I appreciate the wisdom expressed below by Jeff Brown. Through personal experience, I know that being up in my head and trying to think myself into forgiveness does not work. The flip side of the coin is to stay mired in bitterness and endlessly replaying the injury we and/or others have endured.
The only way that I have found to truly do the work of forgiveness is the path through — through the many layers of pain and anger, outrage and betrayal, trauma and grief and loss. This deep processing work takes time, courage, support, perseverance, and a passion for healing, consciousness, and transformation.
There is a path which can free us from what are often generations of ancestral and cultural trauma and loss, bitterness and judgment, blame and shame, and the heavy bag of sorrows carried for so very long. We can do this. We can deepen and expand our hearts and find greater understanding and compassion for ourselves and others.
It is my experience that this process of healing helps make possible a strengthening of our capacity to stand firm in our alignment with truth, justice, compassionate activism, conscious awareness and love. Doing the ongoing work of forgiveness opens our hearts and minds, connecting us with our greater wholeness and the sacredness of life. As we truly heal ourselves, as we break the cycle of trauma and bitterness and anger and hatred, we also heal our families, our communities, our nation and the larger world.
Bless us all — Molly
Many who preach forgiveness are merely bypassing their own unprocessed victimhood. Trauma survivors in denial, they need you to artificially forgive, so that they can turn off the tap of their own remembrance. If they can push you into premature-forgiveness, they no longer have to see the reflection of their own unprocessed pain in you.
It’s the most dangerous game of all—to invite forgiveness of another, before a victim has been truly seen in their woundedness, before they have honestly moved through their own organic process.
If you have been wounded, you have been wounded. It’s that simple. And you won’t heal it, and the world won’t evolve beyond its hurtful ways, if we sweep that truth under a bushel of forgiveness.
— Jeff Brown
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