A single act of genuine forgiveness carries tremendous power. Holding on to injustices enslaves us to the past; forgiveness frees us from the past. We conceal feelings of anger and vengeance beneath the virtuous covering of justification to protect us from losing these feelings. Anger can be used as a defense against our deeper feelings of pain and despair. Deep resentment and anger reinforce our feelings of separateness.

Everyone has something and someone to forgive. Guilt and blame are endemic today. Negative emotions like bitterness, frustration, agitation, anguish, vengeance and resentment are all linked to our need to forgive, and yet they may be less conspicuous when everyone shares them. But in spite of our pressing need for forgiveness, we can be reluctant to truly forgive.

Sometimes we don't really want to face up to the complexities and surrender of genuine forgiveness. So we 'fake it'. Denying our feelings of blame and vengeance, we may indulge in 'fantasy forgiveness'. Pretending to forgive is a shallow by-product of superficial thinking: a virtuously intended but misdirected attempt at healing, or simply the denial of our repression.

Often spiritual seekers want to be further on in their process than they really are. Forgiveness has become one of those benchmarks of inner work that confer 'spiritual rank'. Some people practice 'quasi-spiritual forgiveness'. We are impatient to forgive before we are ready. Our spiritual journey is an earthly journey that requires firm grounding. As we develop spiritually, we deepen in our humanness. We honor our feelings without judgment, notice our thoughts without always having to follow our desires and practice awareness of ourselves and others. We should never use spiritual principles like these to hinder our personal process. Our awakening conforms to natural laws. If we try to get ahead of ourselves the results are usually disastrous. Often we want to be somewhere we are not, someone other than ourselves or in a life situation other than our own.

We may try 'wish-fulfillment forgiveness', hoping that, if we wish deeply enough, we will be able to forgive our oppressors, wipe the slate clean and live in a haze of imagined virtue, as if it never happened. Wish-fulfillment forgiveness is an attempt to bypass the process of forgiveness. But however much we wish to forgive, forgiveness is only genuinely attained through certain necessary stages of inner healing.

Alison was a client who had a problem with revenge. She had a dominating, super-critical mother. She had grown up in an atmosphere charged with hate. As a child she had fought against her mother in stand-up rows and open resentment, mirroring her mother's hate for her. Now, as a young woman, she had so deeply repressed this hatred that the inner voice of her mother had taken almost total control of her life. Nothing she ever did was good enough and she nursed an almost total sense of her own worthlessness. When she discovered this in her therapy, it came as a shock. She had read in a self-help book that we should forgive our parents, so she immediately decided to take the easy way out that the book offered. When it didn't work Alison asked me for help. I explained that there is no easy way to forgiveness, because genuine forgiveness is a matter of heart-searching and deepening. Alison's work became my reference point for the crucial stages of forgiveness in inner work. For me, she epitomized the predicament of the modern day seeker who has too much knowledge, too many 'easy ways out' and who is burdened by too much knowledge and too little wisdom. Forgiveness is a dynamic inner process which consists of a number of steps.

BLOG entry #84

This article by Richard Harvey was originally published at http://www.therapyandspirituality.com/articles/  and it is part of an ongoing retrospective series of blogs. ‘Practicing Forgiveness – Everyone Has Something or Someone to Forgive’ was first published in 2011.