If You Can’t Forgive…

Forgiving someone for a wrong they’ve done to you can be difficult; but it’s important to forgive, not so much for the benefit of the other person, as to free yourself from anger and obsessive thoughts. What may help is the exercise of conscious empathy—trying to understand what in the offender led to the offense, what circumstances in that person’s life made it possible for them to hurt you. 
         
My abusive father will serve as an example. I have forgiven him, my sister has not. The difference between us seems to be that my sister concentrates on what he did to us whereas I have focused on why he did what he did. I don’t mean to claim moral superiority to my sister. She suffered more from his anger and negativity than I did. For example, he once took her up in his private plane and threatened to throw her out of it. Nothing like that ever happened to me. In fact, his worst misdeeds were committed when I was away from home at college. In other words, he deteriorated through the years and was somewhat closer to normal when I was growing up.
         
Our father’s own childhood was anything but normal. His father apparently went on drunken rampages during which little Marvin would hide outside in the bushes (tumbleweeds?). Rumor has it that gunfire erupted during one of these episodes, possibly because my paternal grandmother was “running around” with other men. Anyway, Marvin’s mother—my grandmother—moved to California and abandoned him, leaving him in the clutches of an unstable man dedicated to whiskey. And I suspect that this unhealthy environment activated in Marvin a latent hostility and depression. Without a bad childhood, the genes that made him angry and depressed might never have been expressed.
         
Moreover, my father did love us after his fashion. He did not consistently express that love, and he thought he was showing love when he gave us material things, like fancy cars and expensive vacations. But, after considering Marvin’s own abusive childhood, I came to feel compassion for him. Eventually, my own anger at him melted away and was replaced by the forgiveness that Spirit can inspire.
         
And it did take years for that spirit of forgiveness to win out in me. In other words, forgiving someone is a process that can take a long time. So, my advice to anyone having trouble with forgiveness is, “Try to empathize with the person who hurt you and realize that forgiveness may not come quickly.”  

~ Richard Russell