Day 28 - 28th Jan
DEVIANT
If there was an Olympics of forgiveness,
how would I fare?
Nowhere.
Not on the podium,
or the stadium,
or the medium.
One standard deviation
to the West.
(Is that a personal best?)
Niall Campbell
I heard a meme recently that did the rounds in a big way:
“Your greatest gift of your life is your parents' dysfunction.
For you to be here, to have forgiveness for it, compassion for it, and greater understanding because of it, and to heal from it—
that is the greatest gift they have given you.
I don’t disagree with it. I have just worked in therapy long enough to have a front-row seat to how very, very hard it is to do. It’s hard for the people I have worked with to feed this particular gift horse a carrot. It’s much more likely that they want to drive this horse to the knackers' yard and supervise the glue production themselves, and then take that glue and stick together a new life from it. This is particularly true for those in creative recovery.
I believe that it is also viable to boil down the essence of the ‘anti-lessons’ you received into glue and not really have much to do with the forgiveness piece. I do not think the outcomes are as good or as noble, but I believe it is more viable for a lot of people.
Such a statement as the one above can also be very overwhelming and demoralising when someone is considering dealing with the mother and/or father wounds, and it prevents them from even starting. This is a shame because many people—the adult children of long-reformed alcoholics who were not there for them in childhood being a good example—will not commence if they think ultimate forgiveness is what is expected of them from the outset. But over time, they actually do get there in spite of themselves. This is as beautiful as it is unexpected for all concerned.
Such metaphysical claims—that you have been given the cosmic task to imbibe your parents' bullshit, learn from it, heal from it, and then forgive them their sins prior to their returning to their maker—psychs and grosses a lot of people out. I get their visceral allergy to such statements.
Like I said, I believe it may be true. I also believe it is hard to do, and a very worthy thing to do. Forgiveness, and the capacity for it, may—and about this, I am agnostic—exist on a bell curve. A few people are naturally good at it, most are mediocre, and some aren’t so crash-hot. I fall somewhere between the latter two camps.
It is the most useful skill, but we don’t give away prizes for it. There is no ‘Forgiveness of the Month’, like a Premier League Goal of the Month. That’s a shame—but it’s actually not much of a spectator sport.
I believe some of the energy mainstreaming the psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy movement is intoxicated by the notion that it can facilitate generational forgiveness en masse. In some quarters, it is suggested you’ll experience a ‘Road to Damascus’ moment and forgive everyone in your life who needs it. I think this is dangerous and naïve. These medicines can enhance your tools for this work, but they won’t do it for you. They are not a forgiveness panacea—nothing is. Not creative recovery, psychotherapy, or anything else. The road to forgiveness—for yourself and others—is long and will likely take a lifetime, with kilometres still left on the trail. Just look at a cohort of frequent psychedelic users. Their mother wounds and father wounds often remain alive and well.
If you can forgive your parents wholeheartedly, completely, and immediately—mazeltov. You’ve likely traversed a mountain of rage, waded through a river of tears, and reached a deeper chamber of peace and acceptance. But we are not all there yet.
For many—especially frustrated creatives—rage arises as they realise how far they’ve drifted from their creative core and how much their childhood conditioning contributed to that drift. This is why adjunct titratable modalities are vital when engaging in deeper work like psychedelics. I use artistic expression and clinical hypnosis for their titrability. As an artist, you don’t always know what the work is about—it emerges. But if you’re exploding with rage onto the canvas, you can still grab a sandwich and return to it later. You can’t do that two hours into an LSD or mushroom trip. Prescribers can always give you more of these potent substances, but they can’t take them back once ingested.
Exorcise your demons through art or other productive channels: active imagination, cold exposures, hypnotic regression, manifestation exercises—whatever works. But you must confront the liminal spaces where dark things reside in a diversified, titrated, and autonomous way (or as autonomous as possible, because the wild horses of the mind can never be fully tamed). This isn’t sublimation; it’s integration. It’s slow, unsexy, incremental, and sporadic—but it works.
Unexperienced rage, anger, and sadness must be processed alongside forgiveness, or you risk bypassing the hard emotional work entirely.
Many clients find that forgiveness is often a unilateral process rather than a bilateral event. Media depictions of tearful reunions where all is forgiven in both directions are rare in real life. If such breakthroughs occur, they should be celebrated but understood as exceptions, like a gifted horse with no strings attached.
Ultimately, forgiving your parents’ wrongdoings and dysfunction is the aim, akin to getting a hole-in-one in golf. Good golf courses tempt players with the tiger line—a risky shot over water that promises great rewards. Designers seduce you into thinking it’s achievable, but often you end up off the tee for three.
I work with clients who’ve bombed out of the spiritual bypass movement, giving up their pain and anger about their dysfunctional, show-home childhoods. They performatively forgave but left their inner artist—the child, as Julia Cameron describes—unheard. Their righteous anger, blocked and suppressed, went underground, re-emerging in violent drinking episodes, psychosomatic conditions, and flares of unresolved rage.
If you’re not ready to forgive, that’s okay. The tiger line to forgiveness is tempting, but a conservative strategy can lead to a more authentic, enduring process. You may miss the hole-in-one, but your life’s scorecard will reflect steadier progress—and a few birdies when you least expect them.