This section of "After the Affair" has a good piece on self-forgiveness for the BS and WS:
</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial"> Forgiveness
From “After the Affair” – Janis Abrahms Spring, PhD
Learning to forgive p. 238 (Excerpts)
If your goal is reconciliation, forgiveness requires restitution. Forgiveness is a two-person process; you can’t forgive those who refuse to acknowledge and redress the harm they’ve caused you-you certainly can’t have a vital, intimate relationship with them.
“True forgiveness cannot be granted until the perpetrator has sought and earned it through confession, repentance, and restitution.” - Judith Lewis Herman
A partner who wants to be physically and psychologically connected to you must work to win forgiveness through specific concrete behaviors. Unearned forgiveness, like unrequited love, reinforces the assumption that it’s your job alone to stay attached, that your partner doesn’t need to share the burden of recovery. If you have even a shred of self-esteem, you’re likely to find this a dysfunctional notion.
“While reconciliation may be a desirable outcome, psychologically, forgiveness has to be earned. To forgive people who do not acknowledge the injury, or even worse, rationalize their injurious behavior as having been deserved (or justified), is to sustain the injury all over again.” Robert Lovinger (Clinical Psychologist) in “Religion and Counseling”
The truth is, however, that you, the hurt partner, won’t ever forget how you’ve been deceived, whether you forgive or not. Years later, you’ll still be able to recall the exact moment of the revelation, and all the gory details of the affair. You, the unfaithful one, are likely to want your partner to forgive and forget so that you can move on to a peaceful reconciliation, but you can’t rush the process. If you don’t attend to the damage you’ve caused, your partner probably will.
When you forgive, you don’t forget how you’ve been wronged, but you do allow yourself to stop dwelling on it. Your hurtful memories are likely to stay alive, but relegated to a corner of your mind. You continue to see the damage, but only as part of a picture that includes the loving times as well-the ones that remind you why you’ve chosen to stay together. The past may continue to sting, but it’s also likely to teach come important lessons and inspire you to do better.
Forgiving, in short, entails conscious forgetting, which Jungian analyst Clarissa Pinkola Estes describes as “refusing to summon up the fiery material…willfully dropping the practice of obsessing…, thereby living in a new landscape, creating anew life and new experiences to think about instead of the old ones.”
Unearned forgiveness is pseudo forgiveness. It’s something you grant, not because your partner deserves it, but because you feel pressured to, either by others or by romantic moralistic assumptions about what forgiveness means. Given rashly or prematurely, it buries the pain alive, and robs you and your partner of the chance to confront the lessons of the affair and properly redress each other’s wounds.
It is commonly assumed that forgiveness is not just a gift to your partner, but a gift to yourself, in service of your best self, and that it imbues you, the forgiver, with a sense of well-being, of psychological and physical health. By forgiving “you set a prisoner free, but you discover the real prisoner was yourself”.
The idea that forgiveness is categorically good for you is popular both with the general public and with professionals, but it hasn’t held up under study. In fact, it has been shown in some cases to be anti-therapeutic, spawning feelings of low self-worth in the person who forgives.
“A too ready tendency to forgive may be a sign that one lacks self-respect, and conveys-emotionally-either that we do not think we have rights or that we do not take our rights very seriously,” writes Jeffrie Murphy in “Forgiveness and resentment”. Murphy goes on to point out that a willingness to be a doormat for others reveals not love or friendship, but what psychiatrist Karen Horney calls “morbid dependency.” My own clinical experience confirms that unearned forgiveness is no cure for intimate wounds; that it merely hides them under a shroud of smiles and pleasantries, and allows them to fester.
You may have been taught by family or religious leaders that forgiveness is a redemptive act-a form of self-sacrifice that good people make to their enemies. By forgiving, you demonstrate your compassion and innocence, and preserve, or create, an image of yourself as a martyr or saint.
Forgiveness by itself, however, is not admirable-unless, of course, you believe that silencing yourself and denying yourself a just solution is admirable. What you consider magnanimity may in fact be nothing but a way of asserting your moral superiority over your partner and freeing yourself from your own contributions to the affair. What you see as self-sacrifice may serve the larger purpose of putting your partner under your control, under a debt of gratitude that can never be fully repaid.
The problem with expedient forgiveness-forgiveness granted without any attitudinal or emotional change towards the offender-is that it’s likely over time to exacerbate feelings of depression and grief, and feed an underlying aggression toward your partner. Those who forgive too quickly tend to interact with false or patronizing sweetness, punctuated by sarcasm or overt hostility. The result is a relationship ruled by resentment, petty squabbles, numbness, surface calm, and self-denial- a relationship lacking both in vitality and authenticity.
A patient named Pat modeled expedient forgiveness when she put her husband’s affair behind her long before the two of them had examined its meaning and put it to rest. “I know Henry never stopped loving me,” she told me. “I don’t need him to beg for my pardon.” Eight years later, however, though Henry never strayed again, they were still stumbling over trust and intimacy issues.
As I’ve said, “making nice” settles nothing. If you want to pave the way for genuine forgiveness, you can’t sweep what happened under the table. You need your partner to understand your pain, feel remorse, apologize, and demonstrate a commitment to rebuilding the relationship. To heal, you need to forgive, but your partner must apply salve to your wounds, first.
Self-Forgiveness
In addition to forgiving your partner for wronging you, you should consider forgiving yourself for the wrongs you’ve inflicted on your partner, your family, and yourself.
For you, the hurt partner, these wrongs might include:
• Being overly naïve, trusting too blindly, ignoring your suspicions about your partner’s infidelity;
• Blaming yourself too harshly for your partner’s betrayal;
• Tolerating or making excuses for your partner’s unacceptable behavior to preserve your relationship;
• Having such poorly developed concepts of self and love that you felt un-entitled to more;
• Hurting and degrading yourself for making unfair comparisons between yourself and the lover;
• Feeling so desperate to win your partner back that you acted in ways that humiliated you-in front of the lover, your family, your friends;
• Losing your sense of self; losing sight of what you value in yourself;
• Putting your kids in the middle by needing them to support you, love you, and take your side against the other parent;
• Being so upset by the affair that you weren’t there for your children;
• Isolating yourself unnecessarily; trying so hard to protect the feelings of your children and parents that you cut yourself off from their support;
• Contributing to your partner’s dissatisfaction at home (for example, by failing to take your partner’s grievances seriously; getting buried in your career or in the needs of your children; being too critical, unavailable, or needy).
You, the unfaithful partner, should consider forgiving yourself for:
• Feeling so needy, so entitled to get your needs met, that you violated your partner;
• Exposing your partner-the person you love, the parent of your children-to a life-threatening disease.
• Blaming your partner for your dissatisfaction, without realizing how your own misperceptions, misbehavior, and unrealistic expectations compromised your relationship;
• Developing attitudes that justified your deception and minimized the significance of your actions;
• Failing to confront your partner with your essential needs; acting in ways that blocked your partner from satisfying them;
• Having unrealistic ideas about mature love that rendered you incapable of tolerating disenchantments in your relationship;
• Having such poorly developed concepts of self and love that you didn’t know how to create and sustain intimacy, or feel satisfied in a committed relationship;
• Inflicting chaos on your children, family, and friends.
No matter how your partner may have contributed to your unhappiness at home, you, the unfaithful partner, are solely responsible for your deception, and need to forgive yourself for the harm you’ve cause by violating your covenant of trust. You may also want to forgive yourself for the hurt you’ve caused your children. This may be an easier task if you can teach them through your own example that two people who love each other can make mistakes, take responsibility for them, and work together to renew their lives together.
It may help you and your partner to forgive yourselves if you learn to accept yourselves as fallible, erring human beings-conditioned, confused, struggling to make the most of a life you neither fully understand nor control. Self-forgiveness doesn’t relieve you of responsibility for your words or actions, but it may release you from self-contempt and from a “crippling sense of badness” that makes you believe “I can’t do better.” With self-forgiveness, you bring a gentle compassion to your understanding of who you are and why you acted the way you did, and reclaim what you most value in yourself.
To “forgive and forget” is just a popular saying. Forgiving and forgetting are two completely different notions, and rarely go together in the real world.
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