Forgiveness and Toxic Positivity

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I won’t be forgiving my abusers. I won’t be letting them back into my life. I won’t spend my time trying not to be angry at them or forbidding myself from thinking about what they did to me. I’m not interested in controlling my emotional response to the abuse I’ve survived. Forgiveness is not my focus. Apathy is.

I’m so tired of my refusal to forgive being framed as a failure to heal. I’m tired of the narrative that forgiveness is necessary, and not just a way to make other people comfortable with my story. I am not here to be inspiration porn. What happened to me does not have a redemption arc. As with most trauma, it was horrible, random, and I will never receive an apology for any of it. I’ve accepted all of that, have done my time processing, grieving, and raging about it. For the most part, I feel I’ve moved on. That does not mean I’ve forgiven my abusers, nor will I.

That doesn’t mean my healing is incomplete or has gone off course. In the two years since I cut contact with my parents, I’ve discovered I like myself more, I trust myself, I’ve made decisions that have helped me feel more comfortable in my body, and have recovered my emotions. I’ve spent time comforting my inner child through emotional flashbacks and I’ve put in the work to stay grounded and present in my body. I’ve even started making plans for my future for the first time in my life. I’m doing well. Yet somehow when I say I’m unwilling to forgive what was done to me, that statement alone erases all my progress and triggers a tirade of toxic positivity from people who think they’re helping but are instead asking me to swallow my hard-won emotions for their comfort.

The fact is, there is no emotion that needs to be squashed, ignored, or meditated out of existence. Anger is healthy. It’s protective. It tells us when we’ve been wronged and spurs us on to action. While every emotion can be unhealthy when it drowns out the sensation of all others, anger on its own is not a problem to be solved. It’s a warning bell.

After spending decades being gaslit out of my anger, I refuse to focus my energy on not feeling it for other people’s comfort. My anger is not a problem. It’s a sign of my recovery and ignoring it or bottling it up would not be a healthy response. Anger is my body’s way of telling me that I was wronged, that I’ve suffered an injustice. That sensation is brand new to me and being able to feel it now has brought me incredible relief. Now that I can feel my anger, I can vent it and move on. That’s not something I could do before. I don’t expect that I’ll be angry forever. While I am, though, I’m not going to pretend that I don’t have every reason to be.

Refusing to forgive doesn’t mean that I’m failing to be compassionate. I understand better than anyone how my parents became the people they are because they put me through the exact same abusive training they suffered. I can see it in every family story that they think is funny. I see it in the way they never touch. I see it in how they respond to conflict. I know that their refusal to care for me is a result of the numbness that was necessary for them to survive. They deserved better. So did I. Having compassion for what they went through does not change the fact that it was their responsibility to address the abuse they survived and ensure that they didn’t inflict it on me. They didn’t do that, and I don’t have to forgive a failing they refuse to acknowledge.

Being in a good place with what I’ve been through also doesn’t mean I’ve forgiven them already. It’s not a matter of semantics. If I got a call tomorrow that one of my parents was on their death bed, I would not go to them. I would not offer them solace in their final hour because they don’t deserve it. There is no context in which I would allow them to believe that everything is okay, not even in the most dire of situations, because I don’t owe them forgiveness for abuse they’ve never acknowledged, much less apologized for.

That’s why my goal for recovery is not to forgive them. It’s apathy. It’s not thinking about or caring about where they are or how they’re doing. Peace for me is not in forgetting the harm they did me. It’s in forgetting they exist. Most days I manage that. Most days the only time I think about the people who hurt me is when I sit down to write my way through it. After that, I can carry on about my day without visiting those memories at all. It’s not perfect. I have bad days and bad seasons just like everyone else, but I get a little better every year at feeling the grief and the hurt when it comes up and then letting it go. That, to me, is success.

Telling me and people like me that we must forgive to heal is not healthy and it is not helpful. It’s toxic positivity weaponized to make other people comfortable with our trauma. You should not be comfortable. My parents should not be comfortable. Neither should the people who sexually abused me. I will not swallow my hurt and paint some rosy picture of my emotional state for anyone’s benefit. Recovery is hard. It’s messy. It means revisiting the same issues over and over and discovering new angles and new depths every single time. Putting a bow marked forgiveness on that isn’t going to help me, nor will it help anyone else who sees my journey.

Looking back on where I was two years ago, the difference is incredible. I went into therapy so terrified of walking away from the people who had abused me my entire life that I nearly ghosted my therapist on several occasions. Today, right now, I feel free of them in a way that I never could have imagined was possible.

I am healing, and I’m doing it without forgiving them. I’m focusing instead on feeling my emotions and listening to what they have to tell me. I’m learning to take care of myself and to offer my inner child the love and protection I always should have had. As I do that, I’m finding that I can rely on myself to meet my own needs, that I don’t need other peoples’ reassurance so much, and that I can let go of what kept me hanging onto the hope of my parents’ affection for so long.

My job is to protect the child they harmed. My job is holding that kid close and telling him that I am never going to let my parents hurt either of us ever again. It’s not my job to offer forgiveness to people who have never acknowledged the harm they’ve done me and who have never made any effort to address the damage they caused. After a lifetime spent abandoning my own needs and my own emotions for the comfort of others, I refuse to continue that pattern in the name of someone else’s version of recovery that clearly does not serve me. Instead, I am allowing for every reaction, sitting with it, and working my way through it. I don’t care if it’s ugly. I don’t care if it doesn’t fit someone else’s narrative of what trauma recovery looks like. Ultimately, the path I take is for me, and not for anyone else. While I’m happy to take people along with me and narrate the course, I will not be taking instruction from people who are not walking alongside me.

Every time someone tells me I need to forgive to heal, every time someone tells me that my description of where I am sounds like I’ve forgiven them already, what I hear is another demand that I abandon my own truth to make my accounting of everything I’ve survived palatable. What I hear is that if my story doesn’t encourage other people to forgive the unforgivable, I’m not healed enough.

But I am healed, and I am healing. I don’t need to forgive the people who treated me like property they could dispose of at their pleasure to recover. Neither does anyone else.

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