Forgiving What You Can't Forget: Discover How to Move On, Make Peace with Painful Memories, and Create a Life That’s Beautiful Again

by Lysa TerKeurst

When we have personal marked moments in our own history it can feel like Before Crisis and After Devastation.

Valid point on how grief feels, in spite of the heavy handed religious rhetoric from the jump of this book.

You can’t edit reality to try and force healing. You can’t fake yourself into being okay with what happened.

And, though you didn’t know it, we always had an extra chair for you. Here, your questions are safe. Your heartbreak is tenderly held. Your thoughts don’t need to be edited. Your soul’s need for truth will be tended to. And your resistance is understood. Welcome to the gray table, friend.

It doesn’t feel like it… from what I have read thus far this book feels like a Christian-ease trap of a memoir, instead of a psychology light self help.

“And, Lysa, let’s talk about your coping mechanism.” I smiled, because I fully expected her to give me a pass on this round of therapy. She did not. Instead she said, “You hyperspiritualize what you’ve been through to the point where you deny your feelings rather than actually deal with your pain.” Ouch. No pass on this round. I wanted to glare at her and dismiss her. But honestly, she was right. Her statement peeled back all my posturing and positivity and pretending.

That’s what this book is also doing Lysa…

Another act of forgiveness means even more healing and clarity.

Staying married to your abuser isn’t healing… if I didn’t trust you before this chapter was a nail in the coffin. Whoever recommended this book to me should be ashamed.

She started potty training me using a toddler’s plastic pink toilet when I was six months of age, I was walking by eight months, and I could say the entire Pledge of Allegiance by age two.

That’s not terrifying or anything…

They believe with all their heart things like, They don’t like me. They don’t think I’m smart. They don’t want me on their team. They are out to get me. They think I’m too loud, too overweight, too quiet, too negative, too opinionated, or too bossy. They think I’m not good enough. There are so many statements like this always making what other people do and say tainted and taken as a personal attack. It’s exhausting to be in a relationship where someone is personalizing everything. It can get so bad that it becomes damaging and sometimes even toxic. It makes the people around them soon feel so sick and tired of being misunderstood that they eventually become unresponsive. And the person interpreting everything done and said to them as a personal attack? They are misplacing their pain and projecting it on everyone around them. They’ve never connected the dots to really understand who in their past truly needs to be forgiven.

This could be people with trauma or they could just be neuro-spicy people. Maybe you should also try to learn how to communicate with them, instead of blaming them.

Even worse, it’s all so dang unchangeable. And unchangeable can absolutely feel unforgivable. I grieve over it all. Grieving is dreaming in reverse. When you think better days are ahead, you say things like, “I dream of one day being a wife and mom, or an actress, or a chef, or a scientist.” Or, “I dream of one day opening my own coffee shop, or writing a book, or going back to school.” But when you are grieving over something or someone that was taken away, you wish you could go back in time. You dream in reverse. Instead of hoping for what will one day be, you long for a more innocent time when you lived more unaware of tragedy. But the griever knows they can’t go back in time. So healing feels impossible, because circumstances feel unchangeable.

There are things that are relatable in this book. The problem lies in the “religious” sweep it under the rug solution or the lack of conclusion and action plan. It’s like those hour long infomercials, but to get a real action plan you have to pay hundreds monthly. The purchase (or rental from the library) of this book should have been enough of fee, but i stead it’s the never ending informercial.

I don’t understand how any of this is right or fair or good. It all just makes me so sad, so heartbroken for their pain, and it quite honestly feeds my doubts. I want to say this is where my faith revs up, my spiritual muscles flex big and strong, and a confident war cry explodes from deep within me: “I am confident God will heal your daughter fully and completely!” “I am absolutely certain God will make your husband break up with his mistress and bring him home better than ever!” “I declare Jesus’ name over your anxiety and demand it be gone and your peace and joy restored!” I have seen God do all of that before. But I’ve also seen so many circumstances where they don’t wake up from the coma. The husband never comes back home. And the illness stays. And instead of a fearless, faith-filled war cry, I can be found just curled up on my bed in a full-blown ugly cry.

If you aren’t sure if you have religious trauma or not, just read this. If you didn’t before, congratulations, you do now “dear friend”.

I am deeply saddened every time someone passes away. I know life and death always go together. But I seem to live in denial until I’m forced not to. And no matter if we know the one who passed away or not, we pause at the shocking nature of loss. The sacred nature of grief ripples into our lives even when we didn’t personally break bread with the one who has passed away. We can grieve because we are not strangers to human hurt, even if we are strangers by definition.

Bitterness isn’t usually found most deeply in those whose hearts are hard but rather in those who are most tender. It’s not that they are cold; it’s that they’ve been made to feel unsafe.

I was terrified to tell people what I’d done, but I did tell God that I would share my story if ever there was a young girl in danger of making the same uninformed decision as I did.

So, you felt shame and now you are imposing your beliefs upon others to SHAME them?! Wtf is wrong with you Lysa?!