Is It Really Brave To Forgive Your Captor?
Making headlines this week is the fact that Michelle Knight “forgave her captor despite years of torture.”
And that’s great. And good for her. And I sincerely wish her all the best. But I wonder, is announcing that you forgive someone for abusing you in fact brave? It seems to me that far braver is admitting that you’re still angry; that you fantasize about killing that person. Because that’s what people don’t want to hear.
Everyone wants to hear, “I forgive! I’m all better now!” For years, I got tremendous pressure to forgive my biological mom for abusing me. When I was six years old and she responded to me not organizing her closet right by fracturing my skull and locking me in said closet overnight, I was encouraged by my other family members to think about what I might have done wrong to cause such a reaction. And I certainly wasn’t allowed to be angry. Neither was I at school. My anger at my unjust treatment was viewed as a flaw and something to be treated, possibly with medication, rather than as a perfectly normal and acceptable reaction to an unlivable life. This pattern continued into my adulthood, too; people often asked invasive questions about my biological family and, by way of response, what they mainly wanted to hear was whether I now “understood” my biological mother’s point of view.
They didn’t want anger; they wanted acceptance. They wanted everything to be okay, so they could tell themselves that everything was okay. That no one had been permanently damaged; that it was all a big misunderstanding. That there was no failure of the system and, more importantly, from their point of view, no failure on their own part to act.
The pressure to forgive is enormous; the stigma attached to anger even more enormous.
The bravest thing to do is to honor your authentic feelings. If those are forgiveness and acceptance, then fine. But I don’t think there’s actually anything wrong with saying, you know what, I actually can’t forgive the person who locked me in a basement and tortured me for ten years. I was locked in a variety of different basements, closets and cramped, unheated rooms for most of my first ten years and let me tell you, I’m still angry. Because it’s okay to get angry about injustice. If nobody ever got angry about injustice, if everyone instead practiced learning to be okay with injustice, then nothing would ever change.
Have I forgiven the people in my life, who let me down?
Honestly, I’m still struggling with that. Forgiveness is a goal of mine, and one I work toward every day. But to say that I’m there would be a lie. Because, deep down inside, part of me doesn’t want to be there. Part of me needs to be angry because part of me is still convincing me that what happened wasn’t, in fact, my fault. That I have a right to be angry; that my (so-called) family was wrong in telling me that she never would have “had” to hurt me if I’d only been a better child.
Anger can be a tool of healing, too.
