Acknowledging the Past: Beginning to Forgive

Last week I started working part-time for a non-profit company whose business is to help foster self-esteem, courage, and confidence in girls.  My role is to help five teenage girls, who've been selected as scholarship candidates, write their scholarship essays.  The first priority is to get these girls comfortable with themselves and their stories.  Each of them has overcome adversity in some tremendous way and, with the help of this non-profit organization, has developed some of the necessary tools for building inner strength, optimism, charity, and all-around awesomeness.
I have worked with these girls for 8 hours, and I am already in love with them--their spirit, their passion, their beauty.  They are smart, hard-working, caring individuals who want to spend their lives making the world a better, safer place for others.

On Tuesday, I introduced an activity that was intended to help the girls understand a painful part of their past.  I asked each of them to write a letter of forgiveness to someone who had wronged or injured them.  The letter needed to be directly addressed to the person, and it needed to include the following: 1) what the person did to hurt you; 2) how it made you feel; 3) why you are writing the letter--to confront and forgive; and 4) why you forgive the person.  I said it was a letter they never had to give to the person unless they wanted to, but that whether they felt they could truly forgive at this time wasn't what was important; the important part was in releasing the pain and trying to forgive--practicing forgiveness.

All of the girls began writing without hesitation.  As I sat there pretty much staring at each of them in their vulnerability, their innocence, and their courage, I felt like I should be doing something myself.  So I began writing my own letter of forgiveness.  It started as something I would use as an example for the girls--and to show them that I wasn't asking them to do something I wasn't willing to do.  And then the program leader--the woman who hired me--started writing a letter of her own.

I wrote a letter to my biological father.  I will spare you all of the messy details, but basically I told him how much I hated him for abandoning me and my brother and for starting another family and pretending that we didn't exist.  I told him I hated him for various other ills I perceived I've suffered as a result of his neglect.  I also wrote that I forgive him for his wrongs, and his weakness.  The letter was easy to write.  I could sense two of the girls sitting across from me--they lifted their heads and put their pens down.  They were finished with their letters.  I was still scribbling away, faster now, but not because I was anxious to finish and not have the girls waiting on me; I had a lot to say, and my mind flung ideas out faster than I could capture them on paper.  I wanted to say more than I did--I hadn't realized just how much I wanted to say to him.

When all of us had finished, I proposed that we each read our letters.  I started.  I could set the example of reading the thing that had been kept a secret in the heart, and the girls would see how easy it was after all, how brave I was to share with them--people I'd practically just met, and they would happily follow suit.  I was not prepared for what happened.

As I read the letter, my voice began to shake.  I felt tears coming from...somewhere.  What was happening?  I was forty years old.  I had dealt with my childhood, and the injustices it brought.  My biological father had been dead for almost fifteen years.  I didn't cry when I heard of his death.  In fact, I'd never cried over him--not since the day he came to visit when I was nine years old and I clutched his pant leg, begging him not to leave.  And now, here I was, reading this letter--a letter he would never see--and I was an emotional mess.  I kept reading the best I could, pausing at sentences like “We needed you,” and at words like “forgive,” until I could say them.  Remembering the reasons I hated him was not as difficult as admitting them aloud.  Even more surprising was the fact that I hated him at all.  I'd spent my entire life avoiding thoughts of him, sweeping him and the mess he'd made of our family under the carpet.  I thought I'd transcended hatred, thought I had magically made a little temple of forgiveness in my heart that I never needed to acknowledge.  What I experienced in those few minutes of reading that letter to the first important man in my life was something for which I never could have prepared.

My colleague--the program director, stood up and hugged me and offered me a Kleenex.  And then an amazing thing happened.  She read her letter.  And she cried.  And then another amazing thing happened, two of the girls read their letters.  One cried; the other did not.  The two girls who did not read their letters cried.  They cried while we all read ours, and I am certain they cried because their pain was so heavy that they had to leave it on the page, as if saying the words out loud might somehow literally cause their hearts to break.  

When I designed this exercise, I thought it would be a good way for the girls to start getting comfortable with their stories so they can become effective writers about their stories.  I had no idea it would allow them to dig this deep.  And I certainly had no idea that I had any more digging to do in my own life.

Sometimes people think that their past traumas hold nothing of significance, and that what happened just goes away if they stop thinking about it.  But the truth is, we carry our injustices, our pain, and our pride with us for many years, and they become the scars that make us who we are.  To deny the scars is to deny parts of ourselves, the most important parts, the parts responsible for giving us grit, determination, strength, and resolve.  To acknowledge them is to do right by ourselves in some attempt, no matter how meager, to protect and to understand.  When we take a good, hard look at our past, we can learn to read it like a book, with all of its morals and messages, and we can learn to avoid the pitfalls and tragedies that have endangered us along the way.  Through reflection and education, we begin to see that we are capable of drawing and following a map, one that leads to happiness, success, and freedom.

One girl, in her letter, denounced her father for his sins against her mother, which included violent abuse, infidelity, and sexual disease transmission. She also raged against him, calling him “a disgusting excuse for a man,” for abandoning her.  I cried as she read her letter with the face of a stoic.  Her heart is hard, and she wears that fine mask of indomitability, an impenetrable layer of defensiveness, to protect herself.  She is worried about her scholarship essays because "it's not like [this non-profit organization] fixed everything and now I'm fine.  These problems are ongoing."   I smiled at her bold pronouncement of reality, and I assured her that she didn't need to be fixed or cured, and that certainly, if there is a cure for all the pain she's endured, she is the cure.  Only she can do the work necessary to heal.  And that is when she smiled.  And hope walked right in.