Why I'm Not A Fan Of Forgiveness
Healing is the gold dust that lies hidden within your wounds.
Which is why - in order to integrate your past - you need to focus on these: the imprints of the painful and challenging events that you experienced which contributed to your view of the world and your place in it.
Doing so might seem like viewing your glass as half empty.
But this is necessary in order to acknowledge that the suffering that was inflicted upon you (either consciously or unconsciously, directly or indirectly), was never your fault - you were only a child.
Just as it is necessary to temporarily assign blame for this suffering by channelling it towards the adults in the developmental dynamic: your primary caregivers.
This allows you to assume a victim mentality.
Which means giving yourself full permission to release all of the negativity that has built up in you towards your parents (that you weren’t able to express at the time - either because you feared potential punishment and rejection or because weren’t psychologically evolved enough to do so).
You may feel an initial resistance towards taking this stance. After all, it’s seen as taboo to ‘air your dirty laundry’ in public.
But focusing on how your parents weren’t there for you in the way that you needed, and actually feeling all of the old resentment, shame, disappointment, guilt, anger, fear, frustration, grief, powerlessness and confusion that you have been carrying in your body since childhood, is what ultimately leads to inner peace.
It clears the decks. It shines a spotlight on the elephant in the room. And it drains the hidden swamp of negativity that lay between you and full acceptance of your parents as the flawed human beings that they are (just as you too are a flawed human being).
Releasing your old, stuck emotions doesn’t take away what was done to you - the past cannot be changed - but it heals the pain associated with it.
And instead of focusing on feeling just forgiveness, love, light and positivity, acknowledging and validating this pain allows you to hold space for the full range of emotions that you feel for your primary caregivers, without any one of them feeling more alive in you than another.
Like multi-coloured balls held in the basket of your heart, they are all there - co-existing - but stripped of their rawness.
Pink for the love you hold for them as their daughter
Red for anger for the psychic legacy they left you with
Green for compassion for the trauma that they endured
Blue for the frustration that they never reached out to do their own healing work
Yellow for understanding that they did the best they could with the tools they had at the time
Purple for the disappointment that they couldn’t or wouldn’t try harder
So, instead of tirelessly working towards a one-sided state that may feel impossible and then feeling like a failure, try validating both your light and dark experiences, your love and your pain.
And see that this too can bring true, lasting inner peace.