Trigger warning: sexual abuse
The first therapist I ever talked to taught me an important lesson. She told me that forgiving someone doesn’t mean you have to let them be part of your life. She was talking about my father. I was seeing her to help me work through the sexual and emotional abuse that I went through during my growing-up years.
As a child, I didn’t understand everything that my father did to me. As a teen, I blocked a lot of it out, and because my parents were still married, I had to pretend that he and I had a good relationship. I was scared to disagree with him, let alone talk about the bad things he did. After 20 years of marriage, my mom was finally brave enough to kick him out. Shortly after she initiated the divorce, I became engaged to a great guy. As we made plans for our wedding, I was suddenly flooded with the memories of the abuse. I was now old enough to realize what my father had been doing to me. I couldn’t keep it inside anymore, I told my mom I needed to talk to someone about it, so she took me to our ecclesiastical leader. He recommended I go to a therapist, and helped get that set up for me.
Over several sessions, my therapist helped me to deal with the feelings of betrayal, anger, and sadness that I was experiencing. She taught me what a healthy marriage should look like. Most importantly, she taught me that when I was ready to forgive my father, it didn’t mean that I had to accept him back into my life. Once the divorce was final, I decided I did not want to ever see or speak to him again.
Now, about twenty years later, I still have not allowed my father to be in my life. More importantly, I have not allowed him to be in my children’s lives. I will do anything to protect my beautiful daughters, and my sons, from experiencing the horrors of sexual abuse, and that includes not allowing a sexual predator to have any kind of contact with them. I have seen various therapists off and on, and am continuing to work on forgiving my father. My forgiveness isn’t something I’m giving to him, though, it’s something for myself. It means that I don’t have anger or hurt tearing me apart inside anymore when I think about the things he did to me. Forgiveness doesn’t mean I have accepted what he’s done, and it doesn’t mean I have accepted him in my life. For me, forgiving him means I don’t have to let what he did hurt me any more.