Get Over It? You Can’t be Serious?

How can we give people permission to be themselves when what they’ve done has hurt us?

In a Divorce Recovery Workshop I was leading, we’d reached the stage where I’d asked each person to come up with the one thing their former spouse did that they would never be able to forgive.  Going around the room, each person would have their chance to confess their favorite private grudge.  I’d started out by confessing an incident involving Cheetos and Ping Pong and must be kept private for the sake innocent bystanders. The idea was to soften hard edges by having some fun with ourselves….that once you’ve confessed, then mooshed around, and even laughed at whatever you have a death grip on, well…the death grip loosens a bit.

We were halfway around the room and having fun topping each other’s ‘hideous, unforgivable incident’ when the woman who’s turn it was, looked me straight-on and vowed: “My husband of thirty-three years left me to marry his twenty-two-year-old secretary. I will never forgive him and if my children forgive him I will have nothing to do with them.”

Well, that was a downer.  I don’t remember how the bump in the smooth workshop road worked out, but I never quite forgot the intensity with which that woman gripped the piece of the past.  And, I’m not saying I would be right in there gripping, if I’d been in her place.  She had a right to go at life however chose.  Thirty-three years is a big piece, but it’s not now…so’s it’s still a piece.  A piece that’s over. Over.  Nothing can change it. Keeping a death grip on the bad stuff cuts off our own circulation.  And the person who did us wrong….grrr…

The Emotional Guidance System isn’t logical or even reasonable, even when it’s trying to protect us from further hurt. Yet, just maybe ‘giving other people permission to be themselves’ when they’ve hurt us is the most important time to do so.  We don’t have to agree with their choices.  We don’t have to put ourselves near them again.  But we do have to let it go. 

Next, what about family?  Surely, we don’t have to give them permission?