“It’s Easier to Forgive an Enemy than to Forgive a Friend.” 

 

I’m struggling with this thing called forgiveness.  I’m not sure I even understand it. Or better yet, what I feel is not lining up with what I have been taught that forgiveness is. It made me start to think… is forgiveness all it’s cracked up to be? Is forgiveness simply an apology and everything goes back to normal?

I have a friend who’s recently experienced a divorce. I don’t know the story. Nor is it my business to ask. She has embarked on a new journey in life and has been very transparent that it’s been hard. Her life has been turned upside down. She recently posted a meme about reaching the point of forgiveness. I commented that I was working on it too. I said something like “I’ve gotten to anger and disgust…. I hope forgiveness is coming.” What followed though upset me a bit. Other people commented that I should forgive first. That not forgiving only hurt me. Even though I’m sure they were trying to be helpful I felt attacked for feeling the way that I did. Chastised for not just letting go and forgiving. It hurt. Maybe I have to forgive these people now too but it made me think… is there not a process to forgiveness?

The forgiveness process…. Interesting. I hadn’t considered that before. Why not though? There’s a process for grief. There’s a process for new love. There’s a process for addiction recovery. There are medical processes for recovery. Why do we ignore the process of forgiveness?

Forgive and Forget

Not Forgiving Hurts You Not Them

Forgiveness Frees You

Cut The Strings That Bind

Don’t Let Someone Else Control Your Feelings

These are the messages of forgiveness. All of those things are true in some ways. They all speak to the end of forgiveness. The- I’m over it part. But what about the- I’m in the middle of the way this feels- part? How about the- I can’t understand why you’ve hurt me so badly when I never would have hurt you- part? Or the- I’m dying and you’re doing just fine- part? This common forgiveness rhetoric doesn’t want to talk about that part of forgiveness. That’s the ugly part you should keep to yourself. That’s the part you should endure without telling anyone. Until you can plop a bow on it and say I’m all better now. But that’s not even close to where I am right now! I want to forgive… I’m trying to forgive… but I just can’t. Yet.

Does that make me bad? Were you expecting a step by step guide on how to forgive. A defined monologue on what steps to take when you’re in the middle of the forgiveness process. Ha! I wish there was such a thing. See, I’m not going through a divorce. I didn’t have an absent father I have to forgive. You probably don’t either. But we all have something different in our life we need to forgive. Your process is not going to look the same as mine. No matter how many step by step guides some person creates.

 

Honor Your Truth:

My best friendship of many years has crumbled. It’s completely broken. And probably irreparable. My friend hurt me. Incredibly. I’m the hurting one. I’m the one who’s been cast aside. I’m the one who’s been dumped. I wasn’t worth carrying into his new life. I am too much work. I am not as valuable as I thought I was. I gave a level of friendship that he is not willing to give in return. That is where I’m at.

I am not in a place where I am ready to completely forgive. It hasn’t stopped hurting. I haven’t been able to deconstruct the feelings or exactly why I was shut out. The feelings are raw and aren’t easy to compartmentalize. How do you understand or accept that after years of devotion to a friendship you can be so easily tossed aside? It rocks you to your very core. It makes you question who you are as a friend. It makes you question all of your other friendships and connections. I’m still there. I’m still spinning in circles wondering why I wasn’t good enough. What I have done to deserve to be cast aside.

 

Forgiveness Doesn’t Minimize The Hurt:

It would be easy to look at my friend and say I forgive you. Even though I’ve never received an apology. Well… that’s not totally true. The apology I received was… I’m sorry that you feel the way you do. Not- I’m sorry for what I did. Not- I’m sorry that my actions did that to you. Not- I am willing to change my actions in the future so that I don’t hurt you any longer. I didn’t receive that apology.  Because that is what a real friend would do. As a matter of fact, that is what I did. I gave that apology. But the same kind of apology was never received in return. So I could try to accept a half apology. I could SAY that I have forgiven. But that hasn’t removed the pain. The apology I received only made it worse. It guaranteed that I may never receive a sincere apology. Sincere apologies include repentance and a willingness to change.

I still struggle with feelings like; I want my friend to understand and feel the pain I feel. I want to turn around the treatment that I have received. I want you to feel what it likes to be thrown out. I can’t do that. I haven’t done that. As a matter of fact, I’ve done the opposite. I’ve stayed in the middle of the pain in order to love him. To try to show what real friendship means. I was used for the time I was needed. Then I was ignored again. When I speak, when I try to help him understand how I feel… it’s rejected. It bounces against a wall of self-protection. How do you forgive when the person who hurt you won’t accept responsibility? What forgiveness meme addresses that? Does forgiveness have to condone what’s happened to you?

 

Without Resolution Hurt Resurfaces:

Sometimes you forgive people simply because you still want them in your life. I did this. I dug really deep. I read through thousands of pages of transcript from our years of chatting online. I’m not kidding. Thousands. I hunted for the place where things went wrong… what I had done wrong. I talked and talked with old friends, my spouse, and others until I realized that my friend did not have the capacity to give what I was asking for. I called in tears. I apologized for expecting too much of him. What? Wait. Yes, I lowered my expectations in order to try to repair the relationship. I changed to try to fix it. But guess what happened… my friend sunk to behaviors even lower than my new expectations. Going weeks on end without a hello or text. And there it was again. The hurt. When a person doesn’t attempt to change as well… the cycle just will not stop.

 

Forgiveness is WORK!:

There is nothing more difficult than living out forgiveness when the person you are trying to forgive continues to hurt you. This requires the grace of a super human! This requires putting aside pain that is difficult to ignore. How do you live out forgiveness towards someone who has deeply wronged you and may never see it?

I didn’t have to forgive once. I didn’t say ok… you’re a little sorry. It kept happening. It kept hurting. And I had to keep accepting that someone who was supposed to love me, was willing to hurt me so badly. So much that even when I said I’m hurting that there was no change!

That’s not something that goes away. It’s not something easy to let go. It’s WORK. It’s like trying to sew the sails in the middle of a storm.

 

Forgiveness Doesn’t Have To Equal Reconciliation:

Throughout this process I’ve realized that maybe I have a misunderstanding of what forgiveness really is. I’ve always thought that when someone apologizes you have to accept the apology and go on loving them the same way you did before. It was probably a misconception. I grew up in a fairly sheltered world with little to have to forgive. I was always taught that forgiveness was the same as reconciliation. The forgive and forget method. You know… as far as the east is from the west. But that doesn’t make sense to this real life situation I’m in.

Because that kind of forgiveness means I have to pretend to like his choices. I have to be there when he needs me but expect no safety or camaraderie in return. I have to fight the feelings of resentment. I have to allow myself to be used. It would be like saying- it’s ok you walked out of my life like I meant nothing. It would say that minimizing my importance was not the same as betrayal. I would have to accept a friendship that I would not give. I had to forsake who I am in order to make my friend happy. I would have to lower my expectations of what friendship truly is in order to fix it.

Reconciliation without remorse from both parties just doesn’t happen. There isn’t a restart button. You don’t stop feeling or remembering the things that have happened. Even if you forgive.

 

Forgiveness Isn’t Easy When The Rules Are Broken:

Rules in relationships are real. We use them to judge the viability of the relationship. We compare our spouse, lovers, friends, and acquaintances to a set of rules. It measures how invested you are. It measure how much you can trust someone. Marriages have rules that ensure fidelity. Friendships have rules that ensure loyalty. We measure and stack the importance of that relationship to these preconceived rules of what that relationship should look like.

Prior to my friend’s new relationship we had rules we followed. After the kids went to bed was generally check in time. How was your day etc. If we weren’t going to be around we informed each other of the change in advance. I knew my friend would support me and I would support him. We shared everything. The small things and the really big things. There weren’t secrets and we knew that. I knew I could tell him everything and it was safe in his confidence. I provided the same support. He knew that when I said it’s husband time that I meant it and we would say goodbye. My husband also gave his time on days when my friend needed me. Because he knew my friend needed me. There were rules. We measured the realness of our relationship by these rules. And then my friend starting breaking all the rules. He did exactly what he said he would never do. He devalued me and our friendship. He broke the rules our friendship had been built on. And therefore, he broke my trust.

What happens then? When all the rules don’t make any sense anymore. There was no warning. There was no discussion about wanting to redefine the rules. There was only brick after brick that laid the wall.

I want to forgive. I do. I want to be able to say I forgive you for breaking all of the rules. I want to.

But how do you do that when there is no ground left underneath you?

 

Forgiveness? It’s On Me:

So my forgiveness process clearly isn’t finished. Yours might not be either. There’s many different ways to find your way to forgiveness. Religion, Therapy, Blogging, New Adventures, Self Introspection etc. They all work in one way or the other. Your forgiveness process is what you make of it.

At the end of the day however, my freedom and forgiveness… that’s on me!

I can choose to stay in the pain. I can choose to sit in the anger and the hurt. I can choose how long I walk through each step of my personal forgiveness process. The mud puddle is always willing to let you sit in it.

Tweet: The mud pubble is always willing to let you sit in it. But should you?

I have a long way to go before I stop waking up every morning remembering that I no longer have a best friend. Exciting things now carry a sense of sadness when I realize the person I would have texted first no longer cares. I have moved past the anger and disgust. I don’t have to sit in the mud puddle waiting to be pulled out. I’m not over the hump but… I still care about his children and think of them. I still care that he’s doing well. I still want happiness for him. Except those feelings hurt now. I need him to understand, I need him to feel remorse. I need him to want to fix it too. I need him to want to stop hurting me. I need him to do some work too.

So I’m still raw. I’m still laying out open, trying to put all the pieces back together.  I’m still trying to understand. I need to find myself again. I need to be confident that I am worthy of the kind of friendship I deserve. I need to set my own level of tolerance and acceptance and live to those standards. I need to be able to say- you’re not a good friend to me- and be ok with that. I need to accept that sometimes things end. I need to accept that this may never be repaired. I need to accept that I wasn’t worth it to him. I need to find my bootstraps. That is very hard. That is going to be a process. That is the process of forgiveness. Please, let me take my time.

 

#sonottogether