Breaking Free From Pelvic Pain

I apologize for my absence last week. The end of the summer has proven to carry about as much emotion as I can handle. There has been tragedy, about which I don’t have the heart to write yet, and there has been joy. The two juxtaposed together feel incongruous to my deeply feeling heart, but in reality, it’s just the way of nature (a topic perhaps I will be able to verbalize in the coming weeks).

Today, though, I want to talk about something incredibly personal and vulnerable. If you’ve followed my blog for a while, you’ve probably heard me make reference to my sexual abuse. What I haven’t mentioned were the physical effects that abuse caused.

Vaginismus is a generalized term that doctors use to describe pain in the vagina, usually related to spasms or contraction in the vaginal wall with insertion of any object. Doctors “don’t know exactly why vaginismus happens,” as WebMD bluntly puts it, and six years ago when I first started to experience the excruciating pain associated with vaginismus whenever I tried to have sex, get a pelvic exam, wear a tampon, or even go to the bathroom, I was told that not only was the cause unknown, but so was the cure.

Basically, I was told I would live with near-constant pain all the time, and the best that I could do would be to stretch my stubbornly shut vagina with smaller objects before I had sex…if the pain wasn’t so bad as to prevent me from having sex.

Last year in April, I went in for the dreaded pelvic exam that I get every year. It was also the year that I had to get my merena replaced, and what was supposed to be a “painless” process of removing the merena and a “mildly painful” process of inserting a new one was so excruciating that I was doped out of my mind on tranquilizers and still managed to scream loudly enough to have a sore throat later. Ripping my uterus out would have probably been less painful.

I had the procedure done at Planned Parenthood, and the gynecologist who worked with me took some time to talk to me about my pain. It was the first time any doctor had ever sat down long enough to try to understand it. She wasn’t able to do anything in that moment to make what I was there for any less painful, but she mentioned that there was a physical therapy that could help me with my pain.

Naturally, I was afraid to hope. If it were treatable, why hadn’t I been told sooner? But I let her write me a referral to a physical therapy center in my area…and then I sat on it for two months in absolute terror of what physical therapy might include.

A year ago this month, I finally went to my first appointment and began a journey that has ended Friday with some of the happiest tears I’ve ever cried. I learned that the cause of vaginismus isn’t quite as “mysterious” as other doctors would have me believe. I learned that it wasn’t all in my head due to sexual anxiety triggered by the fear of flashbacks and memories of abuse; my pelvic muscles had suffered physical trauma just as my soul had suffered emotional trauma. No amount of talking therapy was going to address the injury that had occurred to my vaginal wall when I was a child.

But pelvic floor physical therapy could.

It was awkward as all hell going in to see a woman who would stick her finger inside my vagina once a week to teach my muscles how to relax. I think I wouldn’t have been able to do the work if I had gone before last year because there’s nothing in mainstream society that teaches us that vaginal insertion and vaginal massage can be anything other than sexual. It was something I had to learn through my voracious reading of feminist and sex-positive books.

It was painful as all hell too. Initially the only way to get my muscles to release their tension was through trigger point therapy, which basically stresses the muscle until it releases from exhaustion.

And, of course, it was hard as all hell. My muscles were so used to being contracted that relaxing them took effort, concentration, and training. I had to do internal work on myself in between my appointments in order for them to be effective. And the emotional work of my therapy definitely came in. In fact, I learned that muscles often hold memories and emotions. Releasing the muscle releases a flood of things that my mind has buried.

But this week, I finally graduated from my physical therapy with the majority of my vaginal and pelvic muscles at normal tension and tone. The therapist couldn’t fix everything. There’s permanent damage in some parts of my pelvis, but for the first time in my life, I can go entire days and almost weeks without spasms. I know what pain-free sex feels like. I know how to manage my pain and release the spasms when I have them.

So on some levels, the doctors were right. I will never be entirely free from pelvic pain.

But they were so so so wrong because managing my symptoms and pain now means reminding my body how to get to a pain-free place again rather than ignoring the pain.

Why am I writing about this?

Partially because I think we need to slough off the shame of talking about pelvic health. If I were having epiphanies associated with menstruation, I’d be writing about that too.

But mostly because I know there are other women out there who have pelvic pain and vaginismus, whether because of sexual abuse, a physical accident, or anything else.

And I know that they’ve likely been told the “cause” is unknown.

And I know they probably believe there is no treatment for it.

And I want them to now know that that’s not fucking true. There’s a difference between “complicated and caused by multiple factors” and “unknown causes.” There might be some ways in which this is “incurable,” but it’s not untreatable. If doctor’s believe the unknown and untreatable bunk, it’s because women’s sexual health isn’t taken as seriously, but there are people out there who care and who focus on helping women (and some men) heal themselves.

So as the successfully former patient, I’m here to say: There’s hope.

Releasing the Kraken: Breaking Silence on Abuse

Not long ago, I broke silence with my parents about my sexual abuse. I’d been preparing for the moment of disclosure consciously for a little less than a month, but it was a move that my subconscious had been preparing for my whole life.

On many levels, the aspect of myself that I’ve been most afraid of encountering has been that little girl abandoned twenty years ago into a nightmare of silence and pain. To see her meant that whatever illusions I was clinging to about my childhood would have to be revealed for what they were. I couldn’t tell whether she or I was more afraid of losing those illusions.

But this summer, I reached a point where I no longer wanted to be silent. It was a familiar feeling similar experience to when I came out as bi—the moment of knowing that it would cost more to stay in the closet than to risk the pain of rejection from those I loved.

My Underworld Goddess, for that’s how I’ve come to see this 5-year-old me, lost her fearsomeness. I knew she held a world of pain that I would have to feel in order to reunite with her, but it no longer seemed like a punishment she was waiting to inflict on me for having left her buried for so long. There was relief, as if she’d been waiting for me to decide that she was worth more than the preservation of the “rules of engagement” I’d picked up within my church and family that “things like that” don’t get discussed.

The aftermath of breaking silence has taken me by surprise…but then again I’m not really surprised at all. I wasn’t prepared for my own loneliness. I would have thought that breaking silence would have made me feel less abandoned. And to that thought, my Underworld Goddess gives a bitters smile of knowledge beyond a child’s years.

Of course I feel abandoned. The real question was never whether my mom knew about my abuse or not. The real question is, How does a five year old child get slapped with that kind of secret pain and no one sees?

I could answer that question academically, speaking about power dynamics, authoritarian/patriarchal cultures, unspoken rules of a cult, confirmation biases, etc. etc. etc., but it doesn’t really answer the question.

I doubt there is an answer that would help a five year old understand how something that shattered her world couldn’t even cause a blip on the radar of others.

I’m terrified of being abandoned again. I say “again” because I have been terrified of being abandoned so many times before. It’s one of those fears that hasn’t always made sense, striking while I’m surrounded by dear friends or in the arms of my partner. However illogical it is doesn’t matter, for it’s primal, a lesson I had ingrained in me so well that I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to unlearn it.

“Once they get what they want, they won’t love you anymore.” “Once you speak the truth, they won’t love you anymore.”

Did someone ever say those words explicitly to me? Not that I can remember. But children are experts on picking up on what’s left unsaid, especially in abuse.

I say “again” also because I realize that in all of the abandonment I have experienced, it was the moment of abandoning myself that hurt the most. I don’t think I could have broken silence before now without it actually hurting my healing more than helping it. But there’s a part of me that realizes how absurdly long it took me to stand up for myself—to face my Underworld Goddess. Now that I’ve done what she asked me to do, I wonder, “What next?”

I get no answer, and that is where my greatest pain lies. My fear of abandonment comes to rest at its root. Twenty years of grief have finally been set free, but the child of grief is nowhere to be found. I have accumulated a host of archetypes within myself to whom I can turn for support in almost any given moment…except in this moment, when all I can say to myself is, “please don’t leave me here alone.”

Is Bob Jones University Covering Up Sexual Abuse…Again?

Copyright David Hayward, nakedpastor.com. Used with Permission.

Apparently Bob Jones University, the kingpin of my former cult, seems to think that ignoring sexual abuse will make it go away. At least, that’s the impression they give through the termination of their contract with the ombudsmen whom they hired last year to do an independent investigation of their past handling of sexual abuse cases.

I have to say that I’m not surprised they would backpedal shortly before the investigative team at G.R.A.C.E. released their findings. It wasn’t a smart PR move for a cult to bring an outsider in for such an in-depth review of their policies and was bound to backfire on one level or another, but I’m sure they didn’t feel they had many other options after the incidents that Dr. Lewis details in her post here, which included the student-led protest to remove a board member who had covered up a rape in his former church fifteen years ago and the vocal concerns of alumni over the questionable sexual abuse policy in BJU’s employee handbook.

Perhaps BJU hoped that a year later people would have forgotten their reasons for wanting an independent investigation…or perhaps the cult just underestimated the amount of shit that the investigation team would be able to uncover…regardless, BJU sent a termination request to G.R.A.C.E. this past week.

As I said, I’m not surprised, but I am outraged and grief-stricken.

I knew so many dear friends who had gone through horrendous pain to tell their story in interviews this past year, reliving their pain in the hopes that they might finally get the acknowledgement of the injustice of the way their trauma was handled. Now, I watch them grapple with the disappointment and devastation of having been silenced once again.

It’s downright heartless to encourage victims to speak of their abuses with promises that they will be heard, only to shut them down again and again—but it’s a tactic that the IFB loves to use.

Because they think they can break victims that way.

Because they think they can control the flow of information.

Because they think they can get away with it.

But they’re wrong.

Once upon a time, Bob Jones University might have been able to keep survivors’ stories under wraps. They might have been able to scatter and divide survivors, as good as erasing them from existence.

But they can’t do that anymore. Survivors have found each other, and through that, they’ve found their voices. They’ve discovered they have power and strength together. They’re not alone. They’re not without hope. And they’re not at the mercy of the cult anymore.

BJU has been allowed to get away with their abuses and control tactics for so long that it’s easy to believe they will continue to be able to get away with them, but the Internet is changing things. Survivors have been figuring out how to speak out over the last few years and finally–FINALLY–people are starting to listen.

Progressive Christian blogs like Naked Pastor and John Shore are spreading awareness. The media, both local and national (and many more than I can link to. Google it and see), is starting to report. And here’s the real kicker: for once, survivors aren’t going to shut up just because the cult refuses to listen.

They can keep playing the same games they’ve always played, but there’s an audience now. Their own precious image was the cost of this little cover-up. For once, even people within the Independent Fundamental Baptist Cult might think twice about sending their kids to BJU.

You can paint a skunk white, but you can’t hide hide the smell. Sooner or later, the world will see BJU for what it really is, and the survivors will be leading the charge to tear down the gates.

“And whoever receives one such child in My name receives Me; but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to stumble, it would be better for him to have a heavy millstone hung around his neck, and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.” Matthew 18: 5-6

If Virginity is a Myth, Then What Did He Take From Me?

Trigger Warning (obviously): Discussion of sexual abuse and purity culture. I promise I’ll have something a little lighter the next few weeks. 

Purity culture taught me that my virginity was the greatest gift I could give my husband. It taught me that losing virginity made me discardable—like used gum or dirty water. It taught me that my value lay in my purity.

Purity culture also taught me that I was responsible for men’s sexual thoughts and actions towards me. It taught me that I could prevent rape by being pure—and if I was raped, it was better for me to die than to live with my tainted purity.

When I rejected purity culture years ago, I also rejected the concepts of virginity, purity, and sexual innocence along with it. I needed to in order to begin to come to terms with my sexual abuse. I needed to be able to believe that they were just constructs—myths—in order to slough off the guilt and self-hatred that I felt over having been violated.

More recently, I’ve been trying to give myself space to access some of the deeper veins of my grief around my sexual abuse. But I found I can only name that grief with the very constructs I rejected.

Innocence. Purity. Virginity.

Certainly the innocence I was taught I’d lost is not the innocence I grieve. Feminism has done its job. I do not feel culpable in any way for what happened to me.

But there’s a different kind of innocence whose loss I feel intensely.

I’ve come to think of it as the Peter Pan innocence.

It’s what I lost when I was forced into an awareness of sexuality—a violent understanding of affection and love—at an age when I could barely understand that some people had different body parts from others.

It’s the innocence that allowed me to believe that those who claimed to love me were safe, the innocence that gave me a sense of autonomy and belonging to my body, the innocence that assured me that monsters were make-believe and nightmares weren’t true. And it was ripped away from me when I was five years old, leaving in its place a shattered little girl who convinced herself that she was bad in order to continue to believe that her spiritual leaders were good.

And just as I know that I’m not responsible for what my abuser did, I also know I’m not bad because of what he did. But the purity that I lost has nothing to do with good or bad.

It’s the purity of separation.

There are days when I feel like I carry my abuser with me wherever I go, like an invisible residue. No amount of assuring me that I’m not dirty is going to take that feeling away because the “dirty” doesn’t stem from me. It’s his dirt, his perversion. I know that, but I’m still tortured by the visceral sensations.

Sometimes it feels like I share my marriage with him—the unwanted third-party who lurks in the corner waiting for an opportunity to pop out again and remind me that my first sexual encounter was traumatizing and invasive. The beauty of consensual sex—that amazing experience of soul-sharing—is so easily interrupted by flashbacks, as if my abuser can walk into our bedroom and whisk me away to my childhood whenever he wants.

It tears me up that he was the one who stole my virginity. I don’t give a rat’s ass about the value judgments society tries to place on being a virgin or not being a virgin. Virginity, to me, has nothing to do with the hymen. It’s not an object. It’s just pre-sexuality, like pre-menstrual.

I envy the choice that others have to end their virginity.

Beautiful, romantic, irresponsible, silly, uninformed, embarrassing—I’d give anything for my first sexual encounter to be any of those—a stage of growing up and discovering my sexual self. By rights, I should have been able to choose when to end my virginity, where, and with whom. I’m sure I would have made mistakes, but at least they would have been mistakes from my choice.

But I didn’t get that choice. The end of my virginity was forced on me. My first sexual experience was forced on me.

It doesn’t matter that the patriarchal value of innocence, purity, and virginity is bullshit. What I lost goes deeper. It’s the loss of a childhood naivety, the loss of discovery, the loss of choice, and the loss of first times.

I can’t get those back, and to make matters worse, I find that I can’t even properly grieve them without the words that were used to blame me for their loss.

Perhaps one day I’ll be able to find a way to turn that grief and loss into something positive. Grief has always been a Phoenix process for me, and I’m sure this one will be the same. But right now, all I have are the tears, the rage, and the emptiness. All I have for myself and my readers this morning is the rawness of truth telling without any flowery ways of making it sound okay.

This is the grief I wasn’t allowed to feel when I was five.

On a Scale of 0 to 10, My Pain Is . . .

“Does that hurt?” the doctor asked me, pressing against my swollen foot.

“Yes?” I asked, then added, “No. I don’t know.”

“You’re grimacing.” She moves her hand to a different spot.

“Yeah, I think it hurts.”

Putting my foot down, she makes a note on the computer. “Has the pain worsened since it happened?”

“Maybe. I’m not sure. It comes and goes.”

This was me in the doctor’s office on Thursday as I got my foot checked out after having it hit by a baseball on Tuesday night. Thank goodness she didn’t ask me to rate my pain on a scale of 0-10 because I would have given two answers on two opposite ends.

The truth is, I have no idea how to gauge my pain. When I broke a toe in high school, I walked on it until it healed, wearing four inch heals every Sunday. I never went to the doctor, even though I could clearly see that it was misshapen.

“That’s impossible!” people have told me.

Maybe for someone who grew up in a normal environment—where belts are not considered legitimate whipping tools, where sexual abuse doesn’t lurk around church corners, and where abusive siblings don’t minimize the pain they caused after throwing you across your room by your neck.

Bur for someone who faced the possibility of pain on a daily basis, I’m not sure I could have survived if I hadn’t learned how to ignore it. I became very good at dissociating out of my body, talking myself out of my feelings, and redefining sensations as something else—as something acceptable to my various abusers.

So what happens when I suddenly don’t need the protection of a high pain tolerance?

I have to teach myself to listen to my body again.

Notice I didn’t say teach myself to feel pain again. My body, on some levels, has no problem feeling pain. It registers in my brain just fine. Sometimes it’s from current stimuli; sometimes it’s from past traumas. I feel it, but immediately my cognitive mind works to control its interference. Deep breaths, creative visualization, etc.

Like most things in life, it’s not bad in and of itself. The ability to look past pain is a good tool for pain management.

However, that’s not so good when the pain is there to tell me that something bad happened—like my foot this week, or the shin splints that notified me that I needed to adjust my running a few weeks ago, or the pulled muscle that told me I pushed myself too far in yoga last year.

In high school, I would have ignored all of those unless I simply couldn’t function—and I would have done permanent damage to my body.

I may not feel any more inclined to acknowledge the pain now. I could have muscled my way through this current injury if I were determined. I chose to go to the doctor—not because the pain was more intense than it was the last time I broke a toe, but because this time I’m committed to caring for and loving my body.

Plus I’m surrounded by people, for once, who don’t understand why the hell I wouldn’t go to the doctor if I had a question of injury, so I had lots of encouragement.

Turns out the X-ray didn’t show a fracture.

Immediately my stoic upbringing ran its familiar diatribe.  “You’re such a baby.” “You’re going to get fat.” “You’re so lazy.” “It’s not broken, so why can’t you walk?” “Is the pain really that bad?”

Apparently only broken bones serve as legitimate injuries to this “old me” that I’ve resurrected. It’s hard to make room for weakness and injury when you grew up on the motto “Pain is weakness leaving the body.”

But here’s one thing I realize now that I didn’t realize back when I could bully myself out of listening to my body:

Ignoring the pain doesn’t actually make it go away.

Ignoring the injury doesn’t heal it.

Pain is not weakness leaving the body. It’s weakness entering the body. It’s the signal that my body sends to my brain that something needs attention—something’s wrong. While there may have been times as a child when my mind needed to believe that the pain was unimportant, I’m not there anymore. I’m in a different place—a safe place—where I am responsible for listening and caring for myself, which means using crutches for a few weeks instead of trying to prove my willpower to those ghosts in my head.

 

Forgiveness is Bullshit

Please Note: I will no longer be approving comments that prescribe forgiveness to me or others or imply that we “just need to do it right.” I’ve already covered that extensively both in the main post itself and in the comments. Feel free to comment about your own personal experience (good or bad) with forgiveness, but keep your opinion about what others need to do to yourself. Thanks!

Wherever you find an intolerance for and avoidance of “negative emotion,” you are almost guaranteed to also find a “doctrine” of forgiveness. I cringe every time I hear forgiveness come up. For a while, my cringing was accompanied by guilt because I felt horrible that I would see such a “positive” action/attitude as repulsive. I could easily understand why I might feel repelled by the fundamentalist definition of forgiveness, but I didn’t understand why I was also disgusted by the more “liberal” definitions of forgiveness.

As I’ve taken the journey to reclaim my right to have my emotions, even the shadow ones, I’ve gained a bit of a better understanding of my hatred of the very idea of forgiveness.

Basically I’m here to say it’s all bullshit.

Yes, I know I’ve probably made many of you gasp and even branded myself in some minds as a “bitter person.”

That’s okay. If you don’t feel like reading on about how the idea and pressure to “forgive” can actually be harmful, you are free to stop reading here. But I guarantee there are going to be a good number of readers who sigh with relief at what I just said because, deep down, they feel that way too.

Why do I think forgiveness is bullshit? Before I answer that question, I want you to close your eyes and think about your best denotative definition for the word. Can you?

Well, let’s go over some of the popular quotes and quips about forgiveness. Then at the end, we’ll actually look at the dictionary definition and discuss that (now please don’t ruin things and look it up in the dictionary just yet).

• “Forgive and forget”: I actually got this one a lot in fundamentalism. It’s a very convenient phrase for teaching children to suppress memories and accept repeated abuse. In fact, when I, as a teen, confided to a counselor at The Wilds Christian Camp that I couldn’t “forget” about my abuse and I was having a hard time “forgiving” the abuser as a result, I was told that as long as I never talked about it to anyone ever again and pushed the thoughts about the abuse out of my head whenever they intruded, I would be able to forgive, even if I didn’t officially forget. It should be pretty easy to see why equating forgiveness with amnesia of an event is bullshit. Stupidity is not a virtue.
• “To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.” This little gem from C. S. Lewis is representative of another commonly repeated idea in fundamentalism. It doesn’t really define forgiveness, merely mandates it as a divine expectation, which can be just as bad as the definitions. I would actually classify this as spiritual/emotional abuse even without having a definition like the one above simply because of the way that such a divine mandate is wielded against the wounded to undercut their healing. It’s probably also the only idea off the top of my head that I would say Jesus should be ashamed of propogating with his “seventy times seven” statement in Matthew 18:22. . . unless of course, the translation effect fails to account for the possibility that at that time and in that period “forgiveness” wasn’t what we think of it as today.
• “True forgiveness is when you can say, ‘Thank you for that experience.’” (Oprah) Bullshit should be so easy to find in this one. I can think of several experiences that I would NEVER thank someone for, my sexual abuse being the most prominent that comes to mind. In fact, if forgiveness is really finding the ability to be thankful for what someone else did to you that hurt you, I’d have to say that I’ve never forgiven anyone who wronged me, nor do I want to.
• “Forgiveness has nothing to do with absolving a criminal of his crime. It has everything to do with relieving oneself of the burden of being a victim–letting go of the pain and transforming oneself from victim to survivor.” (C. R. Strahan) This is one that on the surface seems nicer. And there are a lot of variations on the idea of freeing or healing oneself through forgiveness. But my next question is, if forgiveness is not absolving someone, what is it? These types of phrases never give an alternative. And I’m sorry to break it to anyone who likes this definition, but it’s not in the real definition. “Absolving,” on the other hand, is. So the attempt to whitewash forgiveness into something entirely personal and not connected to the offending person is really just all BULLSHIT.
• “Forgiveness is the discovery that what you thought happened, didn’t.” (Byron Katie) Bull-fucking-shit! I actually expected better from Byron Katie. I’ve heard a lot of good things about her and was horribly disappointed to find her propagating such a stupid definition of forgiveness. It’s just another form of the amnesia prescription of forgiveness, but with an even more sinister undertone. Instead of just forgetting it happened . . . it’s actually suggesting that it didn’t happen. Yes, let’s tell a grieving parent that forgiving a drunk driver who killed their child would mean discovering that the driver didn’t actually kill their child. That doesn’t sound insensitive at all! For that matter, I’m sure there are a few spouses who might also protest at the idea that forgiveness means discovering that infidelity didn’t actually take place. In case it isn’t obvious, what Katie is describing is called a misunderstanding, and that doesn’t require forgiveness, merely clarification.

But what about the real definition? Okay, here you go. According to Dictionary.com, forgiveness is:

1. to grant pardon for or remission of (an offense, debt, etc.); absolve.
2. to give up all claim on account of; remit (a debt, obligation, etc.).
3. to grant pardon to (a person).
4. to cease to feel resentment against: to forgive one’s enemies.
5. to cancel an indebtedness or liability of: to forgive the interest owed on a loan.

The definition and connotation of forgiveness is all about the other person—the person who wronged you—and setting them free, absolving them, letting them off the hook, ceasing to feel anger (or bitterness or whatever the new demonized emotion is) towards that person.

I’m here to cry bullshit on the whole charade.

Forgiveness isn’t necessary for healing.

Forgiveness is not necessary to “move on.”

It’s not even necessary in order to feel compassion or love for someone.

It’s not necessarily healthy.

In fact, more often than not, in the instances when forgiveness is prescribed (severe betrayal, severe hurt/abuse, severe tragedy, severe trauma), it’s actually harmful to the person needing to heal. There’s a reason why anger is listed as one of the main steps in grief—it’s important! Getting angry, feeling sad, holding someone else accountable, they’re all part of “moving on.”

What does a statement like “you just need to forgive” do? It heaps more guilt on the person who is experiencing those emotions—those necessary emotions—by making them feel like they’re wrong or unhealthy or weak for experiencing them. In other words, it’s blaming the victim, encouraging them to ignore their own needs and cater to another person’s desires.

It denies the mind’s natural way of healing itself.

You don’t get past the anger by suppressing it. You don’t move through grief by denying it. The only way to get through those difficult aspects of healing is by claiming the right to feel them.

And the only reason why forgiveness sounds so “positive” to us is because we have this fucking stigma about the shadow emotions being “negative” (which I discussed briefly here). We as a society don’t know how to handle those intense emotions, so we distance ourselves from them. And when someone else is experiencing them, we prescribe “forgiveness” as the fix-all that allows us to sound helpful without actually doing anything to help. If we move past the idea that shadow emotions are negative, suddenly the need to forgive by letting go of those emotions is non-existent, along with the need to distance ourselves from those emotions.

Does forgiveness ever have a place?

Maybe.

I’m an open-minded person and willing to consider that forgiveness really does have a legitimate purpose somewhere buried underneath all the bullshit–that it can potentially be a healthy  byproduct of healing in some circumstances. But I’d be more than willing to bet that, in those instances, the forgiveness happens fairly naturally.

In the instances where the hurt is bigger and the problems larger, i.e. whenever forgiveness takes up focus, it should be up to the individual to decide if that is something they need or even want.  It should be up to the individual to decide if the relationship is worth the work of restoration or if it’s safe to continue with that relationship. Moreover, it shouldn’t ever be the goal. Healing should be the goal, whether or not it includes forgiveness.

And without a genuine apology for the pain and damage caused and change to avoid repeating it, I don’t think forgiveness is either possible or healthy. Healing comes in those instances by learning to set boundaries, take a stand for your own needs, and hold the other person culpable for their actions, not by giving a blank check to someone who repeatedly hurts you.

I think it’s high time we forgive ourselves this absurd expectation that we should always forgive. It’s time to allow ourselves to recognize that healing isn’t about forgiving the other person; it’s about listening to ourselves.