Forgiveness: Can We Will It or Does It Take Grace? II.

Warnings not to take candy from strangers don’t help most victimized children, as anyone who is paying attention knows. Because the vast majority are sexually attacked by people they know: fathers, stepfathers, uncles, older brothers, and family friends. Yet, some children are raped by strangers - even if they constitute a small percentage of the total.

Such was I. (If you’d like to read a story about it, go to Something That Happened.)

Not that I remembered, of course. In true, post-traumatic stress fashion, I buried the memory. Also in true, post-traumatic stress fashion, I acted out the physical and psychological effects in every aspect of my life. By my late twenties, those effects had given me: 1) intense insomnia – I rarely slept more than four hours a night and was often awake for days, 2) suicidal depression.

Eventually, I sought help. At first, only for sleep. Most of the counselors I saw stuck to that agenda - advising sleep aids and strategies.

None worked.

By the time I started my Ph.D., I was on my fourth or fifth counselor. Phoning her I said, “I don’t have any real problems. I just can’t sleep."

But Mrs. Julian was different. She didn’t take me at my word. “It was something about your voice,” she later told me. “I knew there was more going on.”

A few minutes into our first appointment she asked, “Do you deserve to live?” That took the lid off the worm can. I discovered I was depressed, and that given my druthers, I'd be dead.

Following my Ph.D. adviser, I moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan. This turned out to be a very good thing, because there I met Kristin Huige, and she saved my life.

For the next 6 years, I averaged thirteen hours every week in therapy: one individual appointment and two, weekly groups plus a "therapy training" weekend every month and the occasional 3-day retreat.

I worked much harder on therapy then on my Ph.D. I had to. A good day meant getting out of bed and as far as the couch. On bad days I never got up.

A large part of depression is unacknowledged anger turned against one’s self. The hardest thing in therapy was letting the little girl I had been feel and express her anger towards those who had hurt her: the man who raped her, the parents who didn’t protect her, and the society that created both.

Forgiving them was the furthest thing from my mind. I didn’t want to, saw no need to, and if anyone had suggested that I should, I would have blasted that person forwards, backwards and sideways.

Six years later, in the fall of 1988, I graduated, from therapy and the Ph.D. program – which was not exactly an accident since I would have to leave Ann Arbor to get a job.

Six years is incredibly fast for sexual abuse therapy. I used to complain to Kristy, “Why do you make me work so hard? Some people have been seeing you for decades and you just let them coast along.”

She replied, “I have to push you because when you graduate, you’ll be gone.” Then she paused, considering, “And besides, you’ll rise to the challenge. You might kick and scream, but you’ll do the work. Most others would run away.”

What gift was I given that I could take the fast track? So many go round and round, forward a bit, then back again until witting or unwitting suicide takes them - as it had my friend Ana. Were my injuries simply less severe? Or was my soul dedicated to dragging me through this thing - no matter how much the healing hurt - while theirs had reasons to stay in the injury, working it until they died?

Not that I thought it was a gift at the time. I was jealous of those whose pain swamped them enough that they could open the "back door" and leave life for good.

When I left Ann Arbor, I was on the upslope. A few years later, I emerged into a whole new country. For the first time since forever, life was good. Oh I still had problems, and was sad, lonely, hurt and frustrated. But my background, rest state was not a stinking pit of darkness. It was light.

Forgiveness was still nowhere in my mind or desire.

I knew the guy who raped me must have been an abused child himself. I still blamed him, was enraged at him, and fantasized about stomping him into a bloody pulp.

Five years passed and a funny thing happened. When my mind drifted to the guy, I felt sympathy. I was sorry he’d been hurt, although I was even sorrier he felt the need to pass his hurt on to other kids. I was still angry. It had been his act, his choice, and he was evil. It wasn’t forgiveness, but it was... Something.

A year or so later, I was snuggling on the couch with my cat when my mind wandered down the old track past thought of the guy.

By that time, I liked myself and was proud of my entire history - especially traversing the murky shadow-land of suicidal depression. I appreciated my injuries. It was better to have traveled that dark way than to have been less hurt to start with. It taught me compassion. It taught me fearlessness in the presence of other people’s pain. It taught me to listen with the "ears of my heart" - one of Benedict's prime directives.

I wanted no other children to be raped, but I was not at all sorry I had been.

That evening as my mind turned to the man who did it, I was shocked to realize there was no anger left in me. I felt as sad for the man - the hurt boy he had been and the hurt man he grew up into - as I still felt for my child self.

I thought, “If he was right here, right now, all I would want would be to hug him, to alleviate his pain.”

And so, unbidden and unexpected, I discovered forgiveness.

I was twenty-five when I started down the long, hard, dangerous road into the land of ash. By thirty, surviving and healing depression was my life’s work. I would have avoided it if I could, but it was heal or die and some part of me choose life - which meant feeling all the raw grief, hurt, fear, and anger. It meant expressing them without concern for what was “nice” or “selfless” or “good.”

I never willed forgiveness. I never choose forgiveness. I never wanted forgiveness. It just happened - after twenty years on the slow, tortuous climb into and out of the pit.

Forgiveness: It comes as a grace. Yet without preparation, there is no ground for that grace to appear. Doing your inner work - opening, facing and healing your old wounds - tills that ground. Then grace, and forgiveness, can enter.

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