Time to Forgive

I have a client. She went through two good cycles of psychotherapy with two different good professionals. She managed to solve old conflicts connected to her family while she was growing up. She’s at peace—she says—with her ghost and feels ready to live this new phase of her life.

Yet, there’s this rage that takes the form of a dark resentment that occasionally clouds most of her relationships. She doesn’t want to give space to it, but when she’s more tired, that rage disrupts harmony in her life.

From where does it come? How can she break free from it?

My answer is forgiveness, but this emotional practice takes a peculiar space in time. We do not just forgive those who wronged us but all those who will come again to harm us in the same way.

Time to Forgive

When do we forgive what we forgive? Is the time of our forgiveness the present? Or is it more complicated than this?

I think the time our forgiveness takes place is quite intriguing. We tend to think that forgiveness is an action that occurs in relation to a specific event that happens to you located in a very specific space in time.

Yet rarely the time and space of our forgiveness coincides with that time and space.

Literally speaking, forgiving means to give something in exchange for something else you received. If you receive something bad, you decide to give back something better than what you received.

Forgiveness is a powerful action that halts the chain of wrong-doing that stretches from the present into the future. Receiving forgiveness might initiate a virtuous circle that otherwise would have been impossible to generate.

Yet–what do we do with the past? What if we manage to forgive in the present but then, when we look at it from the future, that event is still there, causing rage and resentment? What do we do with the past and the future of our forgiveness?

The Past of Our Forgiving

I think that the past is the most difficult time, so to speak, to forgive. In the future, there’s hope, and in the present, necessity, but it is in that past that what happened keeps repeating itself.

To continue with the example of my client; she seems a very forgiving and quiet person; yet the triggers of her rage are numerous and quite powerful. We are trying to give words and meaning to that rage. Certainly, the fact that while growing up, her parents neglected her and were occasionally violent toward her was something she forgave at the moment, but it keeps poking at her.

In the present moment, when the events took place, she decided to forgive them because she needed to have a peaceful life. She hoped that she could be a better parent than they were in the future. But what can she do with her past and the sense of rage and frustration that certain memories still generate?

When we forgive, there’s no guarantee that an actual sense of liberation from the wrong-doing we were victims of will occur. What her parents did in the past can be forgiven and forgotten. A new page can be turned.

Yet the past will keep showing up in new people she encounters in her life who behave in a way that reminds her of her parents.

How can we escape the rage and frustration that resides in an unforgivable past?

Whom Are You Forgiving?

The operation of forgiving is much more complex than we think because of the peculiar structure of the time in which we are made. When we forgive, we do not forgive just that specific person and event in time, but we forgive all those persons and events that in the future will remind us of what happened in the past.

Forgiveness Essential Reads

The Mystery of a Genuine Apology

On Being Prepared to "Spontaneously" Forgive the Unexpected

Life challenges us in strange ways, and as Bergson taught us, we tend to live our past over and over again.

It seems that real forgiveness for my client will occur when she is able to forgive all those friends she has whose behaviors remind her of her parents while she was growing up.

A Solution

Hence, for a truly liberating forgiving process, we need to understand whom we forgive and from what pattern we are trying to be free.

Rage and frustration stem from the deep-seated awareness that the past will obstruct the creation of our future. If we are not truly capable of forgiving that past and assigning meaning to it, the future will remain just a hope. We will keep standing in the way of our dreams.

The most radical way to forgive is to be in our present and pay attention to those people and situations that evoke those wounds and use them as an opportunity to understand the actions that are so difficult for us to forgive and forgive them in a way that is meaningful to us.

Given the complex structure of time, it is rare that complete forgiveness will happen just once. To truly forgive, we might be forced to repeatedly forgive all those who remind us—to a small or larger extent—all that is so hurtful and difficult to understand.