Forgiveness, Christian or otherwise, does not mean condoning or giving excuses to wrongdoing. Sanity may be defined as the ability to tell right from wrong. So here it is: Sexual abuse is wrong. Traumatizing young children is wrong. There is no way to twist logic that makes such abhorrent conduct acceptable. But it is important to remember that the prerequisite to genuine forgiveness is that the victim no longer feels the pain, that the past ceases to intrude into the present.
There are two aspects to an abuser’s wrongdoing: his intention and his action. In other words, he might perform despicable acts based on self-serving so-called “reasoning.” Many child molesters proceed with rationales they know to be false such as, “ It is really quite harmless. She is only 2 years old. She will not remember this when she grows up. After all, I don’t remember what happened to me when I was 2 years old.”
It is likely that with the addition of alcohol and/or rage, the abuser may think that he was justified in his conduct or have forgotten it because it was not a particularly significant event to him. If the victim believes that the original infliction of the trauma is unintentional, they may believe that it will be easier to forgive. In fact, abusers may play on that but it reeks of shifting the blame to the patient along the lines of “It never would have happened if you weren’t such a bad child” or “I was drunk so I am not really responsible.” With respect to the latter, I have colleagues that have studied the Bible and wonder how Lot’s daughter’s might feel about being blamed for their father’s incestuous conduct.
One cannot advise a patient to forgive beyond their own heart if there is even the remotest possibility that the abuser might get a feeling of pathological pleasure, knowing that what he once did decades ago continues having a powerful effect on his victim. The therapist’s task is to lead the patient to understanding that holding on to the bitterness about this past experience continues the entrapment by the abuser. The patient’s task in therapy is to work through this, to process this part of their past experience so as to be liberated from the retraumatization power of the past.
If you are holding something tightly in your hand, it will fall as soon as you loosen your grip. It is the same with processing trauma. Letting go of a painful memory’s strength is possible after you genuinely feel you have shared the experience with a significant person, like your therapist, and that you have finished the task of bearing witness to the crime – the series of childhood traumas. This process of successful therapy is often accomplished by deep listening and empathetic sharing of the pain on the part of the therapist.
Know that forgiveness does not mean forgetting. You need to remember it as part of your experience in life. You need to maintain a certain vigilance, not hyper-vigilance but still vigilant awareness, to make sure you are not preyed upon in the future. If and after you forgive, you have a choice as to whether or not to include the past abuser in your life.
By forgiving, you are accepting the reality of what happened and are able to free yourself from the past’s interference with your current life. This is a gradual process—and it doesn’t necessarily have to include the abuser. Forgiveness isn’t something you do for the person who wronged you; it’s something you do for yourself.
As I and others have said many times, the trauma that leads to DID is so overwhelming that ordinary individuals cannot truly imagine the experience. To presume that one will eventually be able to forgive their abuser in any conventional understanding of forgiveness is, in my opinion and for practical purposes, a fantasy. The aim of treatment should focus on the task at hand, teaching the patient to experience and hold on to the safety of the present. It is to teach the patient that skill so that they can experience the safety of the present when memories of the past arise. When memories are just memories, and are no longer the involuntary re-living of pain, that is what it means to heal.
Here are some therapeutic goals I consider to be realistic for patients. They are practical applications of forgiveness in one’s own heart.
1. On the social side, measures that limit and circumscribe interactions with the abuser must be monitored. For example, patients may not be able to say “no” in daily life if they are still in contact with the abuser. Therapeutically, the first step is to establish a firm base of a pain-free and safe present. The patient needs to learn the real meaning of the present, which is the immediate experience of breathing this very breath. Forgiveness in this context is being non-judgmental towards oneself. There are usually alters that are in conflict and angry with others who participate in any way, shape, or form with an abuser. Introducing each conflicted alter to the possibility of forgiving alters with a different point of view is a very positive start. It is not telling them to go along with that other alter’s view. Rather, it is explaining how that other alter feels. In essence, it is teaching the foundation of empathy. This is not easy, nor is it something that happens quickly. In my experience, it is best introduced talking about how the alter might wish to comfort a confused child – not by yelling but by holding them with warmth. Then, within that warmth, clarifying the present danger rather than re-working the past.
2. In order to forgive oneself, a therapist introduces exercises that teach the patient how to find a physical/psychological safe place in the present. Patients are taught how to put themselves in a physically relaxed and psychologically comfortable state. The immediate goal is for the patient to make sure that he/she is in a safe distance from the abuser. Within that experience of safety, one can develop the understanding that abusers are both dangerous and usually survivors of abuse themselves. In other words, through the physical and psychological experience of safety in the present, one can remain vigilantly awake, without being hyper-vigilant, and see that abusers are likely acting out the impact of their own history of having been abused. This is training on extending forgiveness without permitting further abuse.
3. Teach the patient to go back and process the past trauma in a titrated/controlled manner. In that way, the patient can eventually experience the arising of that memory without their present consciousness being flooded with sympathetic fight-flight-freeze reactions. Various techniques such as “the 5% rule” have already been explained elsewhere. See: https://www.engagingmultiples.com/the-5-rule/
4. Eventually the patient will develop the ability to separate the emotions associated with past trauma from the present recall of that past in a manner which avoids retraumatization. A commonly observed sign of progress is the patient’s increasing ability to spontaneously bring back some detail of the past trauma with less panic and more ease. She will speak in a calm voice, without being entrapped in fear or horror. This is usually accompanied with a sense of sadness – which is completely appropriate. That sadness is another gateway to developing further forgiveness towards oneself and the alters in conflict about the abuser.
5. Sometimes there is a wish to understand why the abuse happened. There is the hope that if one can understand the why, then forgiveness will follow because there is a context for the abuse. As a therapist, one must be very clear that there is no acceptable context that permits abuse. One can understand what drives an abuser may have, but that does not grant the abuser permission to abuse. Sometimes there is a ready understanding of abuse – such as a clear trans-generational abuse pattern. It is important that such a connection is discovered spontaneously by the patient. This is not something to be brought up by the therapist. The patient may show the beginning of understanding by replacing fear or anger with sadness. This means that the patient is developing empathy that is being extended to the abuser. Whether or not genuine forgiveness flows out of this should be left to the natural course of events for that patient. I think it is risking an inappropriate imposition of one’s own religious ideas on the patient to bring up forgiveness to the patient as applied to the abuser. It is positive to encourage internally generating forgiveness by the patient for the patient. But, forgiveness is a heavily loaded term in Christian dogma. One must be extremely careful so that the burden of that loaded term is not imposed, intentionally or unintentionally, on the patient.
6. There may come practical real life situations that are difficult, such as whether the patient is obliged to visit, support, help, or nurse the abusive parent who may or may not be incapacitated but desires the patient’s help in one form or another. My view is that a biological parent, having abused the patient, forfeits their parental status. He has disqualified himself as a parent just as a physician can be struck off the registry because of misconduct involving a patient. The patient has no obligation towards the abuser as a parent, just as a physician is no longer a physician when his conduct has been found to be unbecoming of that position.
If the patient insists on offering forgiveness, complete or otherwise, then the prerequisite should be that he/she is healed and recovered from the ill-effects of that abusive experience, to the point that they are truly no longer subject to retraumatization. The way he/she speaks of the past abusive experience will make it quite clear whether or not full recovery has been effected. While engaging the abuser as part of one’s expression of forgiveness may be seen as a laudable goal from a religious point of view, for an abused individual it is unrealistic. It is not the appropriate goal for DID therapy.
