You Can't Forgive an Object
Once I had an argument with a friend over a longstanding issue. “I’m sorry for messing things up in this way.” I said, towards the ends.
“That’s okay.” They said. “I forgave you before I even agreed to come.”
I was stunned. Either way I don’t think we’re friends anymore.
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Understanding apologies and forgiveness is something that children are usually taught very early on. A playmate takes something from you, like a toy, and you’re upset. The parents intervene, the children are taught that what happened was wrong, and the way to acknowledge your error was to apologise. The way to forgive someone was to accept their apology. The lesson is left at there for now, because if you can’t forgive someone for taking your toy, you’re going to have a really bad time when your best friend and business partner betrays you, and that isn’t something a child needs to worry about.
This is the most basic form of an apology, and forgiveness. You did something wrong that hurt me, I forgive you so we can continue to association.
The next level is where I fear we’ve completely left an entire generation, probably 2, perpetually. I’ll use a more niche example here, from therapy, because that’s what I’m good at. A patient comes in, traumatised, their mother was a chronic drug addict and made their childhood living hell. Because of their lack of any maternal (or consistent stable paternal) influence, they end up on the wrong track in life, and 15 years later are in a clinician’s office with their life in ruins. When they start therapy, they hate their mother for how they failed them, and blame them for how their life has turned out. After diving into the work, the patient comes to forgive their mother.
Actually, no, sorry, they don’t. They do what I described in the introduction.
“My mother did her best, and was fighting addiction, and took out her entire life on me. I didn’t deserve what she did, but her behaviour was caused by her abusive husband/lover.”
They take away the individuality of their mother, so that they can retroactively find the illusion of peace.
But it’s not peace. Notice here that they’ve just pushed the responsibility down the line, now it’s the father’s fault the mother abused the daughter. Why was the father abusive? Make up whatever answer you want, maybe it was addiction too, maybe they had PTSD from the war, maybe their own father was abusive. If you follow the train of thought long enough, you inevitably reach the answer that it was unavoidable tragedy, or, in other words, that it wasn’t anybody’s fault, or that it was effectively an intangible force, like God, fault.
There are few ways of interpreting this conclusion. One is that what they really forgive is the world, and their abuser is simply a representative object of the world. But you can’t forgive an object.
What forgiveness would look like is their mother giving a genuine apology: “I’m sorry.” and the daughter saying “I forgive you.”, not because she has already decided to forgive the mother, or arbitrarily assigned her mother as not being at fault because then, this is not forgiveness, because the blame is displaced from the mother, but because she actually does forgive the mother for what she did.
And that is why, when the blame is displaced in this way, it never works. Because it’s not real forgiveness. The patient will end up ambiguous about their relationship with their mother, and not actually be able to find closure from that.
Maybe they can’t ask their mother, maybe their mother overdosed and is dead. But the one thing the patient almost will never do, and I mean never, is go to their mother and say: Hey Mum, you really hurt me and this messed up my life.
This is the opportunity for a real apology. Or a fight, but hopefully not. And the apology allows for forgiveness, genuine forgiveness, not the blame displacement kind. So why won’t the patient do this?
Again, a couple of possible answers.
1, that they don’t actually want to forgive their abuser, for example, because that will mean that they have to take responsibility for their life now after their abuser was no longer involved.
2, that they don’t want to forgive their abuser, because apologising would mean they have resolved, or I guess are okay/come to terms, with what happened to them, and they’re ready to move on.
And they’re not, they haven’t, which is why it’s never 1 and it’s always 2, or rather 1 pretending to be 2. Holding them responsible would mean acknowledging responsibility for yourself.