Tags
demon folk, Forgiveness, gut feel, Intuition, Kinesiology, omniscient, self-forgiveness, shouty, sociopath, wholeness
Some of y’all wrote in the comments of this post that when it comes to forgiveness, we need to forgive the action rather than the person. And I agree. But actually, I forgave my abuser quite a while ago now.
I was able to see that he was a deeply flawed and wounded person, and that his need to control things caused his desire to assault women (I wasn’t the first one he’d beaten up, I found out later). And I also know and accept that what happened wasn’t personal – none of it. What he did… he did out of his own pain.
Others commented that forgiveness is one of the hardest things to deal with. And I say abso-freaking-lutely! It really, really is.
The required forgiveness I mentioned in my last post was all about me.
I’m the one I have to forgive.
Somehow I have to find a way to stop blaming myself for not seeing him clearly enough.
I carry around a lot of blame about those things, even though I know I’m only human, that mistakes get made, and I’m not omniscient or a mind reader. I certainly don’t know everything AND particularly, I didn’t know something that I really wish I had.
I’ve rationalised and discussed it endlessly. I know the story inside out on a whole bunch of levels, too. All those people who almost automatically say “it’s not your fault” aren’t really helping. Because in some ways I really get that. I do.
But the seed of the thought remains: how come I didn’t know he was a violent and manipulative sociopath?
Generally I have a razor-sharp gut feel for the “rightness” or “wrongness” of someone in my world. Yet at the time when that particular skill really mattered, I let myself down.
Or so a very unforgiving part of me says, anyhow.
While I don’t have a 100% strike rate with my instincts, it’s right up there in the high 90% range. Mostly I listen very carefully, because those messages are always right. So… my inner debate has been about whether I just didn’t know that time (and if so, why not?!) OR if I knew and somehow ignored the red flags (blame, blame, blame!).
The other thing I have to forgive is “the past” – as a tangible thing, and something that has (from a certain perspective) been stolen from me. Stolen away years of my life. But then I ask myself, who did the stealing? Certain answers might suggest that it was me and not him. Sure, I wasn’t the one who turned my face into a bruised (and so NOT hot) mess, and I definitely had little to do with my (probably but never confirmed) cracked cheekbone that hurt for weeks and weeks afterwards.
But I was the one who didn’t get the help I needed. Who hid all of the pain as best as I could. So others couldn’t see, because heck, it was just too embarrassing. Yeah, I’m the loser who was beaten up in my own home… I couldn’t stand the pity. People looking at me as if I was weak or stupid.
It would be too raw, too hard, too much to ask when I could barely keep myself from falling apart. (Of course, if someone else told me about something like this, I would NEVER think of them that way. But it doesn’t stop my mind from telling me what I loser I was!)
After a while, I guess I did know that I needed help but I just couldn’t make myself go and get it. And I wouldn’t let anyone else close enough to see what was going on. Just like a wounded animal.
I was pretty good at the hiding all of that apparently, because lots of people, including my own family claim not to have noticed that anything was up with me. Or they simply ascribed my behaviour to other things… *shrugs* It’s impossible to say now.
Anyway. Those stories of blame are the voices of some of the nasty little demon folk I have to contend with. They like to get all shouty and geez, but they can be persistent.
The kinder, wiser, more yogic part of my being (who is doing her best to forgive the shouty demons, the parts of me that won’t forgive other parts and everything else)… she gets it, that none of it matters. That in some ways, there’s nothing to forgive.
That yogi-part is all: hey, so life hasn’t turned out the way we wanted it to. So what? There’s so much to do and learn! And while it’s meant to be easy to let things go, in the real world with it’s thousand and one inputs, sometimes it just isn’t. So, we do what we can to heal, and then go and search for happiness! Because sure, life has sucked an awful lot, but it doesn’t have to keep sucking. And yeah, it hurts that in all likelihood we’ve missed our chance at being a mother. That just blows in so many ways! Still, there are plenty of things left to do in this life…
And so on.
I called this blog “A journey from assault to wholeness” because when all this began, I felt like I was in a million little pieces scattered all over the floor. These days, I am much more whole than I used to be, AND I know my life isn’t as terrible as many others. I really do know that.
But to be very truthful, there’s only a handful of things that keep me going when those shouty demons get extra loud: the notion of transforming my life into one of service to others, practicing and teaching yoga, riding my push bike and giggles and kisses from my little nieces.
That’s all I have. They are the thoughts and experiences that actually kept me alive when I was rather seriously thinking about the alternative. And now… they help keep me focused on creating a new life for myself.
Things are better now… much better, actually. Heck, it’s all relative, right? But still, forgiving the events that sucked me into an alternate reality for so many years? And forgiving myself for allowing things to stay like that for so long?
Uhhh… that’s still a work in progress.
So thank goodness for things like kinesiology, yeah?
~Svasti
Svasti: A Journey From Assault To Wholeness 
I continue to applaud your insightful, wise, honest approach to self healing Svasti, and thank you for sharing it with us as service and inspiration. Your work with forgiveness heals and opens simultaneously. much love, Karin
Thanks Karin! From you, that’s a compliment, given how open and honest you are with your own healing process xo
I just skipped to the latest post in The Aftermath, after reading all of The Incident, because I was curious to see where you’d got to – what you were now seeing & feeling.
I had my own but different Dark Night of the Soul that happened in 2004, and it wasn’t until many years later that I was able to see that it wasn’t What Happened that created all the suffering that I went through… but the Meaning I attached to What Happened.
In retrospect, what happened (psychosis, committed to a psych ward, fiance dumped me, severely in debt blah blah blah) cracked open the shell of ego and identity I’d been hiding behind my entire ’20s. It was fucking awful when it happened, and there are many similarities I see in how I behaved post-incident and how you behaved.
Thank God for yoga and meditation! And blogs! Like you, writing online was a huge part of my healing process (although the blog I originally wrote on I took off line for various reasons about three years ago).
Those similarities I see between our journeys make me think that just writing about it is a huge service for those who follow behind. To see your story in another can help so much with understanding, and often shorten the healing process simply because we don’t have to do it all by ourselves.
I understand now why you felt shame. How your judgement of your roommate all those years ago meant that you were applying the same judgement to yourself. That you were one of those women you’d always seen as weak and pathetic.
It’s so easy to say “We do the best we can with the level of awareness we have in that moment”. Sure, it’s true, but to feel that truth in our hearts and therefore have compassion for both ourselves and other people is… something that comes in time.
Come it will.
Because you did the best you could at the time. You can never know what purpose an event might serve. You don’t know how you’ll see this time in your life five years from now, ten years from now, twenty years from now.
It happened.
After I come home, a shell of a woman, I cried – no, vomited tears – every single day for four months. Those crying sessions would sometimes last up to an hour at a time. They didn’t seem connected to any particular thought or feeling. It felt like I would never reach the bottom of this well of grief. That I would be swallowed up. I begged for mercy in my journal. Please God I can’t handle anymore, please God give me a break, please God… please.
But of course I did handle it, and eventually the tears began to slow down. One day I didn’t cry at all. Seven years on, I’m in a far different place. I don’t suffer. Yep, I’ll say that again. I don’t suffer. There’s still pain, sadness, grief… which I feel as it arises. But I don’t suffer.
I’m grateful for everything I experienced, everything I went through. And I can see that right from the get-go, I was always going to be alright. It was always going to change.
And that’s what I’ve loved about reading your website this evening. Your honesty. Your courage. Your pain. Your suffering. Your insights. Your change. Your strength. Right from the beginning of The Incident. Always your strength.
Namaste,
KL
@Kara-Leah – Thank you so much for sharing some of your story here. Yes, I’ve come a long way since I first started writing this blog. What I’ve come to suspect in recent times is that for some of us, a spiritual awakening involves an almost complete descruction of everything we thought was real. Not that it happens to everyone, but definitely for some of us seekers out there. And yes, the meaning we associate with What Happened can be hard to escape. But the escape is possible, something we have both obviously experienced in a very personal way.
Of course, that freedom doesn’t come easily and the alternate path is simply to become lost in more meaning and more suffering. And that’s where I lived for a while, until I was able to shake myself free. Now I see things quite differently and with great clarity. I doubt very much I see everything with that level of clarity still, but I’m on my way. As you are. So thanks once again for your comments here. For sharing. Because human experience – while variegated – is pretty much the same everywhere.
I’m a subscriber now to your blog and look forward to getting to know you better! xo
It’s like putting coal under pressure I guess to create diamonds 🙂
And great to meet you too!
KLx