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Forgiving the Unforgivable –
A Soul Perspective
by Dottie Titus
How does one forgive a hurt that has left scars for 40 years? The incest was so insidious.
It began with little pats and caresses that seemed almost innocent. I was only 5.
Something didn't feel right, but he always had an answer.
"If it's okay for me to pat you on top of the blankets, why is it wrong to put
my hand under the blanket to pat you?" My 5-year-old mind couldn't find an answer.
There was just this awful feeling....
The patting progressed to fondling, then to more intimate liberties as I grew older.
When I was about 8, I tried to object more firmly. When he made my little brother
go to bed for a nap and then told me to come into his bedroom, I said no. He insisted.
I said no. Our voices got louder until my little brother came out of his room and
asked why he was grabbing me. He was furious. He hit my brother and yelled at him
to go back to bed and not come out. The lesson was clear to me: Submit or others
will be hurt. I submitted.
Finally, when I was about 12 years old, I told my mother what had been going on.
She was shocked. Nobody spoke of incest in the 1950s. After a day and a half of yelling
and fighting (he denied everything), she said to me, "I'm going to ask you if
what you told me is true. If you say it is, I'll take you and your brother and we'll
leave him. I don't know how we'll survive, but we'll manage. But I want you to understand
it will all be your fault."
This huge crisis
I know now that she was scared. She was pretty isolated back then. The women in the
neighborhood scorned her because she was a working mother. In fact, some of them
wouldn't let their children play with us solely because of that. They said she was
"unfit." She was scared, alone and facing this huge crisis. She wanted
to be sure I was telling the truth, so she made the price of lying very high. But
what I heard was that the family would be broken up, disaster would result, and it
would be my fault. I only wanted the incest to stop! So I told her that I had lied.
Fortunately, the incest did indeed stop, but it was a self-betrayal of huge proportions.
And he changed. Outwardly, he was still as vocal with sexual innuendoes and jokes,
but he stopped taking care of himself and his health began to suffer.
For the next 40 years, I hated him. I painted a picture of this man as a self-centered,
cruel S.O.B. who had wanted to hurt me. How could I ever forgive him for what he
did to me?
Over those years, I also convinced myself that the incest had caused me no real harm.
I was fine. I had a healthy libido, and I liked men. In fact, I got along better
with men than with women. No harm done.
Then, in my late 30s, I began to have trouble working with male bosses. A friend
suggested I see a therapist. I found an alternative healer who did therapy, and eventually
I found myself enrolling in The Pathwork, an intense, five-year program of self-growth
and transformation. My healing had begun.
It wasn't easy work. I spent a lot of time ranting about what had happened, blaming
him and putting out my anger by hitting a pillow, kicking on a mattress, screaming,
and even re-enacting the scene with a caring helper. This time, I was strong enough
to keep him away from me. But still I hated. When I went home for visits, I couldn't
wait to get away, because he was there.
The first crack
The first crack in my hatred came when I read Pat Rodegast's book Emmanuel: A
Manual for Living Comfortably in the Cosmos. In it, someone asked Emmanuel why
children had to suffer from things such as cruelty and incest. Emmanuel's answer
was that sometimes a soul took on such a life task in order to help another soul
grow. Oh, I loved hearing this. My beautiful soul had taken on this onerous task
just to help him. How very loving and generous of me!!! I went from victim to martyr
in a heartbeat!
The shift in perspective was important. It opened the way for me to consider that
my soul chose to have this experience for a purpose, a concept that is basic to the
Pathwork, which stresses self-responsibility and understanding cause and effect.
I began to turn from blaming him to looking at why such an experience was important
for me. And I quickly found the answer. There was a part of me that refused to love
and trust. As I remembered some of the family stories about my childhood, I realized
that this refusal did not grow out of the incest, but it was something I brought
into this lifetime with me. It was evident long before the incest began. It was my
life task, what I was here to heal.
As I began to heal this part of me, the hatred began to ease a little. I still felt
contempt for him, but I could bear to be around him for occasional visits. Then he
was diagnosed with lung cancer. The doctors said he had six months to live.
A wonderful soul
One day, I was thinking about the martyr role again. What a wonderful soul I was
to take on a horrific task like enduring incest to help another soul. At that point,
I heard spirit speak. It was clear as could be. The words were, "Or vice versa."
Martyrdom was shattered. Victim was shattered. Was it possible that his soul had
taken on such a horrible role to help my soul grow? To help me realize that I was
unwilling to love? I was shaken down to my core. The next step of my healing had
begun.
I worked with this deeply over the next few months. His condition worsened, but he
hung on. Twelve months after he was diagnosed, I finally wrote to him and spoke my
forgiveness. In 40 years, we had never talked about what had happened. Now I spoke
from my heart, telling him of my scars and the healing I still had to do, being clear
that I was not condoning what he had done, but I had reached the point where I could
forgive him. I spoke of my regret for the way we both had punished him for all those
years.
He didn't respond to my letter right away, but three months later, when he was in
the hospital with difficulty breathing, he wrote back to me. He thanked me and told
me he had always loved me. He thanked me for understanding him and said he never
meant to hurt me. It was our last communication. He died shortly after that.
At the funeral, I was surprised that I could cry. I discovered there was still a
little girl inside who was grieving his loss. As I comforted that inner child, I
knew that forgiveness had truly happened.
There are still some scars, although far fewer now. Every so often, when I notice
that I am not being trusting of a man, I have to check in and see if that distrust
is coming out of my history. I feel grateful for the tremendous healing that forgiveness
has brought to me. All that hatred was too heavy to keep carrying.
Dottie Titus is a Pathwork Helper in the Twin Cities area. She can be reached
at (612) 522-4545 or by e-mail at DottieT@aol.com.
Copyright (c) 2002 Dottie Titus
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