Trauma and forgiveness

I recently had an encounter with a person in therapy, who was very angry with his parents. He said he would never forgive them, swore a lot, and started to rage when the topic came to them.
I was trying to understand, what this meant and searched on Twitter. I found a popular post, where the topic starter said "You should never forgive your abusers'. And for all the comments 'I forgave and it gave me the power to move on', people replied something like:
'It's not forgiveness, it's acceptance' (how would they know other person's feelings?)
or
'forgiving your abusers is abusing you'
how?
Damn, I can't. All these posts I see about mental health, about not forgiving your abusers, scare me.
They wish them death in the comments. What's the point? How can you get over a trauma by dwelling on hate?
What don't I understand?

I’m with you. I think forgiveness frees you. It’s not forgetting. But it does free you to move on and not be stuck.

I'm somewhere in the middle - I think my headspace / emotions can be described as acceptance.


I absolutely don't forgive my abuser and probably never will, but I doin't wish death on him either. It's more like I've accepted that the abuse happened, I can't change it, and there's no point in being angry about it, because being angry doesn't change anything and, I believe, only hurts myself. I reached this point through extensive trauma therapy.

I also live by the Serenity prayer. I really believe in it, and feel that as long as I try to follow it in life, my life is much calmer and happier.

Jesus' saying about his enemies, "they know not what they do", allows me to forgive abusers in my own mind. Forgiveness to me is much more so about letting go of your own rage and anger over the injustice of the abuse and moving towards a stance of acceptance that it happened and that one can still move on and forward in life, regardless. So, forgiveness to me is more about not dwelling in the rage for years upon years. Holding onto bitterness and blame only harms oneself, not the abuser(s). So forgiveness is letting go, accepting (without condoning) that it happened, and moving forward in life, leaving it all behind and in the past.

Thank you for your responses.
I should admit that I looked at the Serenity prayer and loved it very much. It contains everything I need when in distress. I am practicing Buddhism, and this helps me a lot. The main point I love there, you should love all people equally, and this helps with my anger issues.

I believe it is okay to feel angry, as long as that emotion doesn’t consume you completely. Mine does. I can not allow myself to be angry even for some time, or provoke angry thoughts, they are growing by themselves a lot, and no way to stop this.
My therapist said I have a personality disorder, but not sure which. I hope I will find this one day and be able to work with this.

I met other people, that agreed with me that anger is destructive, but not a lot. Among the hundreds of comments, just a few.
I think acceptance and forgiveness are different concepts. Acceptance keeps you to yourself, staying calm and strong. Forgiveness is a method of feeling better. However, there are some situations in which you may not be able to forgive or even accept what has happened.

I don't really consider the abuse really, just the effects. I mean, OG trauma-giver died of his own sins which is kinda cool I guess. I only got involved with 2.0 because of OG (in both a "got addicted to being a victim" way and a circumstantial way), and I guess if I think of him I get pretty angry and want to be violent towards him but only because he's out there hurting others still (apparently a lot of others, and apparently he works with kids now so that's nice).

Both of them are/were just really broken people I feel sad for if I think about them. But now *I'm* the monster that 85% of the time I try to fix and the other 15% of the time I just as if not more efficiently destroy, but at least I put a lot of effort into directing the destruction towards myself or things instead of others when it feels uncontrollable. If I saw 2.0 in person again, I'm not sure if I could handle that situation without winding up in handcuffs or dead.

I still kinda have a bit of denial that anything was "abuse" or "neglect" or "trauma" or whatever they want to use for whatever situation though. I do know things weren't normal/right, but are things ever normal/right? I had a T go through different symptoms of trauma to try to convince me, but I still don't really believe there's anybody that doesn't have demons to that extent from their past--just some people are (currently) hiding them better, maybe they haven't in the past, maybe those demons come out when no one's looking and no one else sees any signs, maybe they'll be a big problem tomorrow. I mean, I was/am a lot, but if you saw me 10+ years ago you'd probably see someone on the fast track to greatness, not someone who would end up crying in the back of a police car last week and hasn't worked the same job more than 6 months consecutively, so you never really know.

I have a personality disorder too (borderline per current diagnosis), and anger is a weird symptom for me. I am usually the calmest of the clams, but also if a button is pressed there will with 98% certainty be some kind of consequence someone's not going to be happy with. Anger to me is energy and power, maybe even nuclear. I can use it as a motivating factor, but only if there's something immediate--not in 2 minutes, but THIS SECOND-- to be done and nothing is getting in my way. Something has to be done with it that requires equal proportions of the feeling to not suffer from it. A hundred jumping jacks and sprinting up the hill isn't going to solve a severe rage-episode when I haven't slept in three nights, have been dealing with other symptoms (esp. paranoia/anxiety, boredom, and having a hard time recognizing/rationalizing cognitively distorted thoughts), am in a relationship (maybe not even, but have and talk to what I guess is called a "favorite person" that I hate the phrase but hardcore recognize the idea as a problem with myself), and am having health and/or eating issues that make me more vulnerable, but it might help if it's cold and all that I was upset about is there not being the right kind of beans in the cabinet for my chili on one of my better days.

This lady at the psych unit kept drilling it in our heads that anger is a secondary emotion that we feel because it's "easier" to experience than whatever it's covering whether it be loneliness, sadness, grief, annoyance, hopelessness, etc. I don't know if it's purpose is to avoid the other emotion or to motivate us to do something about the other emotion personally (because who cares about experiencing or not experiencing the other emotion as long as you realize your body is telling you something is "wrong" to your head and you fix it? Kinda like does it practically matter if the infection is x, y, or z bacteria if the symptoms and treatment for all of them is the same?). Regardless, it's not good to have anger and just sit on it forever when emotions are indications of what is going on. On the other hand, it's not good to rashly act on any emotion especially if you have a harmful default response.
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This was long, but TL/DR: I don't think about past trauma consciously and therefore do not blame them and have forgiveness as a thing I feel I need to do/not do for them (but maybe because I blame myself I should work on forgiving or accepting myself now that I think about it), and emotions are what you make them.

I think the issue is a matter of language and lacking a term for making peace with your past.

I feel that "forgiving" someone is accepting whatever happened and making amends in a way that allows a continued connection or relationship as it was.
Whatever caused the trauma was likely bad enough to hurt you and change the course of your life, handing you a mess to sort through for years or a full lifetime.
It can be some pretty horrific things that happen to someone that forgiveness should not encompass.

Holding on to anger and revisiting what happened in one's mind can take forms of either internalizing it and blaming oneself for what happened or externalizing it and blaming the other people. It can be easy for some to "forgive" in some sense of the word when they are internalizing it and laying blame on themselves.

I feel that it is better described as "letting go" or simply "accepting" as a better terminology.

When I was a kid, my dad taught me how to swim in a river. This was a prerequisite for being able to go river fishing so he was sure it was safe if something happened while we were in the boat.

Navigating a slow moving river is similar to a swimming pool. The current has little impact on you. A fast moving river will sweep you downstream quickly. Simply being in the current and moving away from a familiar location or the boat you had been in can induce panic.

The first rule is to swim towards the bank but do not get fixated on the point across from you. The current will carrying you along the river and your goal is to go to the bank at whatever point you reach it.

The second rule is not to grab onto anything. In a state of panic and being rushed along the river, a limb sticking out of the water can look like an offer of safety. Grabbing and holding onto the limb will cause the current to pull someone under the water. In a state of panic, letting go of some solid thing seen as safety can drown a person. Realizing the danger, after being yanked under by the current and tossed around in murky waters, one can let go of the limb before you are drowned and continue their journey to the bank.

That anger and those thoughts of the past experience is like that limb sticking out of the water. Holding on will only drown someone faster. The limb that had been grabbed onto does not need forgiveness. It needs to be recognized for the experience that it was and that danger avoided in the future.

My mother provided terrible support through my depression and probably unknowingly framed problems as being with me and not other people. Later in life she made other bad decisions and stepped away again when I had issues with a relationship, preferring not to hear anything about my side of it.

I still have a relationship with my mother, but I haven't "forgiven" those things nor have I dwelled on them and hold anger about them. My mother later started to try to push for repair to the relationship she didn't want to be involved in hearing from me about. I made it clear that was not an area that was open for discussion. I recognized the danger of the limb and didn't grab it.

I can't forgive all the hospitals and Drs that have abused me since 1990. You wouldn't believe the way I've been treated all 28 hospital admissions when I was totally incapacitated.
And my last Dr almost killed me several times and lied about all meds, I complained now I'm banned from all practices in NE MD & DE! I contacted dozens of lawyers and none will take my case against my Dr! And he was one of the better Drs I've seen last 40 years! I've been treated much, much worse!
My last wish before I die is to get back at these sick, incompetent people who abused me!
The sickest Dr I saw was in Philly 1992 and he said "Your anxiety is almost psychotic and you're a schmuck" then smiled and said "You think you're losing your mind!". I had a panic attack at the Art Museum and he said "Wouldn't it have been funny if you died at the Art Museum!" Then he told me he was Head of Ethics at the hospital! He told me he was an admirer of Hitler!

I can only speak for myself and the experiences I have had in my life. There are two terms that are often used in reference to trauma or past injury, "pain" and "suffering". Both are very real. The pain at the time of the event, that could not in any way be avoided. The set of circumstances were in play and sadly, tragically, there was pain involved that changed the course of my life. Suffering though, suffering is something that happens emotionally after whatever happened physically has passed. It took me many many years to recognise that my suffering was a choice. I could let go of the suffering. It didn't mean forgiving the person. It didn't mean downplaying or invalidating what happened. Rather it involved recognising two things. The first, was that the other person's intentions were not to hurt me personally. Let me clarify. No one is born evil. No one is born with a vendetta or evil intent. They are things that come about due to life experience, many of which happen at such a young age so as to form an unconscious imprint. The person that steals - he didn't start down that path because he enjoyed it. It started because of highest intention. I know I have done some things that I deeply regret, and, it has never been my highest intention to ever hurt another person. I have acted in a manner that reflected doing the best I could with the rescources I had at the time. It reflected the way I thought was the best way to keep myself safe, or navigate the situation. The brain is wonderful, it wants to keep us safe. Even if doing the safe thing is the unwise thing. Even if the safe thing causes us or others pain.

Putting those two things together, recognising that whatever happened, whatever another person did to us, they did it because of who they were, and what they did reflected them doing their best at the time with the rescources they had with the best of intentions. Their intentions were selfish, there intentions were harmful. And, their highest intention was one that was formed from a belief system they were forced to adopt at some stage in their life. It wasn't about me. They projected into the world, toward me, what they percieved, and their intentions were to keep themselves safe and act in a way that they believed they needed to. This doesn't mean I forgive them. It means that I recognise that ultimately, it was never personal.

The second part of this is the suffering. I am the person I am today because of that. I can choose to focus on what happened, and for sure some days I allow myself to feel that pain fully. The endeavour is to not get stuck in that pain. Suffering is pain that we are stuck in. So, focusing on who I am, what I have become, what qualities I now have, what empathy I have, what experiences I can share and help others with, they are what I intentionally endeavour to focus on. I have choice on my focus. I don't have choice on what happened. I can choice as to what those events mean, what beliefs I label them. I can chose to label that person evil, or label that person as someone I can't make sense of, but know it wasn't personal. Where my focus is, that is where my attention is.

This can easily sound cold, callous, dismissive. I promise its not. I spent decades hating people for what they did to me. Then I learnt, realised, that what they did, reflected them, not me. What they did, they did because of who they were- and they became that way out of what they believe is necessity. In other words, they did the best they could with the resources they had at the time. Mentally, physically, emotionally, financially, spiritually, medically etc. It wasn't personal. Their personality reflected their personal reality.

What this does, given time, is gives back the power. It doesn't change the circumstances. It has given me the opportunity to recognise that I am a victor of life, not a victim of life. That life is happening for me, not to me. I can say that it is a constant work in progress, and some days it simply doesn't work. Those are the days where I allow myself to feel the emotions, knowing that I too, and doing the best I can with the rescources I have.

To those reading this, please know that its taken me several years to get to this point, as well as decades of life passing. The need I felt for acknowledgement from another person, for them to acknowledge what they had done - I learnt that I didn't need that acknowledgment from them. I already knew the hurt, I already knew the pain, I didnt need them to tell me what I already knew. And that, that was the most challenging part for me, releasing that need of acknowledgement.

My heart goes out to everyone in this thread, for all the hurt, pain and suffering you have experienced. And my comments reflect my journey and what has worked for me. It's not for everyone. Most of all, I wish everyone here peace of mind and heart. And good health. This is one of those posts where I am hitting post with trepidation. Please be kind, my intentions are good.

He said he’s admirer of Hitler?

I thunk it depends on someones personality type.. Forgiveness isn't something I think about.. I've never geeky rage either.. I guess my focus was on me and my recovery.. I'm not an actor in their play.. Forgiveness or anger to me it's playing a part still in their drama.. I'm recovering, that's all I care about it really...