The forgiveness trap is the pressure to forgive before we have actually worked through our anger, grief and pain. Therapeutic Shamanism, drawing on Jeff Brown’s term “forgiveness bypassing”, sees forced or premature forgiveness as a form of denial. Forgiveness can be real and healing, but only when it emerges organically from working through the issues, and if it does not emerge, that is fine too.
What is the forgiveness trap? #
How could forgiveness ever be anything other than helpful? “The answer is, when it is what the author and body-centred psychotherapist Jeff Brown calls ‘forgiveness bypassing’.” Just as spiritual bypassing is a way of avoiding unresolved emotional issues, forgiveness bypassing does the same thing. “Rather than face and work through the anger, grief and pain, people choose to ‘forgive’. The problem is that, as with spiritual bypassing, this does not actually resolve anything. It is, instead, another form of denial.”1
See What is spiritual bypassing, and how can psychotherapy help prevent it?
Where does the pressure to forgive come from? #
Anger-bypassing can be prevalent in some New-Age thinking and practice. In ‘more fluffy circles’, feelings are often sorted into ‘positive’ and ‘negative’, and the negative ones are to be avoided or ‘transcended’. There, “feelings like anger are regarded as not ‘nice’ and not positive, and so are to be replaced as soon as possible with something like forgiveness.” None of this means anger should be held on to, or acted out destructively.2
The pressure can also come from helpers, such as a practitioner telling a client it is time to forgive. Forgiveness “is not something you can usefully just tell someone to do, or decide when it is time for them to do it. Doing that would be rushing the client’s process and trampling over any unresolved feelings they may actually have.”3
Why does forced forgiveness do harm? #
Feelings that are bypassed do not go away. They “instead become part of what Jung called the Shadow, something that haunts us and becomes stronger the more we deny it.”4
Replacing anger with forgiveness before it has arrived naturally “is to replace the authentic feeling with an inauthentic thought-formThought-form. A human-created living being: an ideology, religion, corporation, conspiracy theory or platform that has taken on a life of its own. Genuinely alive, but soul-less in the deep sense: natural things alone are full of Soul. More about this, a mental construct, an introjectIntroject. A foreign belief, message or story swallowed whole (often in childhood) and lodged inside as if it were our own; a type of intrusion. More about this”, a ‘should’ or an ‘ought’. Over the years Paul Francis has seen many people who tell themselves they have ‘forgiven’, whereas what they have really done is unhealthily suppress feelings, “feelings that now, because they have been suppressed, are indeed toxic and festering in their unconscious.”5
When a practitioner tells a client to forgive, one of two things usually happens. Either the client comes away feeling judged, or, “and this is far worse”, the client feels they should be able to forgive, finds that they cannot, “and so they end up beating themselves up.”6
What happens inside us when forgiveness is forced? #
Forced forgiveness is “pretend forgiveness, cosplay forgiveness”, which “simply means the unresolved issues continue to fester.” In terms of our parts, one part of us is deciding, “I forgive them”, while the parts that were actually hurt and feel anger and grief are, in effect, being told to shut up. And so they are being hurt and abandoned all over again.
Should our child parts be asked to forgive? #
Asking a wounded child part to forgive is in effect telling it to grow up and be quiet. “It’s not okay. It’s a child. It shouldn’t have to forgive.”
He has written that the Adult parts of us can get to a place of seeing our parents as the flawed humans they were, and of understanding how they were affected by their own childhoods and unresolved trauma. “However, we should never ask this of our child parts.” The child parts have every right to feel hurt, frightened, sad or angry: “It’s not their job to think like adults, and asking or expecting this of them is to dismiss their feelings and abandon them all over again.”
See What are child, orphan, fort-holder and protector parts?
Do the reasons for what our parents did cancel out its impact? #
Making excuses for our parents can also get in the way of facing the truth. “It is perfectly possible to know your parents may have been doing their best, and still acknowledge that you did not get the kind of parenting you needed.” Parents may have been raised in the same harmful ways themselves, but “the reasons why things happened, and the impact of them, are two different things.” “Reasons do not cancel out impact.”
The same section adds that sometimes it is also fine to judge. There are behaviours we do judge, and rightly so, such as child sexual abuse, domestic violence, cruelty and neglect.7
See What are the Mother-Wound and the Father-Wound?
When is forgiveness healthy? #
“There is nothing necessarily wrong with forgiveness, of course!” Healthy forgiveness “is a process, not a thought-form that we use to avoid dealing with our feelings.” When forgiveness is healthy, it emerges in an organic way from working through the issues. “And if forgiveness does not emerge, then that is absolutely fine too. When it comes to forgiveness, the damaging thing is not whether it emerges; the damaging thing is faking it, as that means we are still in denial and so cannot heal.”8
The timing matters: “True forgiveness is something that arises organically when, and only when, someone has worked through and fully resolved the issue within themselves and come to terms with it.”9
Paul also reads his students a passage from Jeff Brown, which says that forgiveness “is not the first place to go after an abusive relationship or traumatic experience. Healing is the first place to go”, and that “Forgiveness is not a concept, it is a process. And if you choose not to forgive at the end of that process, it does not mean that you are not healed.”
What helps instead? #
“Feelings need to be felt.” They need “to be brought into consciousness and allowed to work their way through both the body and the psyche.”10
“As a practitioner, or even as a partner or a friend, you cannot tell someone when it is time for them to forgive.” What we can do instead is be a companion with them whilst they work through their own process and healing, “without imposing your own agenda, beliefs or timing, and without judging or bypassing the feelings along the way.”11
Our own part, in a way that echoes Jeff Brown, is simple: we are responsible for our own healing; we are not responsible for those who wound us. Our responsibility is in forgiving ourselves and healing ourselves.
