While recovering from trauma, forgiveness can be elective

LOUISVILLE — Trauma Psychotherapist Amanda Ann Gregoy, whose book “You Don’t Need to Forgive: Trauma Recovery on Your Own Terms” was published last month, told the hosts of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” during a recent episode that people who’ve experienced trauma can extend elective forgiveness if that’s what’s best for their recovery.

Image

“Can forgiveness benefit them? Absolutely it can. It can be a part of their healing journey,” Gregory told “A Matter of Faith” hosts the Rev. Lee Catoe and Simon Doong. “But it doesn’t need to be there, and I think that’s kind of a sticking point for some people — the fact that forgiveness can be elective, it can be optional.”

Listen to the 42-minute episode here.

Definitions for forgiveness vary for those participating in trauma therapy, Gregory said. One is “If you get to the point where you feel apathetic about your offender or your abuser — you don’t wish them well, you don’t wish them harm — that’s forgiveness,” Gregory said. “But there are other people who say you need to love them and you need to wish them well. If you don’t, you have failed at forgiveness. That is such a hard message to get.”

“How do I know when I’m there? A lot of these are still question marks. We haven’t narrowed this down,” Gregory said, “and I think that makes it so much harder to know in trauma recovery what we are working for when forgiveness comes up.”

That can be especially true in faith-based communities, Doong said, where “forgiveness is a place you should get to. We think that’s the moral standard someone needs to reach. If we’re not getting there, then there’s something wrong with them, when actually there’s something wrong with the situation. We have to not put the onus on the person who’s trying to recover.”

To make things even more complicated, “we sometimes inadvertently perpetuate shame,” Gregory said. “If we’re saying to survivors, ‘You need to forgive’ and they can’t, then we say, ‘It’s the moral high ground. Good people forgive.’”

“But there are so many reasons why trauma survivors struggle to forgive, or maybe can’t forgive,” Gregory said. “That forgiveness process might still be difficult, absolutely. I’m not saying it’s easy.” Trauma survivors “need to feel they are safe enough to forgive,” Gregory said, and that includes both physical safety and emotional safety. They also need to have a sense of self-worth to be able to forgive. “If I’m in shame, it’s going to be tough to forgive my offender because I can’t see the value of myself, and so it’s going to be hard to empathize with them. There are things that survivors need in this process that I think people just aren’t aware of.”

Catoe said it’s spiritual bypassing or even gaslighting to offer advice like “just trust God” or “give it to God” to a trauma victim. “It may be the only thing they know to say, but it does bring harm,” he said. “Who’s saying you don’t trust God in these moments?”

“What I tell people — and you usually can’t go wrong with this — is if somebody you know is a survivor or is just contemplating forgiveness, and you want to be helpful, ask them” what they need, Gregory said “They may not know, but at least they know you’re not the person who’s going to tell them what to do.”

A recovering person’s anger “can actually be so vital in trauma recovery and emotional processing,” Gregory said. “When we are the loved one of someone going through this, it’s devastating because we witness it and we want it to go away. We want to fix it.”

There’s plenty of research to indicate that trauma survivors don’t need to forgive, according to Gregory.

“I’ve worked with people who have blamed themselves for things. You look at them and say, ‘There’s no way you can be blamed for that, but they do, and they believe it,” Gregory said. “They can get to a place of acceptance — ‘Oh, I couldn’t have controlled that or done anything differently.’ Recovery is unique from person to person. We will see some overlapping impacts and experiences, but it is very different.”

For the person in recovery, Gregory said feeling safe can mean “feeling safe enough with a therapist” or “feeling safe enough to go out into the world.”

“A lot of times, survivors will need to lean into their faith and explore forgiveness and other things,” said Gregory, who has invited rabbis, priests and pastors into therapy sessions “to be that support system and talk about forgiveness to help the survivor navigate that.” But there’s no one way to help bring about recovery. “If we had a panacea, I wouldn’t have a job — which would be nice,” Gregory said. “I would love to work my way out of the job, but we just don’t.”

Gregory once worked with a boy who was about 16 years old. He’d experienced significant abuse in his home, including neglect and physical and emotional abuse. He’d convinced himself the abuse had happened because he was a bad kid, “and so he acted like a bad kid,” Gregory said.

One day, Gregory asked the boy to draw a picture of himself when the abuse had ended, which was when he was 5. He did, and then Gregory asked him to draw a picture of 5-year-old one might see on the street. The first picture he drew of himself looked like an adult, and the second “looked like a kid with a teddy bear,” Gregory noted. “That’s when he got it, when he saw those pictures. He was able to work through, ‘I was 5. I could not have prevented this.’”

“That was tough, because he had to grieve. Sometimes we self-blame so we don’t need to feel the anger or to grieve. … He was able to move through the shame and stopped believing that he was a bad kid. In fact, he started believing he was a good kid.”

Even a church sanctuary can play a healing role.

“I’ve worked with survivors who when they go into a church, bam! They feel safe,” Gregory said. “They don’t need to talk to anybody. They may not even need to pray. It’s just being in that space.”

The book includes a chapter on religious influences. While some who read the manuscript early on thought Gregory might remove the chapter, “I said, no, you can’t write a book about forgiveness and not mention faith or religion. That sounds absurd to me.”

“I connected with people of faith in Christianity, Judaism and Islam to really get their sense of what forgiveness looks like for you,” Gregory said. “How can you support survivors?”

“I also have a social justice chapter, which is exciting. I get to talk about how does forced forgiveness come across in oppressed populations? It’s not the same as if you’re a member of a privileged population,” Gregory said. “It doesn’t come across the same way.”

New episodes of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” drop each Thursday. Listen to previous editions here.