The Forgiveness Trap

I remember an especially touching session with a client named Stephanie, whose experience illustrates some of the typical problems of premature forgiveness. Stephanie, 27, was an extremely devout born-again Christian when I met her. At age 11, Stephanie had been raped by her stepfather. He had continued to abuse her until her mother threw him out of the house (for other reasons) a year later.Over the next four years, Stephanie had been molested by several of her mother's many boyfriends. She ran away from home at 16 and became a prostitute. Seven years later, she was almost beaten to death by a client. While recovering in the hospital Stephanie met an orderly who persuaded her to visit his church. A few years later they married and had a son. She was genuinely attempting to rebulid her life. But, despite her new family and her new religion, Stephanie was miserable. She spent two years in therapy, but still she couldn't shake her intense depression. That's when she came to me.
I put Stephanie in one of my incest-victims' groups. In her first session, Stephanie assured us that she had made her peace and had forgiven both her stepfather and her cold, inadequate mother. I told her that if she wanted to get rid of her depression she might have to "unforgive" for a while, to get in touch with her anger. She insisted that she believed deeply in forgiveness, that she didn't need to get angry to get better. A fairly intense struggle developed between us, partly because I was asking her to do something painful, but also because her religious beliefs contradicted her psychological needs.
Stephanie did her work dutifully, but she refused to tap in to her rage. Little by little, however, she began to have outbursts of anger on behalf of other people. For example, one night she embraced another group member, saying, "Your father was a monster, I hate him!"
A few weeks later, her own repressed rage finally came out. She screamed, cursed, and accused her parents of destroying her childhood and crippling her adult years. Afterward, I hugged her as she sobbed. I could feel her body relax. When she was calmer, I teasingly asked, "What kind of way is that for a nice Christian girl to behave?" I will never forget her reply:

I guess God wants me to get better more than He wants me to forgive.

That night was the turning point for her.
People can forgive toxic parents, but they should do it at the conclusion – not at the beginning – of their emotional housecleaning. People need to get angry about what happened to them. They need to grieve over the fact that they never had the parental love they yearned for. They need to stop diminishing or discounting the damage that was done to them. Too often, “forgive and forget” means “pretend it didn’t happen.”
I also believe that forgiveness is appropriate only when parents do something to earn it. Toxic parents, especially the more abusive ones, need to acknowledge what happened, take responsibility, and show a willing-ness to make amends. If you unilaterally absolve parents who continue to treat you badly, who denty much of your reality and feelings, and who continue to project blame onto you, you may seriously impede the emotional work you need to do. If one or both parents are dead, you can still heal the damage, by forgiving yourself and releasing much of the hold that they had over your emotional well-being.
At this point, you may be wondering, understandably, if you will remain bitter and angry for the rest of your life if you don't forgive your parents. In fact, quite the opposite is true. What I have seen over the years is that emotional and mental peace comes as a result of releasing yourself from your toxic parents' control, without necessarily having to forgive them. And that release can come only after you've worked through your intense feelings of outrage and grief and after you've put the responsibility on their shoulders, where it belongs.

Toxic Parents, By Susan Forward