SKEWDONE:
It took me 10 months after D-Day to be able to forgive my WW. They say that forgiveness is something you do, not something you feel, but in my case it was definitely an undeniable feeling. It is also said that forgiveness is more for the benefit of the betrayed than for the betrayer. For me, I could not bring myself to utter any words of forgiveness until my feelings of hatred, anger, and revenge seeking subsided into almost nothing of importance to me anymore. I had reached a point where I realized that I was holding myself back and hurting myself with my negative feelings about the whole thing. I was walking around with this huge "pity poor me" weight on my shoulders and it was wearing me down. I finally reached the point when I was healing myself through much needed prayer and spiritual reawakening that it became a burden in my heart to speak the words of forgiveness to my W. All I could think of was that we expect God to forgive us all our failings and shortcomings in life, yet we offer not any forgiveness to our brothers and sisters in this life ourselves. What if we are only forgiven in the same capacity as we have forgiven here on earth? Scary thought. But, that was only a piece of the total thought process that led me to forgive, it was really more of my own healing and wanting to be free of this ugly burden that I was choosing to hold onto (Levon wears his war wounds like a crown). I released my W and myself at the same time when I spoke to her. I felt so light that I thought I might float off the ground. At that moment I thought to myself, "Wow, forgiveness REALLY IS more for the betrayed than for the betrayer!" I felt like a new person!
Now mind you, forgiveness doesn't mean that the "party" is over by any means, but it is a great place from which you can start to heal yourself and your relationship. For me, my R with my W is not the greatest, and it still has problems that stem way back to the beginning of our R with each other, and some of those problems may still lead us to a dead end some day, but as I told her when I was forgiving her, the issue of the betrayal is not a factor in our relationship any longer, only the good, the bad, and the ugly of what and who we are as individuals and as a couple matters now. Ladies and Gentlemen, the Elephant has left the building!
If your WS takes your forgiveness as being "let off the hook" and that you can just pick-up from here and go on and never look back, well, that's not going to haul oats to the marketplace at all. Both of you need to work at the relationship and she still needs to make reparations to you to help you feel loved and wanted and to ease your pain and fear. Actually, as you can see from reading many of these stories, the work never ends in a relationship and you can easily see where complacency in a marriage leads many into troubled waters.
So that's what forgiveness was to me. Hope some of it helps you in some way.
God Bless
<small>[ March 04, 2003, 09:08 AM: Message edited by: Blind Sided ]</small>
