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When To Forgive. And When Not To

You can choose to forgive others for hurting you, but how do you forgive yourself for being hurt?

A friend called me this morning to tell me that he had finally ended a bad relationship. Though it was brief, the relationship might have even been called abusive. I could relate. I have also made terrifying decisions in dating, dated people who were narcissistic, violent, dangerous. I’ve also been the person who was narcissistic, violent and dangerous.

Years have passed and in some sense, I have forgiven the people who have harmed me. Not “forgiven” in the sense of letting them back into my life, nor forgiven in the sense of forgetting that they are not to be trusted, that they are not safe. To do that would be to erase the past and the past cannot be changed. The record can never be wiped clean. It can only be added to.

When I say “forgiven” I mean that I’ve finished with carrying around suffering based on what they did to me. I now understand it, not as something done to me, but as a part of who they were, and how the world made them. I now recognize their harm and violence toward me as an expression of their own suffering, their own pain. That is all the forgiveness I can have. Fortunately it is all I need to move on with my life in wholeness.

I have not worried about forgiving myself for my harms toward others, because that is not my job. I can no more forgive myself…