The Process of Forgiveness: One of the Hardest Things to Do on Earth
To my dear Friends whose love of other people leads you to persist in your demand for social change and our current social uproar: Bless your heart. Hang in there.
In the 1960’s and 70s we knew what was needed for social change was to be able to bring about an actually agreed upon reconstruction of a new kind of order, but we didn’t know at all how hard it is to do such a thing at the depth required. We have learned over 50 years that we have to do the damned near impossible to actually modify human structural malice and greed and nurture authentic caring for our enemies and build structures and agreements and teaching that maintain it.
I love you for your glorious leadership through trials and failure. And someday soon, we can see it is possible, we can be free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty we’ll maybe be able to be free at last. Shit! Who put that God damned maybe in there?
My lifetime of being a racially privileged de-segregation and anti-war social activist, a group and family and couples psychotherapist, and a writer is flashing before my eyes and heart. The writer Ennio Flaiano in Italia said “there are two kinds of fascists: fascists and anti-fascists.” The news all over the United States these days is full of anti-fascists and fascists fighting each other demanding different brands of social change.
Forgiveness
The hardest part for people to get in psychotherapy and in social change is the same. You cannot bring about social change without a process. That process is called forgiveness. And it is one of the hardest God damned things to do on earth. To forgive you must be furious and then get over it, heartbroken and then cry tears of joy, be filled with love and have it turn to romanticism and tearful failure, and then a more foundational love. (Did I mention that it’s fucking hard to do?)
Here’s how you do it. Starting about 125 years ago, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung and many others invented psychoanalysis and individual and group psychotherapy. We can’t go into the detailed history here but here is the essence of what got refined from that net 125 years: What you resist, persists. (unfortunately, that is true, God dammit.)
The Process
You must acknowledge and share and express and demonstrate your anger, one picky little dipshit picky little judgmental mindfuck at a time about how you can’t depend on these untrustworthy motherfuckers who surround you not to break their word and break your heart. Fuck them! Good. That’s step one.
Step two you employ your attention to how you pay attention, rather than to your thoughts. When you experience and experience it comes and goes. When you resist experiencing an experience it persists. If you then observe and re-connect to, and attend to, and don’t interfere with your experience, the sensations in your body change and your feelings change about the very persons who violated your expectations and requirements. That is the beginning of forgiveness. That is what we teach people how to do. That is what the world is learning. That is why the world is coming to us. Come on if you like.
Love, Brad Blanton
Brad Blanton, PhD is the author of the best selling book, Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth, and is the founder of Radical Honesty Enterprises.