Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,132

apologies can be. Are you apologizing because it makes you feel better or because it will make the other person feel better? Are you sorry for what you’ve done or are you simply trying to placate the other person who believes you should be sorry for the thing you feel completely justified in having done? Who is the apology for?

There’s a term we use in therapy: forced forgiveness. Sometimes people feel that in order to get past a trauma, they need to forgive whoever caused the damage—the parent who sexually assaulted them, the burglar who robbed their house, the gang member who killed their son. They’re told by well-meaning people that until they can forgive, they’ll hold on to the anger. Granted, for some, forgiveness can serve as a powerful release—you forgive the person who wronged you, without condoning his actions, and it allows you to move on. But too often people feel pressured to forgive and then end up believing that something’s wrong with them if they can’t quite get there—that they aren’t enlightened enough or strong enough or compassionate enough.

So what I say is this: You can have compassion without forgiving. There are many ways to move on, and pretending to feel a certain way isn’t one of them.

I once had a client named Dave who had a problematic relationship with his father. His father was, by his account, a bully—demeaning, critical, and full of himself. He had alienated both of his sons from a young age and had a distant and contentious relationship with them as adults. When his father was dying, Dave was fifty years old, married with children of his own, and he struggled with what to say at his father’s funeral. What would ring true? And then he told me that as his father lay on his deathbed, he had reached out for his son’s hand and said, out of the blue, “I wish I’d treated you better. I was a prick.”

Dave was livid—did his father expect absolution now, at the eleventh hour? The time to make repairs, he felt, was long before you left this earth, not on the eve of your departure; you don’t automatically get the gift of closure or forgiveness from a deathbed confession.

He couldn’t help himself. “I don’t forgive you,” Dave told his dad. He hated himself for saying this, regretted it the second it came out. But after all the pain his father had put him through and all the work he’d done to create a good life for himself and his family, he’d be damned if he was going to soothe his father now with a sugary lie. He’d spent his childhood lying about how he felt. Still, Dave wondered, what kind of person says this to his dying father?

Dave had started to apologize, but his father interrupted him. “I understand,” he said. “If I were you, I wouldn’t forgive me either.”

And then the strangest thing happened, Dave told me. Sitting there holding his father’s hand, Dave felt something shift. He felt, for the first time in his life, genuine compassion. Not forgiveness, but compassion. Compassion for the sad dying man who must have had his own pain. And it was that compassion that allowed Dave to speak authentically at his father’s funeral.

It was compassion, too, that helped me help Rita. I didn’t have to forgive her for what she’d done with her children. As with Dave’s father, that was up to Rita to reckon with. We may want others’ forgiveness, but that comes from a place of self-gratification; we are asking forgiveness of others to avoid the harder work of forgiving ourselves.

I thought of something Wendell had said to me after I’d listed my own regrettable missteps that I took great pleasure in punishing myself for: “How long do you think the sentence for this crime should be? A year? Five? Ten?” Many of us torture ourselves over our mistakes for decades, even after we’ve genuinely attempted to make amends. How reasonable is that sentence?

It’s true that in Rita’s case, her children’s lives were significantly affected by their parents’ failures. She and her children would always feel the pain of their shared pasts, but shouldn’t there be some redemption? Did Rita deserve to be persecuted day after day, year after year? I wanted to be realistic about the considerable scars they all bore, but I didn’t want to be Rita’s warden.

I can’t help but think about her evolving relationship with the hello-family girls next door; what