Perhaps the number one killer of mental and relational health in America is the refusal to go through the learning experience of emotional pain. But I believe our next biggest mental health buzz kill is our refusal to forgive others and ourselves. I just have to take a stab here at trying to reduce this colossal waste of serenity.
Forgiveness is a private act. It is first of all an act of the mind and the will. You first have to promise with all that you are that you will no longer scheme, hope, and work to get even, to make the other party hurt so bad they will repent and try to make it up to you. If you think you can’t, start with praying for the welfare of the one who hurt you, and ask for the courage and wisdom to make that promise and keep it. Only then can the words, actions, and finally the emotions of forgiveness come through you.
It may never include an “I forgive you” talk. Sometimes the purpose of forgiving someone is to restore our closeness in that relationship, and other times it is to allow detachment to create more distance. How forgiveness is expressed depends on the other person, on the relationship, its purpose, and how it will be acted out. But some purposes are common to all occasions of forgiveness. Let’s look for some motivations to forgive.
Christians are told that when the children of God forgive each other, it makes God happy.
I believe it, as I believe God loves us and knows that forgiveness is good for us. It reduces the war and crime in our society, and on a personal level, it reduces our resentments, arguments, divorces, ulcers, insomnia and addictions. Besides, being kind and polite to our enemies without needing or expecting anything in return is just the best way to keep our enemies at a safe distance.
Everyone! We need to forgive whoever we are angry at, whoever we dread seeing at Walmart or McDonald's, and generally, anybody that can make us mad just by being happy. We also need to forgive ourselves. Believing that we have been forgiven by God or another person without forgiving ourselves is just like leaving a Christmas present all wrapped up under the tree -- it gives no joy to the giver or the receiver until we take it out into our everyday lives and enjoy playing with it.
We need to forgive everything they have ever done wrong, to us, to our loved ones or theirs, to themselves or others. We also need to forgive every good thing they have failed to do, and every bad thing they will ever do in the future. Past, present, and future, we are to love the sinner and hate the sin.
Now understand that forgiveness is not trust. Unlike forgiveness, trust has to be earned. We need to forgive for our own sakes, long before the other person has earned our trust that they won’t hurt us again. And if our enemy DOES mess up and try to hurt us again, we need to trust ourselves to get over it when they do. This is a heck of a lot easier to do when we can kindly and politely forgive and wish them well without expecting anything in return. We can trust ourselves to get over another betrayal if we know how and why to forgive, and how to set and enforce healthy boundaries for ourselves (more about those below).
And forgiveness does not mean condoning the other person's behavior. It may or may not be a good idea to tell the other person you still think what they did was wrong, but it is always okay to say, "It is not that I am condoning or excusing what you did, I am just forgiving you."
ASAP. Don't wait until the other person repents, reforms, asks for forgiveness, or even admits that they were wrong. You sure don't need to wait until you feel like it, because forgiveness is a matter of faith, not feeling. Don't wait until you understand the other person, or why they hurt you. When it comes to forgiveness, just do it.
First, make a decision to forgive yourself as well as others, because you can’t hold onto forgiveness unless you keep giving it away. Forgiveness can't be given until it has been received, not from your enemy, but from someone that accepts you as you are. To accept yourself as you are, warts and all, you must first admit and accept your weaknesses, and repent of your mistakes and bad habits. Strength is only made perfect in weakness. Only when you know you need more grace than you deserve can you give forgiveness that isn’t earned. Like with money, you must have some forgiveness to give it away. Before you can put a smile on your face, you have to put one in your heart, every day. Treat yourself as you treat others: hate the sin (yours included), but love the sinner (yourself included).
The next step to safety is to drop the rock of resentment. Figure out other ways of making yourself feel safe without carrying around anger to bodyguard your heart. Believing that a resentment can be justified and smart is like wearing a gun on your hip – it keeps gentle people at a distance, attracts fighters, and generally provokes suspicion and rejection. Commit to a life work of daily giving up your resentments, justifications, plans for revenge, and wishes for your enemy to suffer or fail. Carrying a live resentment around is like loading up your gun and wearing bullets on your belt – you 're carrying a chip on your shoulder, wearing your hurt on your sleeve, and just asking for trouble.
Third, choose and meditate on healthy beliefs. You can never prove these beliefs right or wrong, but you can prove without a doubt the internal results of holding these beliefs. You can know if they calm you down. So taste the following beliefs, see that they have a healthy and calming effect on your relationships. Then start meditating on them, so you will remember them on the spot, and be able to act upon them: ~ All human beings are capable of repentance and reform. ~ If we were born into our enemies’ bodies and situations, we don't know whether or not we might have turned out much worse. ~ “Who are you to judge the servant of another?” asks Paul in Romans 14:4. ~ When we are kind to them without needing or expecting anything in return, it delivers deep and painful wounds to their prideful and vengeful egos. ~ What our enemies may need to hear they wouldn’t be able to hear from us. ~ So we can just “Let go, and let God.”
Finally, resolve to protect yourself by showing love and respect from a healthy distance. Set and carefully keep healthy boundaries. A boundary is not a threat to another person, but a promise to yourself of what you will do to protect yourself if they violate your safety zone. Protective behaviors that do not attack might include remarks such as, “Well that's your opinion,” or “I'm sorry you feel that way.” The important thing when you are threatened or insulted is to immediately change the subject or end the conversation, before you take offense, or let yourself get upset. Otherwise, your distress will show, and that would be showing blood to a shark. You can’t play it cool on the outside without being cool on the inside, and you can’t do that without forgiving all around. If you pray for them in private, you can speak to them and about them respectfully in public. Or, instead of talking, make brief eye contact, give a quick little nod of recognition with a quick little smile, then move on to avoid them. If you don’t shine a light of goodwill on your enemies, you remain the frightened deer, when you could so much more enjoy being the headlights on high beam.
Sometimes when we want to talk with someone, we assume they wouldn’t understand, or worse still, wouldn’t listen. Maybe they’d even fire back some criticism at the messenger so they didn’t have to deal with the message. So we send our message through a third party.
This is called a ricochet message, or a bank shot, but these terms imply it just happens once. Usually messages keep coming this way, and so it’s more accurate to call this form of communication a triangle. It creates talks about third persons who aren’t there.
This form of communication isn’t very effective-- problems hardly ever get solved this way. Actually they get enlarged, because triangles are always an insult to the person being talked about.
Not all triangles are unhealthy. When you find you can’t talk with someone directly, arrange to have a third person mediate a new 3-way meeting. Ask him or her to uphold not one or the other of you, but your relationship, and the open and kind communication it needs.
One of the best descriptions of this mentally healthy triangle is Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 18: 15-17. Businesses would do will to put this procedure into their policy manuals. It would cut way back on gossip, backstabbing, the fear of same, and so it’s great for team spirit and morale.
Most triangles are harmful, behind-the-back. One especially tricky triangle involves a victim, a villain (victimizer), and a rescuer. Psychiatrist Stephen Karpman has taught that when this situation doesn’t get resolved, and a person keeps being drawn into these roles, it feels a lot like the Bermuda Triangle. This is variously called trauma repetition, repetition compulsion, or trauma bonding, but policemen and counselors call it a Karpman triangle.
When someone gets traumatized and tries not to think about it, research shows that the trauma victim will keep feeling victimized by other things, and keep calling in others for rescue and to punish those perceived as abusers. Sadly, the drama doesn’t end—it keeps repeating itself.
And the roles keep changing: once you enter it as a rescuer, you often become a villain to one or both of the others, and the original villain often feels like a victim. You then feel like a victim, and may look to one of the others to bail you out, thus launching another round of Karpman Hades.
All the characters are drawn into the triangle by identifying with the victim in another, and before it’s over, you will all feel victimized. The only way for you to get out of a Karpman triangle is to detach from the game without emotion, realizing you’re neither victim, victimizer, nor rescuer.
Blame no one including yourself, and accept that both of the other two may continue to see you as a victimizer/villain. Realize they need to bond with that victim role more than they need to bond with you, mental health, or reality. You can only pray they will someday work through it.
Research shows that there is a much higher incidence of Karpman triangles in the lives of not only trauma victims with repressed memories, but also alcoholics, drug addicts, and behavior addicts like sex and gambling addicts, bulimics, etc. Why? Subconsciously, if something once upon a time came into them to hurt them, they keep looking for something else to come in and take the hurt away—a pill, a bottle, a Twinkie, a lottery ticket, or yes, a villain and a rescuer.
None of course will give more than temporary relief. The game must repeat itself, until the trauma is uncovered and healed in therapy, and the grip of the addictions are broken.
We learned last week twelve ways that emotional bullies and master manipulators dump their pressures and problems onto us. Assuming now that you can identify these stress-inducing behaviors that will trigger your bogus pressure alarm, how can you keep people from throwing you under the busload of stress that they carry around? How do you avoid absorbing someone’s second-hand stress?
Here are some ways that are polite, and respectful of the stressor, but these remarks also respect your own right to refuse a problem, pressure, an expectation or feeling that has been laid out there for you to absorb.
The first thing is to ask them what they have already done about their issue. "What have you done to solve this problem yourself? Have you spoken to Joe directly? Why not? You might be wrong about him. If you feel you can’t approach him, is there someone you can take with you to help you communicate with Joe?"
The next three responses you could make would offer limited help:
∙ Buy yourself some time. "I’ll think about it and get back to you." "I don’t make commitments like this under time pressure."
∙ Refer the problem on to someone else, someone who can draw healthier boundaries and teach the stressor a thing or two about his or her own role in creating and solving the problem: "I really can’t help. The person you need here is Jack."
∙ Offer to do what you think is fair, what you can afford to do, and leave it at that. "I will mention it to Jane, but I don’t know what you should do with your husband."
The next set of responses are when it’s not your problem at all, and you sense the stressor not only hasn’t done all they should do to solve it, but isn’t ready to hear that from you either. You could say, "Hey, you’re pressuring me. Calm down. Go get some fresh air, say a prayer, count to ten, and then start over in calm voice and try to own that this is your problem, not mine."
Another way would be to exit entirely. Use any one, two or three of these sentences, followed by a quick and firm change of the subject by you: "Wow, you’ve got a tough problem there. I just don’t know. I don’t see it that way. It’s not my problem. I didn’t cause it, and I can’t fix it. I’m sorry you feel the way you do. My plate is full too—I don’t have time for this."
When you refuse help, or offer only limited help, often the stressor will react by just intensifying the pressure on you. This requires a firm answer like: "I really don’t appreciate your tone. I don’t need your pressure. Apparently you’re so overloaded you are caring only about yourself right now, which is fine, but this shows me exactly why I don’t want to get involved in this. I’m not going to be your chump here."
Whatever response you make, the key point is before you say anything, you have to realize YOU ARE HELPING stressors own and solve their own problems. If they sense any guilt or weakness on your part, the game is still on, and you’re going to lose this round. To take away the feelings, expectations, pressures or problems you are being offered would only serve to overprotect them. You’re giving the truth that will set them free, free of their illusions that they can always get somebody else to solve their problems for them.
Imagine that you have messed up big time—physically abused your child, cheated on your wife, stole money at work, or lied to your husband about where you were. And let’s say you really want to make sure that both you and the people you’ve hurt can trust that you have learned your lessons of how and why not to do that again. How would you go about crafting an apology that would do all that?
The purpose of most apologies today is merely to minimize pain for the apologizers, protect their image, and enable them to avoid the work they need to do but don’t want to do. Like any other form of lying, over time, a weak apology fails at all three of these goals.
Most people don’t know how to go about restoring both the trust of others and their own trustworthiness. That’s because there are so few role models in America for genuine remorse. I can’t recall when I last heard a satisfactory apology from a public figure who had made a moral mess, can you? An effective apology needs to answer three simple questions.
Don’t blame it on the situation, or on anybody else’s behavior, because you can’t guarantee those won’t come up again. Besides, that doesn’t take responsibility for the choices you made about how to handle your feelings.
Sure, maybe you put yourself in a bad situation, and you can change that. But what else do you need to change? attitudes you have harbored that provoked your choice? beliefs you have used to rationalize or excuse your behavior? images you’ve had of yourself and the other people involved here? These ideas in your head can’t be proven right or wrong, but you and others can prove the kind of words and actions these beliefs will provoke and excuse.
Put yourself in their place. Imagine a situation where they could theoretically do something like this to you. Imagine how you’d feel, if there were no real remorse in the other person, how hard it would be to carry on like nothing had happened. What would this do to your mind, your heart, your ability to go on like before, doing things for that person, facing your friends and family, trying to go to sleep at night, or fighting off your own bad, stress-related habits, like eating or drinking to your frustration?
If you have hurt someone in your personal life, you can apply what you have learned to your situation, and to your loved one. “I understand that I have made you have to carry around feelings of ______ and _______, that I have embarrassed you in the eyes of ____, and that now you’re going to have to really struggle with your ________ and _______. This is what I have done to you. What else have I messed up in your life? I know that I have hurt _____ and _____, but who else do you think I have hurt, and how?”
How will you clean up your side of the street? What will you do to help heal the hurt, and earn back the trust you have broken? Again, put yourself in their place—what would you need them to do in this situation to resolve your hurt and mistrust?
Do you need to go have a talk with others you have hurt, to see how your actions have affected them, and tell them you were wrong and you are sorry? How can you show them that you are going to teach yourself a lesson, by making sure you suffer more than all the pleasure you have derived from your bad habit over the years, even if it is possible, more than they will have to suffer for your actions?
Do you need to get an education, like anger management training, or understanding another culture, gender, or generation? Do you need to talk with someone to learn new role models for your behavior in certain situations?
Do you need counseling to work through old feelings that you’ve never expressed toward people in your childhood, feelings that piggyback on your natural emotions to provoke and rationalize your bad habits? Do you need residential treatment to break an addiction, to let your family have a break from you to heal, and to get you away from temptations you can’t resist?
Changing your beliefs requires admitting that you can and should change them, because they caused harmful behavior. You first confess this to people you’ve hurt, but real change inside requires you to tell others who share these attitudes and beliefs, especially the friends and family who may have taught them to you in the first place, by their words and lifestyles. And your lifestyle will also have to change, to express and firm up your new attitudes and beliefs.
Why don’t we ever hear apologies that answer these three questions in America? Very few of us really believe in and practice personal growth. Spin doctors say the public would see repentance as weak, weird and wacko, but I think those words better describe the conscience of any nation which values image over substance, and anesthesia over the truth that hurts while it is setting us free, free of the illusions that we are better than others, and don’t need them.
I pray that America may soon see a genuine, effective apology from one of its celebrities. I pray that you and I will amend our wrongs by helping others get over our messes, by cleaning them up. That way we can bring some major good things out of the next bad situation we create.
Dr. Schmidt is a psychologist life coach with offices in Middletown, Lexington, and Shelbyville.