Tag Archives: trauma

Freedom Without Forgiveness

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In many religious traditions and twelve step programs, people are admonished to forgive those who have hurt them. I want to offer something for consideration from my lived experience. 

I grew up in households with five different step-fathers and numerous of my mother’s boyfriends who were all physically and/or sexually abusive. This left me with a few resentments to be sure. 

When I got sober, my first and second sponsors told me that forgiveness was not necessary for me to find freedom from the resentments that stemmed from the complex trauma of my youth. However, to remain sober and to have a happy life, I would need to find freedom from being consumed by those resentments and to let go of any thoughts of retaliation. 

For me that process was many years in the making but consisted of a few action steps. First I had to understand how my experiences had impacted me. I talked with a therapist who helped me understand how my emotional reactions and coping mechanisms stemmed largely from my childhood experiences. For example, I had learned to try to appease my abusers and continued to try to use that strategy as an adult. I had learned to dissociate so I wouldn’t have to bear the full emotional brunt of the experiences. I had continued that as an adult through the use of psychological mechanisms as well as drugs and alcohol. 

Then with my therapist and my recovery sponsor, I looked carefully at how those experiences were influencing my behaviors in the present. I started to learn other ways of coping. For example, I learned some self-soothing behaviors and grounding techniques to help me walk through times when I was experiencing great emotional distress. I learned to call another person in recovery or go to a recovery meeting or hike with a friend instead of turning to a drink or drug to sooth myself. 

And slowly, I worked through the anger and grief from having my childhood stolen from me. I drew a lot of angry pictures, listened to a lot of angry music, and then added more hopeful and resilient music. 

At no point did I feel the need to forgive the people who harmed me nor to try to seek out any relationship with them. Today, I am free. I am able to live happy, joyous and free for the most part. Life on life’s terms happens. But I am no longer a prisoner of my past. And that freedom, for me, was not contingent upon forgiveness.

I share this for people who experienced unforgivable trauma and for those who work with or advise people who experienced such trauma. Find freedom from your past and if forgiveness is your path, great. However, it is possible to have freedom without forgiveness of the one(s) who harmed you.

Why It Takes Time to Heal

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“Why can’t you just get over it?”

“It happened so long ago, quit hanging on to it!”

“Aren’t you through with that yet?” 

These are all things that have been said to me when I have been open about my mental health struggles related to the abuse and terror I suffered as a child. I don’t think people meant to be harmful, though they were, but instead I think that people who haven’t lived through trauma just don’t understand the long term effects. 

To educate people, I share about a groundbreaking study conducted in the mid 1990s that has generated a mountain of follow up research confirming its findings. 

Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) were first studied by Kaiser Permanente from 1995 to 1997. Over 17,000 Health Maintenance Organization members from Southern California received physical exams and completed confidential surveys regarding their childhood experiences with child abuse and neglect, household challenges, and other socio-behavioral factors. The surveys also asked about current health status and behaviors.

The study found that ACEs are common across all populations. Almost two-thirds of study participants reported at least one ACE, and more than one in five reported three or more ACEs.

The ACE score is the total sum of the different categories of ACEs reported by participants. Study findings showed that as the number of ACEs increases so does the risk for negative outcomes in academics, occupation, income, substance use, physical and mental health outcomes.

More information can be found in the original study “Relationship of Childhood Abuse and Household Dysfunction to Many of the Leading Causes of Death in Adults,”.

Another resource I share is the book Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation by Dan Siegel. It it Siegel explains how trauma alters the construction of neural networks in the brain. The amygdala, the brain’s danger warning center, can get paired with stimuli present during traumatic experiences. Later, when those stimuli are present even in neutral contexts, the amygdala sets of an alarm and a cascade of chemicals stimulate a fear based response. And the more the stimuli were paired with traumatic situations, the stronger the association and the faster the automatic response. This is how a seemingly harmless sight, smell, taste, or touch can trigger a fear based response that seems out of proportion.

These two pieces of science have helped me understand myself and why I have some of the reactions that I do. It helped me to have more compassion for myself regarding flashbacks, intrusive memories, and aversions to seemingly neutral stimuli. Therapy has helped me find ways to deal with those things.

While I am responsible for the choices I make regarding how to cope, it is not my fault that I’m not completely over trauma experienced in childhood as if it never happened. Some wounds get in too early and go too deep to ever completely go away. I am better and I cope better these days though. And, thanks to sobriety, good therapy, and an awesome support network I have a life that is abundant, rewarding, and amazingly good.

But, no…I’m not “over it yet.” And if you aren’t either, be gentle with yourself and keep working along your own healing journey. 

Visibility: Not Just for Pride Month

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Pride month is coming to an end but that doesn’t mean that we should retire our pride attire. Visibility matters. As it says in the iconic flyer, Queers Read This:

Being queer is not about a right to privacy; it is about the freedom to be public, to just be who we are. It means everyday fighting oppression; homophobia, racism, misogyny, the bigotry of religious hypocrites and our own self-hatred. (We have been carefully taught to hate ourselves.)

For some people it isn’t safe to be out and visible. I want to acknowledge that reality. But it makes me feel all the more the responsibility to be out. When I wear one of my pride shirts, fly my progress pride flag at my house, or am out to my neighbor or colleague, it has the potential to shift perspectives. People come to see me as responsible, kind, funny, or as someone to whom they can relate rather than the caricature monsters or depraved that our haters portray.

And although there is much anger toward straight people in Queers Read This, I am finding more and more cisgender, heterosexual folks who embrace me and my family, who are taking actions to show their support for me and my communities. I invite more visibility from straight people. Their outness has the potential to change others’ views about us. Their outness about their support for LGBTQIA+ people will be the thing that changes outcomes at election time. They are not more important than queer folks but they are more numerous. 

Pride is protest and we desperately need protest against things like the Skrmetti decision from SCOTUS, from attacks on our right to marry the person of our choice, and from the myriad attacks being leveled at transgender people. I urge cis-het people to show their support and to be visible as allies throughout the year. I urge those of us LGBTQIA+ who can, to be visible all year long. I’ll be looking for you as I walk through my daily life.