Healing After Trauma: When Forgiveness is More than Just Letting Go

Five years ago this March I went through one of the hardest experiences of my life. I had been in a new town less than a year, living way too close to an ex from a toxic dating relationship, and trying to forge a career path. The last two years had been difficult; filled with working at a Bojangles with a master’s degree, then working two part time jobs while completing a chaplaincy internship that involved 24-hour on calls at the hospital, and figuring out how to move on from the aforementioned ex.

I had finally landed a new job and I could breathe. The job only lasted a year, but that was ok. I could take some time, regroup, and figure out my next step. Little did I know I walked into an environment way more toxic than any dating relationship I'd ever have.

I’m not going to go into details about what happened or where it happened, but I want to share the hardest lesson I’ve ever learned about forgiveness. For some brief back story, I was working at a large organization in a department with a history of dysfunction. False accusations were made, I found myself out of work on leave, and navigating a government system I never thought I’d have to figure out. People I thought I had befriended turned out to be anything but friends, and my heart was broken. It cost me and it cost my family.

I remember the day my supervisor told me what had happened and I wasn’t even sure of the meaning of his explanation. As is custom with me, the news didn’t fully hit me until later. That day I felt somewhat numb, even able to laugh about the situation. Pretty soon my almost constant tears replaced that laughter.

I was out of work for a while and struggling with how people could do this kind of thing. I talked with my pastor, my family, my friends, a counselor….. but the anger and hurt seemed to be a constant in my life at that point. I cried a lot, I had bursts of anger, and I carried around a massive weight of anxiety. I started hanging out with a friend more often and drank more than I ever had in my life. My friend in no way pressured me and he provided an extreme level of support, but if wine was available, I drank on a regular basis and it was my decision. For some people it probably would not have been significant, but since I don’t have a history of drinking, it's clear something was up. I am so thankful I don’t have an addictive personality and when this whole situation started to rectify itself, I stopped trying to act out to deal with my pain.

As things began to clear up and I went back to work, I felt like I was treated like a leper. I had people- even within my work organization- who offered their support and solidarity, but I still felt watched and judged by others for something I didn’t do. Ironically, the hardest part of this ordeal was just getting started.

I spent many therapy hours talking and crying over this situation and like the abstract thinker I can be, continually questioned what forgiveness meant. I remember saying to my counselor, “So they can just ask for God to forgive them and He does, but I still have to deal with all of this?” Even as I asked it, I knew God had forgiven me of my sin, but I still felt indignation that they could so easily “be let off the hook” as I saw it.

So, what did forgiveness mean? Did forgiveness mean getting over it? How could I do that when I occasionally had a dream about the situation, I still walked around under a cloud of anxiety, and I could see certain triggers in public that would put me in a tailspin of anxiety? I became concerned that anybody else could do the same thing and even called 911 once to tell my side of a story involving getting angry at another driver, so he couldn’t call and make up a lie first. I didn’t always think rationally about others because I was afraid. I’m not going to call it PTSD, but I am going to say it was the faintest traces of it.

People say forgive and forget…. surely they can’t mean literally. How can you force yourself to forget a scarring event? So maybe it’s figuratively, as in living your life as if it had never happened…. but considering my stress levels, I didn’t see how that was a possibility either. It’s not that I refused to forgive, but I didn’t exactly know what it meant in the midst of my pain. I could say I forgave, but I would still carry around the emotional scars in a way that controlled my life.

I went back to grad school after that experience, a move that wasn’t popular with my family, but I figured I could make my own decision after what I had gone through and my previous extroverted and talkative self was suddenly an awkward, reserved, non-participatory classmate and I’m pretty sure I may have been eyed as a pretty weird person. That’s ok; grad school was a time to relax. It was my second master’s degree, I knew I could do school well, and so far the working world had been ridiculous. Going back to school for a degree I had wanted anyway seemed like a great movie; and it ended up being so.

Eventually I began to regain some sense of normalcy and reenter the world of extroversion, but the question of forgiveness still hung in my mind. How did I let go of everything that had happened when I was so damaged and afraid?

I was in a Bible study at the time and we had a discussion on forgiveness. One of the people in my small group shared that they had once heard that forgiveness is being willing to live with the consequences of another’s person’s actions. That was probably the best- and most freeing- definition I had heard since this whole thing started. I didn’t have to stop working through my emotional issues, I didn’t have to stop talking about it in therapy, and I didn’t have to try to forget it all in order to forgive. I could still work on me, work on my feelings about all that had happened, and still be in the process of forgiveness. I could forgive AND still focus on it; because the focusing was for my healing.

The healing process took a while….. over the course of the next few years I was able to let go of it a little more at a time. I came to a point when I prayed that I forgave those people, but even after that I dealt with anger and hurt. Maybe forgiveness isn’t about just letting go right away, but being willing to work toward forgiving, even if you aren’t quite there yet. Like grief, the process of forgiving came in waves. Some days I felt further along and the next day I felt like I took some steps backward.

I saw one of those people out in public a couple times since that job. The first time I burst into tears and the second time I didn’t. It was a little bit of progress.

So what is forgiveness? I think only God has the perfect definition, but I can say that I no longer think it means just letting go. If I had tried to just let go of that situation, I wouldn’t have dealt with my emotional baggage. Forgiveness involves a choice. It’s not about refusing to forgive because of your pain, but being willing to work to get to the point where you can forgive, in spite of your pain. Even if I hadn’t reached forgiveness right away, I was willing to get there. And I think that’s a big part of the process.

A while after the incident had happened I remember saying to my counselor that I didn’t feel like I would ever stop being angry. He said to me, “Are your bouts of anger less frequent than they were a few months ago?” I affirmed that they were and he reminded me that was progress.

Life is hard; people will often hurt you. Please never confuse forgiveness with ignoring the healing you need to move on. You can focus on the issue and forgiveness simultaneously. There is no perfect formula for what it means to forgive and heal, but the willingness to get to that point is a prompting of God that reminds you He is good….. and despite who has hurt you, he has also blessed you with so many people in your life to remind you of His goodness. 

Please watch this video for Ten Avenue North's song, Losing, and really listen to the lyrics. It's the best song I have ever heard that could describe my experience through the journey of forgiveness.