How Do I Forgive? How Do I Trust?

This columnist is on holiday for all of August.  Please enjoy the rerun of a few posts and send your questions to jennifer@jenniferlauck.com.  I'll be back on Sept. 3rd

How does one forgive?  Truly forgive.  How does one trust, truly trust...when both of these were never learned.  When both were destroyed.  "Don't tell"  "You can't trust anyone."  True surrender seems incomprehensible.  When a child is humiliated, ridiculed, shamed behind closed doors, then abandoned when she tried to hide or take away the pain...how does she heal if forgiveness seems impossible?   ~ Anon.  Canada
Dear you.  Dear one.  Thank you for your question. 
I am so so sorry for this harsh behavior from the past—not so much in the past—but rather alive in the question you ask.  That little child.  So eager to be shown the way but when the path is revealed and it is full of wicked barbs and confusing twists. 
How do we find our way out of such a mess? 
Let’s grab forgiveness first.  Grab it like the cloud it is, this elusive and impossible thing.  We saw it with our eyes, didn’t we?  The cloud was there, a collection that seemed so solid but put a hand through and it’s nothing.  Air mixed with temperature.  A ghost.  An illusion.
Forgiveness, for me, is something like this.  An illusion.  What does the word mean anyway?  Like “love” and “God”, “forgiveness” is a word that holds mountains of misconceptions. 
From my own early years as a young Catholic, I remember being told that to forgive was divine. I did the math:  Me + forgive = divine. 
Who among us doesn’t want divinity?  I can see my younger, impressionable self in church—the sacred heart of this or that—one of so many penitent girls in catechism class.  I wore the white dress, had the garland of flowers in my hair, kneeled before Christ, kept my chin tucked and pressed my hands together in total forgiveness of those who had trespassed against me plus additional prayers that I would be forgiven for the very fact of my existence, made more unholy by my gender.  “I’ll forgive and please, please forgive me.”            When a person believes they are going to hell, she’ll say just about anything to undo her fate and that’s what I did.  I said “I forgive” because I was no fool.
But wait.  Hold on.  How could I forgive what had I yet understand?  How could I say, “oh sure, I forgive the men who molested me when I was six, eight and twelve?”  How could I agree to let go of so many betrayals, abuses and confusions without proper examination, explanation and integration into my own being?  How insane for a church or anyone to tell a person to “let it all go,” when “it all,” has yet to be explained, grieved, considered and weighed.  That’s just not right.
And here is what I think. I think the world, our families, churches and everyone else wants this snappy little conversion so it will make life easier for them.  Why explore all that nastiness of deception and abuse and being wronged when we can just snap our fingers and make it all go away.  Forgiveness is divine.  Right?
I just don’t believe it.
Forgiveness can only come to a heart when the time is right.    
Our divinity is in our ability to reflect, consider and work experience through our hearts and our minds and clamor towards truth. 
To say you are not divine if you don’t forgive is a betrayal to the truth of the soul, which is already divine.  The soul is pristine and worthy without being told to bend down and pray and forgive and be forgiven.  These rules are constructs of men.  They are fear and intimidation techniques churned out by fallible human beings who now prove they have a pretty embarrassing double standard. Aren’t these the same priests on trail for assaulting innocent children? 
And here is where things went so wrong. 
We looked up to a Father to tell us what to believe and what to do and of course, no father, or mother, or teacher or friend can lead us to the truth of our own soul and heart.  The mystery of our interior is ours alone.  In our own truthful heart, we will know when and how to let go of wrongs that litter our past.  We will know.  We will. 
You will and I will.  
My favorite wise study of forgiveness comes from Women Who Run with Wolves , by Clarissa Pinkola Estes who writes, "many people have trouble with forgiveness because they have been taught it is a singular act to be completed in one sitting. That is not so. Forgiveness has many layers, many seasons."

Estes lists the four stages of forgiveness:

Forgo (leave it alone).
Forbear (abstain from punishing)
Forget (refuse to dwell)
Forgive (to abandon the debt).

You can do one or two or get through all four or go back to the first.  Whatever.  You start.  You start and see where your good heart takes you.  If you need to be mad, sad, righteous, wounded, protected, worried, mired, okay. Okay!  Be what you need to be, write, see a therapist, take a yoga class, dig in the dirt, whatever.  Do what you need to do and trust yourself in this process.
Forgive when you are ready. When you are ready.
And to know this means you have developed a level of trust in the only person you are going the able to trust in this world.  Yourself. 
Let’s leap over to the second prong of your question.  How do I trust?  
You trust, not those outside of you, who will always and I mean always let you down.  Even Jesus was betrayed by his own disciples.  Remember? 
Look, you trust yourself and your own good heart and your own feelings and your own experience.  Do a little investigating and see where you lost your own trust in yourself.  You know that moment.  You’ve had it.  We’ve all had it.
The moment I trusted myself the most is when I left home and went to college and studied journalism. Something in me, something deep and powerful, led the way.  It said, “Go that way, Jennifer,” and I went.  And it was trust that had me go.  Each and every day I was a reporter and learned how to investigate was a gift.  I was so happy doing my work.  I had a gorgeous apartment on the top floor of a vintage building overlooking a park, I made enough money to pay my bills and feed myself and I had a little dog who loved me as much as I loved her back.  And, I learned how to write and think and dig for the truth.  Righteous and wonderful work.  I was truly blessed when I trusted myself.             And the place that I lost my own trust was when I believed I needed another to love me more than I needed to love myself.  I got lost in the hope, prayer, dream, promise of love—the love of a man—the one.  My prince.  Where was he?  I had to find him and make him mine. And I got lost further still by shoving my own soul voice down as I made the man I found (and there would be more than one) more important than myself.  How many years was I lost from myself?  Too many to count, sister, too many to count. 
How do I forgive?  How do I trust?
How do we, you and I, not lament all the wasted years, the betrayal of our own trust and our own souls?  How do we not lash out in rage and blame?  How do we not demand some form of retribution?  How do we not become bitter and dry and hateful?
We forgive the only person we really need to forgive—ourselves.  Okay.  A mistake was made (many perhaps).  We got lost on the path.  We forsook ourselves.  We screwed it all up.  All right then.  It won’t happen again, or if it does, it won’t happen in the exact same way and it won’t last as long.  We will learn because isn’t that the point of this whole thing we are doing here—this thing we call a life?  It’s not called perfect.  It’s called life and how do we know until we try and fall and fail?  How else can we learn?
Once we go more gentle on ourselves, we can see that our parents or our caregivers were just like us.  The priests too. They were human.  Full of flaws and confusions and lost opportunities and betrayed trust and mixed messages.  And, loo, look out.  We are forgiving them too. We look at the people who hurt us from the past and we are just let it go because life is too damn short and there is good work to be done.
Once we get back in touch with our own souls and our own good hearts and we really stay close to the fire inside, things have a way of righting themselves.  Forgiveness comes in one form or another.  Forgetting can be enough.  Setting the whole mess down and just leaving it alone can work too.  We don’t have to go all the way across the finish line.  We don’t.  We are just human.  We are not saints.  We tell the truth when we say, “I can’t forgive it all the way, I just can’t.”  That’s honest.  That’s human.  That’s the truth. 
Tell yourself the truth and rebuild a level of trust—with yourself.   That’s when it starts.  Once you trust yourself, you will know how and when to forgive. 
Forgiveness and trust. 
How do we get them when they haven’t been learned? 
The answer:  they are there.  They have always been there.  Yes, dented.  Yes, challenged, but always there.  The work here is to look within your own good, wise, broken heart.  As Buddha says, “Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.”  Buddha was a guy who told the truth and that is what he and I am say here.  Listen to yourself.  That’s where trust and forgiveness are alive and well.