The other day my car died. The thermostat housing failed and I lost coolant and it overheated. I’m still not sure what it will take to get it on the road, but as soon as this happened I realized that it was an opportunity to do more writing. If I’m taking public transportation instead of driving, I can write while commuting. It was during one of my commutes that I was working on an article about forgiveness and I came up with a definition of forgiveness that meant something to me. I sent it to my therapist and she suggested that I start a blog and post it. The definition was this: “Forgiveness is the act of letting go of guilt that rightfully belongs to someone else.”

When most of us think of forgiveness, we get an idea that we have bought into that suggests a clean slate and a fresh start – let bygones be bygones, we should pretend that something never happened. That is simply wrong. When someone has betrayed trust, when someone has committed sexual crimes, especially against children, forgiveness cannot be a cause to reinstate trust. Sadly, in some cases – in some churches – forgiveness has led to just that, with disastrous consequences.

No, forgiveness can be granted, but forgiveness shouldn’t imply freedom from consequence or penalty, especially for criminal acts, or acts of broken trust. Rather, forgiveness is every bit as much for the one who was harmed as it is for the one who committed the offense.

In my own case, I was harmed, as a child, by abusive clergy. It has affected the entire course of my life. It is one of the reasons I’ve been thinking so much about forgiveness. The particular clergy persons who harmed me died years ago, so I will never be able to see them, but I do need to be able to let go of the resentment that has stifled me for many, many, years.

There is something called Complex PTSD, or Complex Post Traumaatic Stress Disorder. Most of us recognize that PTSD results from stress induced by a traumatic event. Complex PTSD comes about when someone is in a prolonged stressful situation and there is no way out of it. The difference is like being in a terrible battle, or being a prisoner of war for many months or years. It can happen to children who are being abused for many years. It can happen to people who spent prolonged time involved in cults.

I may never completely heal from my childhood, I will never know what “normal” is, because I never experienced a “normal” childhood, or anything remotely resembling it. But if I am to move forward with my life, I need to let go of what ties me to a painful past. I don’t mean by “letting go of guilt” that I feel guilty for what happened to me, rather, I mean that I’m holding on to “their” guilt – “their” responsibility – a responsibility that I have no means to hold them accountable for. It doesn’t serve me.

Every bit of energy I expend on the pain of the past is energy that I can no longer put to use for my present or my future. It is energy that cannot go toward my healing. Certainly I needed to feel this pain to understand it. I needed to feel the anger to understand it. I needed to hurt to know I had been hurt. I needed to feel the rage, the betrayal, the isolation everything that had happened to me. My mind had done an excellent job through traumatic amnesia at shielding me from much of this.

But now I can let go of all of that; every bit of it. And that is what forgiveness is. It doesn’t mean I forget. It doesn’t mean I pretend nothing happened. It doesn’t mean I would ever trust these people again. It does mean that I get my life back, that I no longer carry their burden for them. They may not carry it either, but that’s not my concern. They may not even feel miserable – that’s not my concern either. What is my concern is my own state of mind, and when my focus isn’t on them and the harm they did to me, I can focus more on doing what’s right for me and for those I love. And that, my friends, is what life is about.