Nearly 15 years ago, Matthew Shepard, a University of Wyoming student, was lured from a local bar, robbed, tortured, tied to a fence and left to die. When his killer, Aaron McKinney, was up for the death penalty, it was Matthew Shepard’s mother, Judy, who prevailed upon the prosecutor to spare the killer’s life. The prosecutor later commented that he would never get over her capacity to forgive.
Forgive?! I grew up Catholic, so I thought of forgiveness as something only a priest can give after several “Hail Marys” and an “Our Father.” People sin, God (and his representatives on Earth) forgive. Forgiving, to me, meant absolving someone of his sins.
When I heard about Judy Shepard “forgiving” the killer of her child, I was taken aback. Does this now mean it is OK this person murdered her child? Not at all. It means something much more powerful.
Thankfully, there are few people in the world who can know the grief of a family whose child was taken from them in a tragic manner. But it is precisely from people like Judy Shepard that we can learn to move beyond the tragedies that have befallen us in the past.
All of us have been the victim of someone else’s misdeeds at one point or another. But depending on the severity of the deed, impact on the victim and time, some have let it go and some are still burdened.
When something bad has happened to us at the hands of another, there is no doubt we become a victim in that moment. But what happens after the physical damage from that other person has healed? When does the emotional healing begin?
In the previous article, I pondered past the point of being a victim into the state of victimhood. That is the state of being a perpetual victim and staying in a state of emotional resentment toward someone who hurt us in the past.
I often liken it to being knocked down while walking down a busy sidewalk. There are two responses—one illustrates being victimized in the moment, and one illustrates going beyond that and holding onto victimhood.
If someone were to knock you down, you would lay on the ground until someone helped you back up or until you had the strength to get up on our own. When you get up, you dust yourself off and continue on to your destination. You were a victim in the moment you were knocked down, and now the moment is gone. You move forward in your life despite the fall you took.
The advantage is that though you have taken a fall, you were only temporarily delayed on your journey along life’s path. You get up and continue on. The disadvantage is that few will recognize that you were hurt, including the person who knocked you down in the first place. If you were to talk about it, others might say, “Well it couldn’t have been that bad—just look at you now!”
But some people have a different response, staying on the ground. There are two reasons: 1) you are afraid to get up because you will be hurt again, and 2) you want to show the perpetrator—and the rest of the world—you were hurt and the damage that person did.
The advantage to staying down is that you are protected from future harm and are showing the world how much you’ve been damaged. The disadvantage to staying down is that it keeps you from moving on life’s path. By staying down, you are in fact in the perpetual state of victimhood.
If you have suffered repeated abuse or significant trauma, you are often trained to stay down. You learn that if you get up, you will be struck down again. So you learn an emotional style that both protects you from harm (depression/anxiety) and gives you some emotional strength to separate from your perpetrator (resentment/anger).
This emotional style probably works to limit harm while the perpetrator of the abuse is still around. But once the perpetrator is out of the picture, our primitive brains don’t want to let go, as this style has been protective in the past. The primitive brain thinks letting go would mean opening you up to future harm.
So how do you get up and get on with your life? It’s not as easy as this metaphor makes it sound. The way to get up is to lighten yourself of the emotional baggage—that depression, anxiety and resentment/anger—and be willing to face your fear of being vulnerable as you continue back along life’s path. All of that takes work.
It can be done in therapy or some other means, but it is usually a healing relationship with another person that helps the most. A bad relationship usually gets people into this mess, and a healing relationship (such as one with a therapist or another helpful person) can help get people out.
But what about the perpetrator? Isn’t that the person who should be doing the repair work? That would be ideal, but it is rare that someone is willing to admit they have significantly harmed another and make amends. Even when they do, the person who has been harmed still has to deal with his own emotional scars that a mere apology from the perpetrator cannot heal.
By Judy Shepard forgiving her son’s murderer, she was able let go of the negative emotions that tied her to Aaron McKinney and free herself up to remember her son with love. And that is the way out of victimhood—to let go of the resentment we have toward our perpetrator, unburden ourselves of our own depressive beliefs and willingly allow our vulnerability to be exposed once again as we get up and get on with the journey of our lives. This is what forgiveness is to me, but a think a better phrase may just be “letting go, getting up and moving on.”