Disclaimer: The opinions shared in this post have evolved through my personal experience and observation, and may not line up with your experiences and perspectives. That is OK. We each have distinct journeys.
Healing begins with honesty. Forgiveness begins with honesty. See it, name it, and grieve.
How can a person break free of harm when their overwhelmingly negative emotions continuously or intermittently engulf them? When waves of confusion and pain, shame, anger, and sadness threaten to extinguish the last flickerings of love, hope, and wellbeing? I believe that in order to escape victimhood, we must honestly confront what has been done, or what is being done to us. Factually. Even when we aren’t in a place or position to verbally express these things to the person sinning against us, or to others for validation and help, we need to be honest with ourselves. This can be a long, excruciating process, for multiple reasons.
One dynamic that makes this honesty difficult, is the need and desire to be valued. We long to be loved authentically, and acknowledging the fact that someone objectively treated us in an unloving, devaluing, or derogatory way, will force us to see ways in which that person does not value or love us. We would much rather face the assessment of these actions in the context of the other person’s loving repentance, because that would eliminate the pain of feeling unloved or hated. Because of this need to know we are valued and loved, we need the offender to recant his or her harmful and/or hateful words or actions. We need them to assuage our pain by apologizing and discontinuing their harmful behavior, or to relieve our resentment and sadness by showing a heart that feels remorse for what they did. While all of these innate needs are not wrong, hinging our honesty on another person’s love and integrity could be emotionally, spiritually, and even physically deadly.
Another angle of complexity is that we may deeply love and respect the person who has caused the harm, and by avoiding to fully face the harm they have caused us, we may subconsciously think we are protecting them or protecting our relationship with them. The pain and humiliation of being disrespected or disdained by someone you respect and love can be deeply destructive, and the complex pain and remorse of realizing you can’t respect or esteem that person as you had before can be disorienting and heartbreaking.
Our understanding of morality also highly influences how we interact with sins committed against us. In the case of the person who is experiencing ongoing or past harm from another, but who is unable to acknowledge the nature of the harm, there may be an understanding of forgiveness that makes them feel morally obligated to overlook or “let go of” the sins committed against them, married to the feeling and/or belief that to bring up someone else’s sins is hypocritical or unloving. How a person defines love and forgiveness will greatly impact their interaction with another person’s sin against them. In this mindset, “forgiveness” may look like quietly tolerating another’s harmful sins against oneself, or mentally minimizing its nature and negative consequences and effects. I think that somewhere along the line, Christian niceness has equated integrity and honesty, when it interacts with negative scenarios, with slander or complaining. We don’t want to slander this person to the world, we don’t want to be the complaining spouse or coworker, and we also don’t want to be the person slandering or complaining in our own heads! We don’t want to be unloving, unforgiving hypocrites! Sadly, it is this honesty about negative behaviors and attitudes that leads to healing and forgiveness. I am not advocating for gossip at all, and I think you, my readers, know that.
Christ explicitly addresses the issue of forgiveness. He directly calls His followers to forgive those who sin against them, and to love their neighbors as themselves- I am not denying this. I am not saying that a person shouldn’t or can’t forgive until the person who harmed them repents. What I am getting at is that a person cannot truly forgive an offender their offense if said person has not truly recognized and acknowledged the offense. They can quietly endure offenses, they can “forgive and forget,” but I think that in cases where the harm was deep and/or ongoing, these tactics are dishonest and ultimately counterproductive. If we neglect to honestly address deep and ongoing harm experienced at the hands of another, we may very well end up binding their sin within ourselves so tightly that we eventually have difficulty distinguishing the offender from the negative feelings their harmful actions are stirring up in our bodies, or we may become so entangled in anger and resentment that we lose ourselves in emotions whose ongoing natures damage us even more deeply than the original harm.
Jesus called us to forgive real offenses. I think the calling to forgiveness is a calling of freedom for the victimized and oppressed, one that does not depend on the cooperation of the offender, but if our understanding of forgiveness is categorized by excusing or denying the harmfulness or inappropriateness of a person’s sinful actions against us, we will be incapable of experiencing the healing forgiveness spoken of in the Bible.
There is so much more that could be discussed in relation to victimhood and all the nuances surrounding it. To summarize the last few posts and any remaining thoughts on the subject that are currently zipping around in my head, I will leave these notes:
If someone wants to escape the sickening grip of victimhood, the victim cannot wait for the person who is sinning against them to repent or take restorative action. This would be like hinging your physical recovery from a virus on the source of the disease.
In order to escape victimhood, the victim should be honest about the sin that is taking place, and should take time to properly grieve the nuances of how that sin has harmed or is harming them. During this process of acknowledging and grieving, the victim should take time to extricate their personal identity, conscience, and value from the emotions and memories of the harm. It would probably also be helpful to acknowledge and grieve how those sins and sin patterns have harmed the person sinning against them, and how even the perpetrator has value apart from their sin. This should be acknowledged, but not in a way that justifies or excuses the sin.
Victimhood is real. The unseen bondage of silent, psychologically and/or physically harmful and spiritually deadly victimhood is way more prevalent amongst Christians than we like to think.
We cannot truly help people love and heal well in the context of real life relationships if we do not encourage honesty, allow people the freedom to feel and recognize unpleasant feelings and experiences, or give people the space to grieve and untangle themselves from the negativity, pain, and shame they have internalized.
Showing partiality to people who are sinning against others, or diminishing the sinful reality of harmful relationship patterns, keeps victims psychologically, physically and spiritually bound in harmful situations. Bad theology morally incapacitates victims and perpetrators from experiencing the freedom of spiritual healing and true forgiveness. It unhinges the integrity of their consciences, and barricades the way to love.
In closing, remember that Christ is our source of life. The sins I have been harmed by, and the sins I have perpetrated on others are beyond counting at this point. I have wounded, and I have been wounded. While there is shame and grief bound up in my processing of these things, I do believe that our Savior is one who sees and loves each one of us. On the cross He showed us that he does not tolerate our prideful, oppressive, hateful behavior, that He knows our brokenness, sorrow, and distress, that He grieves these realities, and that He will do whatever it takes to redeem us. In the resurrection He showed us that there is hope for a new, unbroken life with Him and with one another. Throughout His entire word, God recounts again and again, through the narrative of His people, that He deeply loves us and fully intends to heal and restore those who are broken and tangled up. This is what it means to be a child of God.
So sweet and sour!