Someone tells about an injury, maybe about a father who was never there, about a friend who dropped one when it got serious, about a person who took life and thus left a wound that never completely closes, and hardly the sentence is spoken to at the end, she already comes, almost reflexive.

"You have to learn to forgive, otherwise you will never be free.

Perhaps the sentence was in a reel that just wandered through the social networks, perhaps he came from a spiritual counselor who actually meant it well, maybe an aunt told him at family dinner, with the best of all intentions, the content is almost always the same. Forgiving is made a condition for someone to go well again, and who has not yet forgiven, apparently still lacks a step on the way to himself.

And somewhere in the chest, something is coming together, no loud frightening, rather a quiet sting, because the phrase hits something you have already thought, in the middle of the night when the pain is still there, persistently, and the question fades in, what is not true with one.

Where it comes from

Therapeutic concepts are complex, they need time, context, sometimes years, and social media rarely has room for it, so what remains if you press something on postcard size, a set that shares well because it listens well. This will result in a kind of checklist, a check that has to be set to allow the next step.

In doing so, forgiveness is not the problem. The problem is what is made of it when a possible result becomes a duty if a process that sometimes takes years or is never completely completed should suddenly apply immediately, is best done properly and without further circumstances cleared out of the way.

What is lost

If forgiveness becomes a compulsory exercise, a person learns something definite, namely to skip his own injury before being properly looked at at at at all, as if it were obviously not important enough to stay with him for longer. Working becomes more important than feeling, and the wound is quickly connected without someone really seeing how deep it reaches.

This is not only evident in the big, obvious injuries. It is manifested in family dynamics that have existed for decades, in relationships that are broken, in loss of any kind, whether by death, by separation or by the slow disintegration of people who were once close, and wherever someone is forced to surrender early, the same silent message arises that their own violation is less important than the peace that is to be made by forgiveness.

It often looks like someone sits on the phone and says it's okay, though nothing's okay. That someone smiles at the family party next to the man who hurt him most, thinking that I should be over it long ago. The smile is really meant, and yet there is something that was never asked if it was ready at all.

The distinction that lacks

Forgiving can be at the end of one's own process, it can adjust, sometimes after a long time, sometimes never, and both are all right. What is not right is the idea that forgiveness is the ticket to be here again, instead of a possible station on this way.

From acceptance and commitment therapy we know a distinction that makes it much clearer here what it is about. To assume that it has happened is something different than to say good. I can accept that my brother has taken his life, and that does not mean forgive and forget. Acceptance does not take its meaning and does not end its own pain, it rather opens a space where one can grow, or, as it is called therapeutically, to realistically classify and integrate the events.

The same trap in understanding

What applies to forgiveness is almost the same for understanding. If you explain why your father was so, why she did it, then you can let go, then it says, and here too a silent equation seems that who understands, must somehow also say good, otherwise understanding would have missed his purpose.

It's a bust. I can very accurately understand what one's own story has been hurting, and still remain in order, because understanding explains a process, it doesn't evaluate it. Whoever mixes both demands something dangerous for himself, namely that his own perception of the injury is corrected as soon as a motif becomes visible, and that does not take a step further, but suppresses his own experience a second time, only this time dressed with psychological vocabulary.

What is allowed

Taking into account what has happened and taking seriously how it has felt and still feels to stay at its own pace, even if the environment makes pressure to be faster, because some injuries want to be seen first, completely and without beautification, before anything can happen to them, also giving.

This includes, above all, one that is often skipped to honestly perceive one's own pain as what he is to acknowledge that something has done with one and that it still does. Pronounce this is rarely easy, it often conflicts with a loyalty that we feel towards the person who has hurt us, and this loyalty does not disappear simply because someone has hurt us. That's what makes it so difficult to accept your own pain.

Sometimes it sounds like that in a sentence that falls in practice. I've long since forgiven her, why is it still so painful when I hear her name. There is no contradiction, forgiveness and pain do not come out, both may exist side by side, without one making the other invalid.

Because actually it's never really about giving, it's about the wound that was beaten. Forgiving is only the word we use because it sounds more grasping than the actual process, namely listening to what is painful in one, still, perhaps forever. Who only focuses on giving, looks past the wound instead of on it.

And in this process there is almost always a clarity that is not rare, even though it often does not feel that way. We are a person, and the person who has caused us pain is also one. Both may be true at the same time, their own violation and humanity of the other, without one lifting the other.

Forgiveness may be, understanding may be, both may show when the time is there, if at all, and none of them need the award as an entrance price, none of them is a duty that must be fulfilled, so that someone may be considered to be right.

Maybe it's enough today to just say it still hurts without adding in the same sentence that you're working on it soon better that you'll probably get over it soon. This one honest sentence, pronounced or silent, may stand for itself, without addition, without justification.

Sometimes the greatest step is not the forgiveness, but the permission to itself, not to be so far, or perhaps never to be, and still to be completely.