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Forgiving Is Like Giving Birth (Without The Epidural)

Monday, August 25, 2014 16:45

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(Before It's News)

By Elzbieta Pettingill

Guest Writer for Wake Up World

Forgiveness is a concept that it’s really hard to understand, unless experienced first hand. I’ve struggled with it for a very long time, before I was able to fully understand what it means to forgive, why it’s so important that we do forgive all the wrong doings, and how to apply this incredibly healing tool in our lives.

I used to ask myself: “How can I forgive when it hurts so much???” I thought it was simply impossible to forgive all the pain and suffering I had to endure, especially in my childhood.

When I finally understood that the only way to free myself from such pain is through forgiveness, my perspective changed entirely. It became obvious to me that the question “How can I forgive when it hurts so much?” was out of context. The more accurate question was: “How could I not forgive when it hurts so much?” The moment I understood that forgiveness was the only way to heal, was the moment when I realized that, if I didn’t want to keep experiencing the pain, I really had no choice but to forgive.

From all the pain I’ve experienced - rape, abuse, depression - the rejection hurt the most. And of course, it was the hardest to forgive. As they say, hatred is not the opposite of love – indifference is. Feeling unnoticed, unrecognized, ignored and completely neglected is a feeling that I would not wish upon my worst enemy. Not surprisingly, such emotions were the main reasons that were hiding behind my several suicide attempts.

Breaking Through Denial

For a very long time (several decades, to be more specific) I was in complete denial about the resentment I was holding toward my mother. I had too much respect and too much admiration towards the woman that gave birth to me to allow myself to see her as a human being. Typical of a child, in my eyes my mother was nothing else but a faultless replica of God himself. She did earn my admiration in many ways, I won’t dispute that. She raised nine children, working full time, while not only financially struggling but living with an abusive husband as well. She seemed to possess the strength that not many people had. But she was not without her faults.

Her strength did not come to her for free. It had its price. The saddest part was that her children (myself included), whom she loved so much (and still does) were always the ones picking up the ‘tab’. My mother’s strength (and in other words, her love) did not come entirely from within herself, it came from those around her. She was born as an “illegitimate” child, and as such (in those still very primitive times) she was viewed as a burden by her own mother; the symbol of embarrassment and shame. Her father, (my grandfather) still remains unknown to me to this very day. There is no doubt that her childhood was anything but “a walk in the park”, and those feelings manifested in her adult life – and in my childhood.

Unfortunately my mother did not have the understanding that I have now. She didn’t understand that, in order to be able to show love to her own children the way they deserved - and the way she wanted - she had to find that love within herself first, and the only way she could have done that was if she forgave her own parents for neglecting her the way they did – and finally released that energy.

So my mother searched for that love and acceptance outside of herself. She became fascinated with religion and the Church. In fact she became obsessed with it. Her daily attendance at mass (sometimes even twice a day) gave her a temporary high, which she interpreted as a sense of belonging. But I believe she mistook that as a source of her inner strength. As time went on, her ‘addiction’ to Church became so strong and so overwhelming that she wasn’t able to see the sense of abandonment I felt every evening as a child, while waiting for her to come home. Blinded, she put herself and her children in a risky situation (just being home without her meant we risked being beaten up by her spouse) and we were understandably infuriated by her constant absence.