Forgive, Forget, Let Go
Forgive, forget, let go. Let me push that idea a little further. If you believe you have to forgive someone before you can let go, you may end up holding on forever. What if there is nothing to forgive at all, and the act of forgiveness itself is the thing blocking you from moving on with your life?
I had a teacher once who was, to put it kindly, unpleasant. He rapped your knuckles with a ruler whenever he decided you had earned it. The whole thing was frustrating, and I cried plenty of tears over our run-ins. I was just starting grade school. He was a music director who had been handed elementary school duties on top of his work as organist and choir leader. Temperamental, the way musicians and artists sometimes are. Teaching probably ate up hours he would rather have spent on music, and that likely wore on him. He made my days miserable, and my cousin, who sat in the same classroom, said he singled me out when he could easily have left me alone. I will admit I was not an easy kid. Quick to learn, full of ideas, hard to keep occupied, and I questioned his authority often.
For a long stretch I couldn't look at any of it through his eyes. Those years with him were unhappy ones, and he wasn't the only teacher I clashed with back then. What stands out now is that nearly all my teachers were men, and I doubt a single one of them considered teaching young children his real calling, the way many women did in that period. The one genuinely good year I had in elementary school was the year I had a woman teacher.
None of it did my self-esteem any favors. My parents were worn down too, tired of being summoned to the office and having to sit across from a teacher or the principal to discuss my behavior.
So it was frustrating for everybody involved. And now, who exactly is supposed to be forgiven? The teacher, my parents, me? Saying something must be forgiven carries a hint of malice, of deliberate harm. Weren't we all just doing the best we knew how to do at the time? I no longer think of myself as a bad, disobedient child. Misunderstood, perhaps, but not bad. And was he a bad teacher, or a person doing what he could in circumstances he hadn't chosen?
Maybe he was taking out his own frustration on a room full of children by expecting more than they could give. Maybe he resented being made to teach when music was all he wanted. My parents, like so many parents of that generation, cared a great deal about appearances and believed children should respect their elders regardless of how those elders behaved.
Now that I can see the fuller picture, do I keep the anger and frustration alive by telling myself I have to forgive the adults for what they did to me as a child? Or do I simply let it go, understanding they were people who didn't know any better? Forgiveness, to me, demands a lot of time and energy, and it comes wrapped in a sense of obligation, something I ought to do for my own sake and theirs. Letting go doesn't claim that what they did or what I did was right. It just acknowledges how much confusion and misunderstanding ran through the whole thing. Part of my distress had less to do with me than with watching my brother and cousin sit in that same classroom. It is scarier to see someone else possibly getting hurt, because you can't feel what they feel, and you already know firsthand how much it hurts.
Attach hatred and anger to the idea of letting go and you turn it into a heavier load than it needs to be. The weight that an offender should be carrying stops being yours. Sometimes the real payoff for someone who does harm isn't the act itself but knowing the people they hurt will carry the consequences for the rest of their lives. That is exactly the point where the victim has to release it, because once released, the offender no longer has any hold. A couple of years back I noticed that long after my divorce I was still turning over how my ex treated me near the end and how wretched I had felt, while he, for all I knew, had happily moved on and started fresh as though I'd never existed.
If you grew up in the northern part of the country you know mosquitoes, how maddeningly their bites itch, and how scratching only opens bigger sores and makes everything worse. People who get bitten feel helpless, like they can't keep their hands off. Eventually you stop going outdoors altogether during mosquito season and find yourself trapped inside through the hottest weeks of summer with no air conditioning. Wouldn't it have been better to spare yourself all that? You can spare yourself something very much like it by releasing old wounds.
Don't keep regurgitating. Don't do what cows do and chew the same cud over and over. Learn from what happened to you, yes, but don't let it swallow the present or leave scars on the future. Sometimes forgiveness isn't required. Sometimes you only need to let go and meet whatever comes next as a chance to try something new.
A caution. A history of severe physical and sexual abuse, and at times even severe mental abuse, calls for professional psychological treatment and should not be tackled alone. Abuse can happen in adulthood too. And do not let the person who abused you decide how you deal with it.