{"id":7770,"date":"2023-06-17T14:26:37","date_gmt":"2023-06-17T18:26:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=7770"},"modified":"2023-06-17T14:26:37","modified_gmt":"2023-06-17T18:26:37","slug":"forgiveness-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=7770","title":{"rendered":"Forgiveness"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have been\u00a0reading Christina Baldwin’s book called Life’s Companion; Journal Writing as a Spiritual Quest<\/a>. \u00a0<\/span>In the chapter on Forgiveness she describes what happens to people who refuse to forgive, and what happens to people who are not forgiven.\u00a0 <\/span>I was surprised and then validated by the descriptions.<\/p>\n

from Life\u2019s Companion, p197<\/p>\n

When you will not forgive someone, you fill your life with resentment, paranoia, isolation, righteous indignation, vindictiveness, and false assurance that your perceptions and actions are justified because of the wrong that has been done you.You withhold yourself from human community because you perceive, or at least hope, you are not as imperfect as the rest of us and you don\u2019t want to associate too closely with our unforgivable flaws.<\/em><\/p>\n

When you are unforgiven, your life is filled with recrimination, self-abuse, isolation, fear of further accusation, shame that you have done something considered unforgivable.You withhold yourself from human community because you perceive, or are afraid, that you are more imperfect than the rest of us and that you can never make enough amends to be a fully acceptable member of the human family again.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The first paragraph is a good description of my mother. I remember once reading the words “resentment and self-pity” and realizing they were an exact description of her.<\/p>\n

I didn’t realize that she never forgave me until I saw the movie Mommie Dearest<\/a>. Here’s what I wrote in 2011<\/a>:<\/p>\n

My mother did not know how to forgive, and so I learned that I was unforgivable.\u00a0 If I did something \u201cwrong\u201d there was no way I could make amends.\u00a0 This resulted in some odd behavior that I see as shameful now \u2014 an example: I lost my cousin\u2019s bike and never apologized or offered to buy her a new one.\u00a0 I went into denial about the whole thing, disappeared it, made it not happen.\u00a0 It was only much later that I remembered several such incidents, and I fear there are more that I\u2019ve completely forgotten.\u00a0 I was so ashamed that I could barely look at them, much less try to make amends.\u00a0 Then I saw the movie \u201cMommie, Dearest\u201d where Joan Crawford\u2019s daughter apologizes for waking her during her afternoon nap.\u00a0 Crawford doesn\u2019t say \u201cThat\u2019s all right, I still love you, you\u2019re forgiven,\u201d she says harshly \u201cWell just don\u2019t do it again.\u201d Lights went on for me.\u00a0 I realized that when apology was unacceptable, there was no \u201cright\u201d action but not to have done it in the first place.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I also wrote a description of how I didn’t want to be if I was ever a mother. I had noticed that Mother seemed to hold a grudge forever, and decided firmly that I didn’t want to do that.<\/p>\n

The description of the person who is never forgiven exactly describes what I have been up against all these years. I think of my need to “prove I deserve to live<\/a>.” I think of my feeling of being defective all my life until \u00a0I learned about Children of Alcoholics, and realized I had learned dysfunctional behavior from a pair of alcoholics. But the feeling of being defective is a kind of default that I can easily fall back into.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have been\u00a0reading Christina Baldwin’s book called Life’s Companion; Journal Writing as a Spiritual Quest. \u00a0In the chapter on Forgiveness she describes what happens to people who refuse to forgive, and what happens to people who are not forgiven.\u00a0 I … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,5,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7770","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-guidance","category-healing","category-present-day"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7770","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7770"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7770\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}