Boundaries, Forgiveness, Shame & Judgment
Forgiveness has eluded me for so long.
It has taken 3 years of practice and months of intensive practice to convince my mind, body, soul, spirit to reach this state.
Forgiveness is not giving someone a free pass for what they have done wrong.
Forgiveness is not setting myself up to get hurt yet again.
Forgiveness is not saying, “I’m easy. Come walk all over me because there are no consequences.”
It is accepting we are all imperfect beings. It’s accepting we all make mistakes, and in some cases, live in a pattern of iniquity. It’s acceptance I have done and will do things that require forgiveness. If I am imperfect, why do I expect that previously unforgivable grievance was so much worse than my mistakes? Why was that act too great a deed to be undeserving of forgiveness?
I realized one of the underlying problems was I found myself unworthy of forgiveness.
I was raised in a Christian household and in the church, and as is typical nowadays, raised with shame as a parenting tactic (not trying to dump more shame on my parents; they were raised the same way).
What that taught me was I am innately bad. And every time I made a mistake that piled on the shame storm.
A mistake understandably produces guilt - the feeling, “I did something bad.” Because shame was regularly practiced, a mistake was felt in my body both as, “I did something bad” (guilt) AND “I am bad” (shame).*
When you believe the shame storm your whole life of, “I am bad,” you also believe you are unworthy of forgiveness. You naturally then hold others and their actions to this standard.
I realized the more I worked on forgiveness I did forgive…but only some people. The link between those I didn’t forgive was those who had violated my boundaries. That led me to see the ones still not forgiven was every authority figure I had in my life as well as myself.
I was stuck in judgment. Judgment for not expressing my boundaries, sticking to them, and granting people a greater level of access to me than they had shown responsibility for.
That led me to question: How could I so easily forgive my husband when he is also the person with the capability to hurt me the deepest? He was raised with boundaries (a moat and a drawbridge in my opinion), so therefore he demonstrated and continues to demonstrate level 10 responsibility.
Once I made the connection these people who had hurt me so badly in the past were not capable of hurting me in the future, it became simple to forgive them. How did they lose that power? Because as they violated my boundaries previously, I brought their level of access down to meet their level of responsibility. In some cases that meant it was a level 0 across the board. That realization was so incredibly freeing.
In the end I realized: It’s about healing; it’s not about minimizing the hurt.
*Thank you Brene Brown for teaching me this difference.
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How did I reach this stage?
Weekly EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) and IFS (Internal Family Systems) therapy thanks to Amy Cook, EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) thanks to Ashley Chance Fox, life coaching thanks to Kathryn Freeburg, spiritual coaching thanks to Gabby Bernstein, journaling practice with bilateral music, devouring different forgiveness resources such as Gabby Bernstein’s forgiveness meditations daily, and books* on related topics:
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