Forgiveness...

Interesting discussion on Threads today about forgiveness. 

Valerie Bertinelli* linked a post talking about how you should forgive to complete your healing journey and said that she respectfully disagreed with that position. That you can heal just fine without forgiving someone. 

A lot of people disagreed. A lot of people agreed. And a lot of people said well it depends on what you consider forgiveness. 

I thought it was all really interesting. 

I think I fall into the it depends on what you consider forgiveness camp. For me forgiveness means I'm letting you off the hook. I'm saying we are square now. I'm okay with you. For others forgiveness just means you hold no ill will toward someone for what they did. You don't need to seek revenge or retribution, you have "let it go."

I do not believe that you need what I think of as forgiveness to heal. But I do think you need the no ill will part to heal. One is about them and what they did. Some things are unforgivable (in my opinion) and you don't need to ever let someone off the hook for those. They did what they did, they hurt you in some way that was profound. How they live with that is on them completely. But you holding on to how much you hate them on the daily is not good for you either. You aren't letting them off the hook for what they did to you, in this case, but you are stopping them continually doing it in your head.

I am also a firm believer that the opposite of love isn't hate, it's indifference. When you reach the point of indifference about someone who has hurt you, you are better off. You are on your path of healing. And even then I think mild indifference can be enough. Like you just don't think about them much. If someone brings them up and mentions how great their lives are going, you can be a little disgusted by that. Or if something really shitty happened to them you can think couldn't have happened to a nicer person. I think you can be healthy in your own mind and still hold on to those ideas.

It's the constantly thinking about them and what they did to you part that I think hurts you. That's the part that gets the pithy sayings like hating someone is like drinking poison and hoping they get sick. Or however that goes. Just learn to let them go. To not let them live in your head. To know that they cannot hurt you or take advantage of you anymore because you won't let them. 

I also saw someone comment that the whole forgive them for YOU not for THEM thing that goes around must have been started by a gaslighting abuser. And I sort of felt that deeply. That a lot of what we get hit with around forgiveness is like the whole be nice thing I rail against. It puts their behavior on you. Like it's on you to be better, to be nicer, to forgive, because if not you are hurting yourself. 

Well bullshit. They are the ones that hurt you. You get to not like them. You get to not be nice to them. You get to smile when someone mentions that they saw them bitching about life. You do need to work to make sure that's the only time they take up space in your head and that they slide right back out again after someone brings them up. But you do not have to be some sort of bigger person and make it okay for them that they hurt you. 

Fuck that. 
Fuck them.

All you have to do is figure out how to not continually hurt. And you do what works for you. And maybe that is forgiving them, if that's what YOU need to do. But you don't need to do it for any other reason. And you don't need to do it at all. 

Just let them go. 
Let them slide out of your life and out of your head. 

Forgiveness not necessary. 

*Valerie Bertinelli is recovering from a bad marriage right now. I guess he was a terrible human and treated her terribly and gaslit her constantly. Just destroyed her own sense of self. She's been working through it all for awhile now. That's why she was posting about forgiveness and that she doesn't think it's necessary.