Step Eight question 2

[primrose]

Why is forgiveness of the utmost importance in working Step Eight?

[serenity]

Why is forgiveness of the utmost importance in working Step Eight?

Forgiveness means the act of pardoning somebody for a mistake or wrongdoing.

Having a forgiving nature means the tendency to forgive offences readily and easily.

I grew up hearing that I had a very forgiving nature from my mother as I was always encouraged to forgive my brothers aggressive and hurtful treatment towards me. She would praise me for being such a loyal sister and this is very confusing for me even today. As a child I used to feel good that I was pleasing my mum and able to ‘do the right thing’. As an adult however I have an inner rage that wants to explode because I was manipulated into doing what my mother wanted which was peace and quiet because my brother was such a handful.

I played the good girl role up until I started to rebel at about 15.

Looking back I didn’t really forgive my brother because I wasn’t given the chance to have my feelings about what he did before I was made to forgive him. Therefore I don’t really know what forgiveness is and although I can do it on an intellectual level because it’s the right thing to do, I haven’t learnt how to do it on a heart level which is where it matters most.

Looking at the meaning of forgiveness it appears simple to pardon someone for a mistake they may have made towards you and I would like to think I can forgive a mistake. From my own experience growing up i was made to feel ashamed if I made a mistake and I project that on to others when they make a mistake and judge them as harshly as I was treated because this is how I’ve learnt to treat myself.

It seems all the more difficult to have forgiveness when someone does something wrong to you as I interpret it that they have chosen to hurt me in some way and their behaviour is wrong therefore they are wrong. Again this is how I was treated by my father as a child and thus I project the same bullshit story onto others as I believed what I was told all these years later about myself.

If I look at my behaviour and the times I have hurt others I can see that in every case it was not in order to hurt someone on purpose but more of a retaliation to something I perceive to be an insult etc to me or because of my own insecurities and low self esteem which before my programme in slaa I wasn’t properly aware of and therefore couldn’t change my behaviour.

As a Christian I understand today that God see’s all wrong doings as the same whether you call someone a rude name or go out of your way to destroy them in some way, sin is sin and in order to have a true relationship with him we need to forgive others their wrong doings because otherwise he will not forgive our wrong doings. This seems a bit like a bribe in way as it makes me want to forgive others so that I can be forgiven. However, I need to forgive them from my heart for my wrong doings to be properly forgiven so I can’t fake my forgiveness to get mine forgiven.

My self esteem has been so low up until last year that any harm done to me whether on purpose or not was a huge blow to my pride and I felt I needed to put up my walls against anyone who hurt me because I couldn’t bear it. I’ve been looking back over my step 4 resentments and harms to see my part in them and last night after talking with my sponsor I felt a shift in my forgiveness for my qualifier. I saw myself 2 years ago and how I used to expect him to live up to my fantasy of what I wanted him to be and how it didn’t matter who I had chosen I would have put those same expectations on them and then pushed them away when they didn’t behave the way I expected them to. In this sense I was disrespecting the reason why people have relationships because I wasn’t being honest and I was using him to avoid taking real responsibility for my life, he was my distraction and my puppet and he probably would have got himself tied up in knots whilst I continued to pull the strings because he was sick himself.

Today I understand that two sick people are a recipe for disaster and whilst I see his sickness and the pain that caused me, it was my sickness that entered into the r/s in the first place and enabled him to act out. I am praying daily to have my unforgiving heart set free right now so that I can feel the forgiveness in my heart for my qualifier and I trust that God will bring me to that forgiveness in his perfect timing together with the forgiveness of my Mother and Father. I am blessed to be your daughter today Father God and I thank you with all my heart for the work you are doing in me daily. It’s painful and lonely at times and I sometimes want to run away from myself but I have you in my heart always and that is why I know it will all be ok.

[primrose]

Vee, I really admire you for wanting to forgive from your heart in an authentic loving way. It sounds like your mother was praising you for being submissive as a child rather than for practicing forgiveness. I think forgiveness does come when all of the feelings you have about a situation are felt and cleared. Then forgiveness can come from an honest place.

That's just what I think, there are lots of other ways to practice forgiveness, but for me it has had to come after I released my frustrations, and not before.

This is something that happened to me which made me feel clearer about what forgiveness was going to mean for me. When I told my mother that my grandfather was a pedophile, she said she forgave him, but when I told her he'd tried to abuse me, she called me a liar and was furious with me and there was no way she was willing to extend her "forgiveness" to me.

So I thought about what her meaning of forgiveness was and to me it meant hiding from the truth, going into denial about something, forgetting it, rather than really dealing with it. My mother wanted me to forgive my grandfather for being an abuser and she wanted me to take back my own truth so that she didn't have to deal with the reality of what it actually meant for her to have a father who was a child abuser.

So then I felt that if that was forgiveness I wanted none of it and I thought it was nonsense. But over time I have felt forgiveness for my parents. I forgive them in bits and I accept that. Some things I still need to work through before I can forgive.

Forgiveness flows out of me having done the emotional work I need to do, and it is a benefit of me being honest with myself about how I really feel. That is vastly different from what my mother thought forgiveness was.