“During holiday time a lot of people have old hurts coming up.”
Karen writes:
What is your take on forgiveness? Many authors talk about coming to a logical understanding of what happened and then preventing yourself from going back into your emotional reactions. I suspect that would not be the Focusing approach. It seems that during holiday time a lot of people have old hurts coming up, and I’d love you to say something about this.
Dear Karen:
Let’s look at the cycle. Something triggers an old hurt — perhaps needing to be in contact with a relative one can usually avoid, or memories evoked by the season.
This trigger brings up emotion…anger, resentment, agitation…along with a feeling of being burdened with it or at its mercy. “Why do I have to go through this over and over?”
And that leads to the idea that perhaps the way to be free of the burden of being thrown into emotional turmoil again and again would be to somehow let it go. The notion of “forgiveness” looks attractive. “If I could just forgive and let it go, I would not have to go through this suffering.”
It’s very understandable to not want to suffer.
But it has been my experience that forgiveness is not something that can be decided on. Forgiveness — in other words, being able to see the person who hurt you as a human being doing the best they can, and the feeling of being free of the burden of suffering — comes as a result of an inner shift. Not as the cause of the shift.
The inner shift comes as a result of Focusing: being Self-in-Presence, turning toward the part of us that is getting triggered, making a gentle contact with it, listening to its feelings. Feeling it in the body and describing precisely what it feels like. Finding your own self-compassion for the one in you that has carried this burden. This brings a shift, and that in turn brings lightness and freedom.
