Is forgiving your abuser safe?

In leaving an abusive dynamic, your body undergoes shifts that often rewire the fundamental underpinnings of everything you had once learnt to accept and see as normal. You learn what care looks like, and what it does not. Your body starts to learn what stability looks like, consistency, and neutrality. Slowly but surely, you start to see your life as something to protect, rather than bend over or exploit to prevent being attacked. It is no wonder, then, tasting your sovereignty, power to create a beautiful life, and seeing more of your worth, that your nervous system may have some stern questions about the concept of ‘forgiveness’.

You may have heard that ‘forgiveness sets you free’, and felt an old and familiar protective bubbling inside.

“I don’t need to forgive them.”

“They don’t deserve forgiveness.”

And more worryingly,

“If I forgive them, will I go back?”

​This feeling was no stranger to me. I would find the fearful and angry charge toward these dynamics settling, and would allow myself to soften the guards. I would remember some of the sweet memories with people I had experienced an abusive dynamic with. A fun day out, a thoughtful gift, a moment I felt held for my differences rather than shunned. I would remember one person’s goofy and fun disposition, and then somebody else’s wonderful nerdy excitement. I would feel the heart of the kid inside me open back up to bring them in. Thoughts of “I know they don’t see the truth, but what if we just texted occasionally? Nothing too deep, I wouldn’t get close enough to be attacked. I’d keep it short; I could just love them from afar. They’d know how much I care about them.” I’d feel myself drifting closer toward them again, and then the fear would kick in. My nervous system was hearing, “As I forgive, I come closer to living in that environment again. Every ounce of the lies I’ve deprogrammed is being reinstated, and every ounce of the truth I’ve worked to rebuild is crumbling. I’m a few stages of forgiveness away from being unsafe again.”

This isn’t what forgiveness looks like; this is what trying to move toward forgiveness before self-love, self-recognition, and trauma processing, looks like. These facets of recognition and processing are explored further through separate writings and lay the basis through which you can expand your capacity for love in the way you see outside of yourself.

After leaving an abusive dynamic, there is often a pendulum swing in the attempt to see your abuser truly. From warmth, recognition of deeper context, the core, and unconditional love, to betrayal, pain, and a protective shield that sees it as safest to be angry. This pendulum swing can be severe, destabilising, and frustrating. Scrambling to find a stable ground through which your view doesn’t flip based on mood, triggers, and proximity. The truth, however counterintuitive, is that forgiveness stabilises that swing, setting your body at an ease that will feel natural, yet perhaps slightly alien at first.

I experienced this swing personally through some critical moments in my path. After leaving one abusive dynamic I was well familiar with, I instantly looked for safety in the hands of another. I hadn’t processed the pain of my first dynamic, and had only acknowledged at the shallowest of levels that it felt scary and unsafe. I was still in contact with these people, and pushed aside my pain when they would message to organise casual get-togethers. I knew that if I were to call attention to my true experience in their household, the narrative would be entirely rewritten by them to paint their intentions as pure and my knowledge and pain as false. Not understanding my power to say the truth regardless of whether it was received coherently, I’d distanced myself but remained otherwise silent on what I knew was true. It was during a trying time with my health then that I had reconnected with another party I was partly aware was not stable or loving. I felt I had increasingly limited ways of tending to my health needs and saw it as safer to rest and recover in their home than to stay where I was. I had accepted the offer to live with them and had gone on to learn my lessons in authenticity and self-advocacy through their resistance there as well. This second dynamic was finalised with being kicked out of my home in one night, and away from those whom I’d grown to love deeply. The pain was immense and felt insurmountable. Despite every day in those last three months that I had spent recognising abuse from the first dynamic, one thought hit me.

“If I go back to the first dynamic, maybe they will have changed. Maybe I could tell them what happened, and maybe I would be held there.” As humans, our survival code is strong. The idea that we will survive in a pack of whoever we see available is based completely in fear, but nonetheless a powerful influence in our decision making (before we decode it). Knowing that the first party had experienced their own pain and betrayal with the second party, I craved the validation of the first party, believing my pain about the second party. But kinship cannot be stably created in construct. A friendship cannot be built on the basis of both parties bonding over shared false beliefs and unmetabolised pain; this is karmic and nothing more. A true and stable kinship can only be built on stable grounds, where unconditional acceptance is the gestalt operative state (lending to effortless forgiveness).

Forgiveness requires ingredients that weren’t present for me during this time. Where I thought forgiveness looked like sweeping your pain under the rug to allow others to feel comfortable in their lies, I was unable to forgive in any capacity at all. Forgiveness requires self-recognition, compassion, and love. Then, once this is stabilised deeply and truly, it requires the sight and grace to extend all of that unconditional acceptance you have for yourself to everyone else. ‘In my life, I am learning, have misunderstood the nature of myself and others and therefore been unable to honour it to the highest level. I am worthy of love, and it is my core indefinitely. I seek to do the best I can with what I see and actively audit my understanding of truth, love and reality daily. How can the collective be different and exempt from this same acceptance?’ I wasn’t able to forgive until this internal work had been done. The pendulum swing that precedes forgiveness is actually what disposes you to seeking old or new abusive dynamics. The swing doesn’t see your pain, and it doesn’t see others neutrally. It’s reactive, flighty, scared, and comfort-seeking. It will flip from anger and hatred to a fearful, pandering, validation-seeking in one fell swoop. It will be far more disposed to trading abuse for more abuse.

Forgiveness will require getting comfortable with grief. Realising that the hatred, fury, and accusations you may have once held don’t reflect the true nature of others or reality, can sting. To see another’s core of light in its truest form would have any individual crippled with the weight of their love and grief; therefore, it’s no mystery that even iteratively seeing more and more truly will be, at times, quite emotional. To see the misunderstandings of others not as cruelty, stupidity, and evil, but as more akin to a baby falling over while trying to walk their first steps, is an intense shift. It will no doubt surprise you in the revelation of just how little difference there is between you and any given other. The peace and stability that follows these revelations will feel like solid ground under bare feet.

It will most of all be the reason you truly complete these cycles, and no longer feel any inclination toward welcoming toxicity toward you. When we move toward love and truth, hold the void space of uncertainty for where we now lie, and allow reality to rearrange around us, we change our life indefinitely. Forgiveness is safe, it is stable, and it will set you free more than the anger that convinces you you’ve reclaimed your power when you roar. You’ve reclaimed your power when you sit by the core within you unfalteringly, and see nothing but the truth as worth surrendering to.