We can't afford therapy. My job requires too much time for therapy and so does my H's job and school. We just can't do that right now. We can't even go on a family vacation because we don't have the money and it's all my fault.
Rain, may I offer you something to maybe help begin to answer some of your questions AND give you some hope that it is NOT a "no-win" situation unless you want it to be?
Do you dare release the person you are today from the shadow of the wrong you did yesterday?
Do you dare forgive yourself?
To forgive yourself takes high courage. Who are you, after all, to shake yourself free from the undeniable sins of your private history – as if what you once did has no bearing on who you are now?
Where do you get the right – let alone the cheek – to forgive yourself when other people would want you to crawl in shame if they really knew? How dare you?
The answer is that you get the right to forgive yourself only from the entitlements of love. And you dare forgive yourself only with the courage of love. Love is the ultimate source of both your right and your courage to ignore the indictment you level at yourself. When you live as if yesterday’s wrong is irrelevant to how you feel about yourself today, you are gambling on a love that frees you even from self-condemnation.
But there must be truthfulness. Without honesty, self-forgiveness is psychological hocus-pocus. The rule is: we cannot really forgive ourselves unless we look at the failure in our past and call it by its right name.
We need honest judgment to keep us from self-indulging complacency.
Let me recall the four stages we pass through when we forgive someone else who hurt us: we hurt, we hate, we heal ourselves, and we come together again.
We all hurt ourselves . Unfairly, too, and sometimes deeply.
God knows the regrets we have for the foolish ways we cheat ourselves. I smoked cigarettes too long, and while I puffed away on my pack-a-day, I feared the time that I would say: you fool, you fool, dying before your time, and you have no one to blame but yourself. Then there are the opportunities spurned, disciplines rejected, and addictions hooked into – they all can haunt you with a guilty sense that you did yourself wrong.
But the hurt your heart cries hardest to forgive yourself for is the unfair harm you did to others.
The memory of a moment when you lied to someone who trusted you! The recollection of neglecting a child who depended on you. The time you turned away from somebody who called out to you for help! These are the memories, and thousands like them, that pierce us with honest judgment against ourselves.
We do not have to be bad persons to do bad things. If only bad people did bad things to other people we would live in a pretty good world. We hurt people by our bungling as much as we do by our vices.
And the more decent we are the more acutely we feel our pain for the unfair hurts we caused. Our pain becomes our hate. The pain we cause other people becomes the hate we feel for ourselves. For having done them wrong . We judge, we convict, and we sentence ourselves. Mostly in secret.
Some of us feel only a passive hatred for ourselves. We merely lack love’s energy to bless ourselves. We cannot look in the looking glass and say: “What I see makes me glad to be alive.” Our joy in being ourselves is choked by a passive hatred.
Others sink into aggressive hatred of themselves. They cut themselves to pieces with a fury of contempt. One part of them holds its nose and shoves the other part down a black hole of contempt. They are their own enemy. And sometimes, in the ultimate tragedy, their self-hatred is acted out in self-destruction.
Of course, your inner judge may be an unreasonable nag, accusing you falsely, and flailing you unfairly. On the other hand, your better self often sweeps real guilt under a carpet of complacency. You con yourself just to save yourself the pain of confrontation with your shadowy side.
In any case, you shouldn’t trust your inner judge too far.
Still, he is your toughest critic, and you have to come to terms with him.
So let us move on to love’s daring response.
What happens when you finally do forgive yourself?
When you forgive yourself, you rewrite your script. What you are in your present scene is not tied down to what you did in an earlier scene. The bad guy you played in Act One is eliminated and you play Act Two as a good guy.
You release yourself today from yesterday’s scenario. You walk into tomorrow, guilt gone.
Again, the word that fits the case best is “irrelevance.” Look back into your past, admit the ugly facts, and declare that they are irrelevant to your present. Irrelevant and immaterial! Your very own past has no bearing on your case. Or how you feel about it.
Such release does not come easy. The part of yourself who did the wrong walks with you wherever you go. A corner of your memory winks at you and says, “Nice try old chap, but we both know the scoundrel you really are, don’t we?” It takes a miracle of love to get rid of the unforgiving inquisitor lurking in the shadows of your heart.
Perhaps nobody has understood the tortured route to self-forgiveness better than the Russian genius Dostoevski. In his novel Crime and Punishment, he portrayed the inner struggle of self-forgiveness in the soul of a murderer named Ilyon Raskolnikov.
Raskolnikov did something as evil as anyone can do. He brutally murdered a helpless woman, and old pawnbroker – a miserable woman to be sure, and miserly, and mean, but innocent still. His guilt was stupefying.
No soul can bear such guilt alone, not for long. Sooner or later one must tell. Raskolnikov found a girl, an angel, Sonia, and he confessed to her. He told her everything.
She persuaded him to admit everything to the police, and he finally did. He was sent to prison in Siberia.
The loving Sonia followed him there and waited for him to forgive himself so that he could find the freedom to accept her love.
Raskolnikov could not forgive himself. He tried to excuse himself instead.
He came to grief, he said, “through some decree of blind fate”; he was destined to kill the old woman. Besides, when you come right down to it was his act really that bad? Did not Napoleon do the same sort of thing and do they not build him monuments? In clever ways like this he excused himself by finding deep reasons why he was not to blame.
Raskolnikov did not dare to be guilty.
“Oh, how happy he would have been,” wrote Dostoevski, “if he could have blamed himself! He could have borne anything then, even shame and disgrace.”
Yet, now and then, Raskolnikov did get a glimpse of “the fundamental falsity in himself.” He knew deep inside that he was lying to himself.
And finally it happened. How it happened he did not know. He flung himself at Sonia’s feet and accepted her love. “He wept and threw his arms around her knees.” He finally had the power to love. And his power to love revealed that the miracle had really happened; he had forgiven himself.
He forgave himself? For such a crime as cold blooded murder? Yes. “Everything, even his crime, his sentence and imprisonment seemed to him now . . . and external strange fact with which he had no concern. ”
Release! Release by a discovery that his terrible past was irrelevant to who he was now and was going to be in the future. He was free from his own judgment and this was why he was free to love.
Raskolnikov stands out in staggering boldness to show us that even the worst of us can find the power to set ourselves free.
Finally, the climax of self-forgiving; it comes when we feel at one with ourselves again. The split is healed. The self inside of you, who condemned you so fiercely, embraces you now. You are whole, single; you have come together.
You are not being smug. You care very much that you once did a wrong. And you do not want to do it again. But you will not let your former wrong curse the person you are now. You take life in stride. You have let yourself come home.
It does not happen once and for all. The hate you felt comes back now and then, and you reject yourself for doing what you did. But then you come back to yourself again. And again. And again.
To forgive your own self – almost the ultimate miracle of healing!
But how can you pull it off?
The first thing you need is honesty. There is no way to forgive yourself without it. Candor – a mind ready to forego fakery and to face facts – this is the first piece of spiritual equipment you need.
Without candor you can only be complacent. And complacency is a counterfeit of forgiveness. Some people are superficial, there is no other word for it. Drawing on the top layer of their shallow wits, they pursue the unexamined life with unquestioning contentment, more like grazing cows than honest human beings.
The difference between a complacent person and a person who forgives himself is like the difference between a person who is high on cocaine and a person who has reason for being really happy.
Then you need a clear head to make way for your forgiving heart.
For instance, you need to see the difference between self-esteem and self-forgiveness.
You can gain esteem for yourself when you discover that you are estimable, that you are in fact worth esteeming. To esteem yourself is to feel in your deepest being that you are a superb gift very much worth wanting, God’s own art form, and a creature of magnificent beauty.
Sometimes you gain self-esteem only after you come to terms with the bad hand you were dealt in life’s game.
I know a man who has what is cruelly called the Elephant man syndrome; a tough hand to play, but the only hand he has. He has learned to see the beautiful person he is beneath his t horny skin, and he esteems himself – because of what he is. Kim, on the other hand, is a beautiful adopted child whose birth-mother dealt her a genetic disease. Kim has chosen to accept herself as an incredibly splendid gift of God because of what she is, and in spite of the tough hand she was dealt.
Blessed are the self-esteemers, for they have seen the beauty of their own souls.
But self-esteem is not the same as self-forgiveness. You esteem yourself when you discover your own excellence. You forgive yourself after you discover your own faults. You esteem yourself for the good person you are. You forgive yourself for the bad things you did.
If you did not see the difference, you may shout a thousand bravos at yourself and never come to the moment of self-forgiving. So you need a clear head about what it is you are doing.
You also need courage. Forgiving yourself is love’s ultimate daring.
The reason it takes high courage to forgive yourself lies partly with other people’s attitudes toward self-forgivers. Self-righteous people do not want you to forgive yourself. They want you to walk forever under the black umbrella of permanent shame.
I understand these people; I am one of them. There is something inside of me that wants a wrongdoer, especially a famous wrongdoer, to keep a low profile, to take the last place in line, to speak with a meek voice; I want him to grovel a little. Maybe a lot.
So, when you walk and talk like a person who has sliced your sinful past from your present sense of selfhood, you will need courage to face the self-righteous crowd.
Then you need to be concrete.
You drown in the bilge of your own condemnation for lack of specificity. You will almost always fail at self-forgiving when you refuse to be concrete about what you are forgiving yourself for.
Many of us try, for instance, to forgive ourselves for being the sorts of persons we are. We are ugly, or mean, or petty, or given to spouting off; or, on the other hand, we are too good, a patsy, everybody’s compliant sucker, humble servant to all who want to get something out of us.
But people who try to forgive themselves for being wholesale failures are not humble at all; they are really so proud that they want to be gods. John Quincy Adams, not the greatest, but a very good President, could not forgive himself. “I have done nothing,” he wrote in his diary. “My life has been spent in vain and idle aspirations, and in ceaseless rejected prayers that something should be the result of my existence beneficial to my own species.” The last words spoken by the great jurist Hugo Grotius, the father of modern international law, on his deathbed, were: “I have accomplished nothing worthwhile in my life.” Such people sound humble with their moans about being failures in life; but they are really crying because they had to settle for being merely human.
You must call your own bluff: precisely, what is it that you need forgiveness for? For being unfaithful to your spouse last year? Good, you can work on that. For being an evil sort of person? No, that is too much; you cannot swallow yourself whole.
Most of us can manage no more than one thing at a time. “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,” said Jesus. When we overload ourselves with dilated bags of undifferentiated guilt we are likely to sink into despair. The only way we can succeed as self-forgivers, free from the tyranny of a tender conscience, is to be concrete and to forgive ourselves for one thing at a time.
Finally, you need to confirm your outrageous act of self-forgiveness with a reckless act of love. How can you know for sure that you gambled with guilt and won unless you gamble your winnings on love?
“She loves much because she has been forgiven much” –this was Jesus’ explanation for a woman who dared to barge into a dinner party uninvited, plunk herself at Jesus’ feet, and pour out a small cascade of love.
Love is a signal that you have done it, that you have actually released the guilt that condemned you. You won’t always know exactly when you have forgiven yourself. It is like reaching the top of a long hill on a highway – you may not be sure when you have reached level ground, but you can tell that you have passed the top when you step on the gas the car spurts ahead. An act of love is like quick acceleration. A free act of love, to anyone at all, may signal to you that you do, after all, have the power that comes to anyone who is self-forgiving.
You can buy her a gift! Invite him to dinner! Visit someone who is sick! You can put your arms around a friend you never touched before! Write a letter of thanks. Or tell Dad that you love him. All ways of confirming that we performed the miracle of forgiving ourselves.
Yes, love gives you the right to forgive yourself. And it gives you the power as well. At least to begin. Healing may come slowly, but better a snail’s pace than standing still, feet sunk in the cement of self-accusations.
To forgive yourself is to act out the mystery of one person who is both forgiver and forgiven. You judge yourself: this is the division within you. You forgive yourself: this is the healing of the split.
That you should dare to heal yourself by this simple act is a signal to the world that God’s love is a power within you.
(Forgiving Ourselves, Ch.8, Lewis B. Smedes, Forgive & Forget, Healing The Hurts We Don’t Deserve, p.71-77)
