Whenever my abusive boyfriend wanted to make up with me, he’d tell me he was sorry for beating me up, and naturally, I’d forgive him. That was just a green light for him to start beating me up all over again.
- Carol M., Vancouver, February 2010

By refusing to forgive, I give up my illusions.
- Alice Miller, Breaking Down the Wall of Silence

Harry Wilson is still alive, somehow. He is homeless, starving, plagued by alcoholism and drug addiction, and regularly beaten and robbed on Vancouver’s meanest streets. Yet neither his present suffering, nor his childhood rape and torture by a clergyman with an electric cattle prod, has caused him to collapse, as it has most of his fellow alumni from the death camps called Indian Residential Schools.

None of these others have ever found their voice, but Harry has: and when he speaks of his life, he always ends by saying the same thing:

“I’ll never forgive those bastards for what they did to me.”

Harry Wilson proves to me something I have observed over many years: that the healthiest people are those who have never forgiven what was done to them as a child.

I’ve recently begun to ask counselors and other “helping” professionals why they believe that a traumatized man or woman must forgive if they are to become well. I have yet to receive a clear or logical answer. Rather, it is simply a self-evident and unquestioned assumption that “forgiveness” is indispensable to recovery.

However, when we look beneath this surface conjecture, we find that the exact opposite is true: specifically, that the most basic requirement of recovering from any pain or trauma is to not surrender our capacity to name the wrong and the wrongdoer, and freely express our natural outrage at it. And yet precisely such a surrender and silence is required for us to undertake the gesture of “forgiving”, which in practice is simply the inner resignation and defeat of our being reconciled to our torture at the hands of another.

Anger and the refusal to “let go” of our violation is seen by modern therapists as a hindrance to “moving on”, as if not accommodating to one’s wronged condition is the source of one’s problem. “Forgive and forget, and all will be well” is the unchallengeable secular creed of psychology. The onus, in other words, is placed upon the victim, and not the victimizer, to change.

It is therefore alarming to the extent that so-called “helping” professionals base their methods not upon provable truths but on unquestioned moralism, and specifically, on the underlying assumption that there is something wrong and unhealthy about challenging or confronting one’s abuse and abusers. In this approach, there seems to be endless room for “reconciliation” and “forgiveness”, but just so much time and space allowed for the naming of the full and terrible truth.

More people than I care to remember have told me how their counselors have told them that healing is only possible by moving beyond their past, and learning to accept the injustices and betrayals done to them. They are told over and over that they are somehow damaging or belittling themselves by not forgiving those who harmed them.

In the case of aboriginal survivors of Christian genocide, such a charade of “healing” is an obvious political maneuver by government and church-paid therapists to sideline and prevent lawsuits and even more hazardous responses of the survivors. But the argument is the same, for white or native refugees from childhood rape and torture: the abuser is not responsible for changing, and must ultimately be appeased and placated by being forgiven.

The fact that this attitude is so universal, and that the capacity to “forgive” their torturers is held up as some sort of qualifying morality test for victims, suggests that it arises from something very basic, which I suggest is the collective, fearful memory of parental retaliation: a fear that gives rise to our entire structure of personal and societal morality in western culture.

In a nutshell, that morality states that goodness consists of respecting and obeying constituted authority and one’s elders. By definition, one cannot be “abused” by those in such authority because they are superior to us, and thus, incapable of being in error in relation to us.

The template of such elite-worshiping morality, of course, is the Biblical message that a “rebellious” humanity and all of creation is being punished by an all-wise father-figure “god” because his instructions were disobeyed by our ancestors. Yet the same punishing deity offers us a way back into his graces if we will return to our original unthinking state of obedience through our blind faith in his son Christ – and in those who claim to “represent” him. If we reject this one-time offer, however, we are damned for eternity as amoral and evil people.

In this Christian paradigm, we are all inherently lost and sick souls, but we can become “moral” and well again through obedience to those powerful and threatening figures who know better than us. In short, morality and well being means unflagging obedience and conformity to the very power that harms and endangers us.

To kiss the hand that strikes you makes no sense, at the best of times. But the absolute mandate to do precisely that pervades all of our thinking and social practice, however subtly it is disguised or elaborately it is rationalized. And so it is hardly surprising that the pressure to conform to the unchallengeable interests of authority figures determines virtually every aspect of our lives, from religion to political activism to social and family relationships.

By this scheme, humanity is divided into the dominators and the subjugated. In our western religious-philosophical tradition, one cannot envision anything – and in fact, nothing is allowed to operate in any substantial way – outside the bipolar dynamic between the dominator (abuser) personality and the accommodator (the abused).

Even if we somehow disregard the fact that this is the prevailing paradigm of western culture, it remains a common and lingering belief that we must personally forgive a wrong done to us if we are to avoid a crippling resentment and thirst for revenge.

This attitude is especially prevalent in Christian circles, where it’s sanctimoniously espoused that “I forgive not for the sake of another, but for my own sake.” And after all, Jesus himself in various scriptures explicitly seems to condone an absolute forgiving of all those who harm us.

In reality, the word “forgiveness” in Hebrew is not an absolute moral term, but is akin to the word for “repentance”, which means to turn around and walk in a different direction. Jesus was saying, in effect, to simply not be like the person who harmed us, but rather, to be different. This is a radically different thing than saying, be reconciled with one who has harmed you. Indeed, it actually means the opposite: be separated from such a person.

Further, even on the level of the moralistic claim that “forgiving” those who trespass against us grants a psychic cleansing to us, the empirical evidence does not bear this out.

To try to forgive one’s abuser is to deny our most basic common sense and our capacity to freely express our feelings. It is to create the illusion that a wrong is somehow wiped clean by killing in oneself the desire to strike back or seek restitution for our pain.

On the contrary, it’s clear that when we forgive another person, we must not only repress our natural feelings but deny what we know is true for the sake of a supposed settlement with an abuser who invariably shows little or no remorse for his action.

In practice, such a resolution is never achieved, and yet the “forgiver” cannot recognize or acknowledge this simple fact, for he is in even deeper denial about his own condition in the wake of the pseudo-liberation imparted by his “forgiving”.

In effect, the abused person must immerse himself in a permanently dissociated mental state to convince himself that his act of “forgiveness” has both redeemed his abuse and reformed his abuser – neither of which is true.

To demand such a neurotic and dishonest condition in those who have survived abuse and torture is merely to continue that affliction under another name. And yet, paradoxically, this destructive pathology is found most strongly among those people who have suffered most severely, individually and socially, at the hands of others.

I witnessed this last year, when a strange gathering of native people assembled on Parliament Hill in Ottawa to offer to the government of Canada a so-called “Forgiveness Charter” in the name, absurdly, of every survivor of Indian residential schools.

The event was sponsored, predictably, by the very churches that ran the schools, acting through various puppet aboriginal politicians and preachers. But the rally was filled with hundreds of everyday survivors of rape and torture in the residential schools: people who sincerely believed that their unilateral “forgiving” of the government would make everything better.

The very fact that the “Charter” was addressed not to those actually responsible for the schools and their crimes – the churches themselves – spoke much of the actual deceitful and obscuring purpose of the event. Nor did the enormous pretense and travesty of pretending to forgive murderers for a crime on behalf of the silent and murdered victims who have no say in the matter seemed not to occur to anyone at the rally, or to the slavish national media that widely and uncritically reported the event.

Nevertheless, what I described earlier as the innate dread of parental retaliation that so molds our society’s notion of well being and morality was rampantly present at the Forgiveness Charter Rally. Each aboriginal speaker implored his fellow survivors of Christian terror to believe that much harder in Christianity, to love those who had harmed them, and to completely absolve both church and state for all the wrongs they had committed against native people: even the slaughter of children.

The fear in the speakers’ eyes and voices was palpable that day, as was their pitiful hope that their torturers would approve of their words, and stop their reign of terror against native people. I have seen the same look in every battered wife who is convinced that just a bit more love from her will still the blows of her husband. The hopes of the eternal victim, robbed of their own voice and ability to confront and condemn their abuser, are always the same – and are never realized.

What would a genuine healing, geared to the needs of the victims themselves, look like?

If we simply reject any moralistic view or “forgiveness imperative” in dealing with our own pain and trauma, and begin from the first and fundamental necessity of always retaining our capacity to speak freely for ourselves about who and what has caused our affliction, we can avoid the self-defeating pitfalls of silencing ourselves and burying our feelings for the sake of our abusers.

By not worrying about forgiveness, we free ourselves from any illusion about our actual condition, and retain our capacity to speak freely about what we feel and know. What I have observed in trauma healing circles, time and again, is that only when victims have reached such a stage of inner freedom can genuine recovery begin.

My fondest and most inspiring memories of such actual recovery occurred not in a healing circle at all, but at a public protest inside the sanctuary of the main Catholic cathedral in downtown Vancouver just before Easter in 2007, when aboriginal survivors of torture in Catholic residential schools held aloft their banners and signs, and spoke to the congregation of the crimes committed against them by the church.

Men and women who could not enter a catholic church or see a crucifix without becoming nauseous because of the awful memories of their torture as a child, strode bravely and calmly amidst the pews that day and handed leaflets to the dumbstruck crowd. Survivors faced down the threats of policemen and priests and stated their case to them, and then peacefully left the building amidst their own drum beat, laughter, cheers and joyful triumph.

Outside, as we all hugged and congratulated one another, a permanent cloud of despair seemed to lift from the survivors gathered there, and during the following week, not less than five of them stopped drinking and doing drugs, for the first time in many years.

What had caused this incredible healing that day was summed up by one of the victors, a native man named William Combes, when he said later on my radio program,

I thought I was going to crap out and let you all down, but then I saw you all outside and I felt the courage to walk up those steps. Then I was inside with all of you, and you all kept me safe. Just doing the right thing kept me safe. Just speaking the truth to those bastard priests and facing them down made me lose my fear of them. I wasn’t worried anymore about what they thought or might do to me. I could finally lay the blame with them and leave it there. I didn’t need to kill myself with booze anymore because the blame is theirs, the secret is all theirs now, it ain’t mine anymore.

William and the others reminded me on that glorious day that when the battered victims finally speak in their own name, they begin to heal the wrongs by making justice an actual possibility. And such justice, and the equality it breeds, always precedes any possibility of forgiveness, which is the consequence of right action, not the cause.

Standing by our own painful truth is as necessary as standing by one another – and as dangerous to a society like ours which is based on domination and abuse. In times like these, just naming what we feel and know is a subversive act, and will become more difficult to do in the face of ever-growing abuses of power and humanity.

Nevertheless, once we unite and confront that and those who are the cause of our torment, there begins to grow something even greater than healing, or forgiveness, and that is transformation.

On one of the last times I ever saw William Combes, he handed me a scrap of paper with a brief poem that read,

I looked for healing, but healing eluded me;
I sought for my God, and for love, but neither could I see.
I discovered my own battered truth, and I found all three.