(Post 9)

Forgiveness in the Modern Psychoanalytic world has not been addressed directly. Nonetheless, it behooves us to address it as part of the healing for patients on their journey to wellness.

Forgiveness is “For Us”

You’ve heard the saying: “Unforgiveness is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.” The reality is that when a person has hurt us, s/he continues on his/her merry way and seemingly forgets all about us and the harm they have caused us. When we don’t forgive our aggressor, we are the ones imprisoning ourselves in bitterness, resentment, thus like: “drinking poison,” while the aggressor goes scot-free.

Therefore, it behooves us to choose to forgive those who have hurt/wronged us, so we can release ourselves from this prison we have built for ourselves!

Forgiveness is a choice. When we choose to forgive, over and over again, the feeling of forgiveness – thus the freedom from our pain and bitterness – will eventually follow.

For Example:

Betty was molested from the ages of 6-10 by her uncle who was a teenager at the time. This has caused her to become promiscuous, and contracted various sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) at a young age. While she disdains herself for her sexual behavioral pattern, she detests her uncle as the cause of this pattern. She is stuck in a loop of promiscuity, further exacerbation of her STDs, hatred toward, and sabotaging herself, and bitterness toward her aggressor. Whom, by the way, has moved on with his life, became a Born-Again Christian, gotten married and serves in his church. Betty despises her uncle and hates the fact that he has become a Christian and is serving at his church, while he never apologized or made amends for how he had set her life-course on this vicious cycle.

Treatment Suggestion:

Help the patient to grieve her pain (loss of innocence in this case), by going through the Stages of Grief: 1) Shock/Denial; 2) Anger (toward oneself; toward the Object of the loss/Aggressor; toward God); 3) Bargaining; 4) Depression (both missing the good aspects of the loss as well as feeling a sense of relief that one no longer has to deal with the negative aspects of one’s relationship with what was lost); 5) Acceptance.

In order for one to be able to grieve one’s loss, one needs to first be able to get in touch with her negative emotions from the experience. If a patient has a hard time getting in touch with her anger or empathy toward herself for the wrong done to her, help her identify a young child in her life whom she loves, and imagine this young child experiencing what she had experienced. Help her to put into words her feelings, feel them, embrace them and grieve the loss/the wrong done to her. Help her to identify how her life was effected by this wrong.

Provide psycho-education of how Unforgiveness only hurts us and not the aggressor. Help to choose to forgive the aggressor in order to set ourselves free from bitterness and resentment.

Even though we did not do anything wrong to cause the abuse/wrong done to us, we tend to blame ourselves nonetheless. Studies have shown that when a victim blames herself for the crime done against her, she feels a better sense of control: If we think we did something wrong, we can then do something differently going forward to prevent further wrong done to us. Therefore, it’d be helpful to assist the patient to Choose to forgive herself for her “part/ participation” in the event.