Creating a Life Story of Ongoing Growth Rather Than Victimhood

In my last blog post, I wrote about how when I choose not to forgive someone, I’m hurting myself more than I’m hurting the person who has offended me.  In his book Conscious Living, Conscious Aging, Ron Pevny says that when we refuse to forgive, we believe “that our ongoing resentment is somehow putting the offender in prison, when we are actually imprisoned in our anger and closed hearts.” (58)

Then he goes on to say, “Forgiveness opens the heart to unconditional love so that we can use the power of love to heal ourselves, and perhaps the offender, rather than stewing in a toxic mix of disempowering emotions and blocked heart energy. Forgiveness decreases physical and emotional stress. It allows us to take our power and control back from the other person so that our happiness is dependent on our choices, consciousness and well-being, rather than on another who may or may not have any interest in reconciliation. And forgiveness enables us to begin to learn how our wounds, as terrible and unjustified as they may be in some cases, can help us create and support a life story of ongoing growth rather than victimhood.” (59)

I love the idea that we can “heal” ourselves instead of “stewing in a toxic mix of disempowering emotions and blocked heart energy,” and “open our hearts to unconditional love.” But I like the second point he makes even more. “We can take back our power and control from the other person so that our happiness is dependent on our choices, consciousness and well-being.” Why would I want to give someone else– especially someone who has hurt me and who may not even be a part of my life anymore– the power to determine whether I am happy or not?

Then Pevny takes another big step when he suggests that the fact that we’ve been wounded is not all bad. Even though those wounds may be “terrible” and “unjustified,” in some cases, they can help us “create and support a life story of ongoing growth rather than victimhood.”

I have written earlier in my blog about how important it is that we begin looking at our life in the second half of life differently than we did in the first half. We will be missing the opportunity that these years after middle age offer us if we continue to focus on the outer work of moving fast and accomplishing a lot. We need to change our focus to the inner work that we need to do before we die. As we age, many of us—the lucky ones—feel an urgency to get our house in order. Many people who have worked with the dying have written about how much regret people feel if they haven’t at least attempted to do this. Karen M. Wyatt, M. D. is one of those people. She wrote a book called What Really Matters: 7 Lessons from the Stories of the Dying. Lesson 3 is “Forgiveness: Hold No Resentments.”

This is especially true if we have been blaming our parents for all of our problems. In From Age-ing to Sage-ing, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi says, “To grow into elderhood, we cannot continue thinking of ourselves as victims of early life trauma or parental conflicts. We cannot in faith take refuge in the thought, ‘I’m solely conditioned by my origins, and everybody else is responsible for what I’ve become.’ The time for playing the blame game has long since passed. As Abraham Lincoln is reputed to have said, ‘The face you have up to age thirty-five is the one you were born with; after thirty-five, it’s the face you have made.” (116–17) Maybe as elders we can open our hearts by giving our parents the “unconditional love” that they may not have been able to give us.

And finally, Rabbi Zalman makes another point about forgiveness that is very important. He says, “The issue of forgiveness has another dimension that we are normally loath to examine. We often fail to account for the role that we unconsciously play in creating dysfunctional relationships and situations. All too often, we don’t ask ourselves, ‘How did my hidden agenda—my expectations, unacknowledged needs, and unresolved conflicts—lead to my getting hurt.’ We cannot forgive the offending party as long as we have not taken responsibility for our own contribution to the misunderstanding. By portraying ourselves as victims, we avoid dealing with the pain that we unconsciously inflict on ourselves. Forgiving another’s deed against us requires forgiving ourselves for our complicity in the affair.” (Sage-ing, 98)