I just had someone piss me off, in a way which would have severely triggered me in the past. But I had just done a Neurofeedback session, and I’m like “ah, it’s in the past. It’s done. Forget about it.” And for a split second I DID.
And then I looked at that (it is called introSPECTION), and realized that holding on to wounds is something which happens mostly when there is already an underlying strata of hyperarousal. I will be mad about one thing one day, then replace it with something else the next day, but the whole thing is glued together with an underlying emotional current which makes it easy for me to float the paper boats of wrath and hostility, both of which amount to unforgiveness.
I take that underlying energy and transform it now into this memory of this offense, now into the other. And new ones spring out, more powerful, more palpable, more colorful, more charged, easily.
To forgive, phenomenologically, in terms of how it feels, how it presents itself to the consciousness, amounts to relaxing a tight knot of emotional dysregulation. It is relaxing a tension.
And obviously, no specific forgiveness will help, if there remains an underlying current of energy. Learning to calm the limbic system, to self regulate, amounts to the ability to forgive in advance.
We are animals, certainly. We are spirits, I believe. But our experience is where the two possibilities meet.
Forgiveness is the resolution of the fight or flight or shame response, from long ago. Humiliation is a wound, too, isn’t it? That wound triggers a chronic agitation, or emotional inflammation, that makes all future hurts easier to overreact to, and harder to let go of, which is to say forgive. We fight old battles, again and again, until we let them go. This we call forgiveness.
And you might say, well there was this one person, who hurt me long ago. My fiancee ran off with my best man on our wedding day. I will never forgive him. Well, what happens every time you think about it? You feel like breaking something. You feel like strangling one or both of them. You got into hyperarousal, in other words, in ways you can’t control, and this hyperarousal is liable to cause you to yell at someone you would not have yelled at, to drive too fast, to refuse to listen to your friends story. All of this only hurts you.
Forgiveness is allowing this tender spot to relax. Forgiveness is returning to a base of calm. Forgiveness is reaching a point where when you see or hear their names, or even see them, that you are not triggered.
Almost everything in life, good and evil, wealth and poverty, has to do with trauma and relaxation. I really believe this. Nothing is more important than figuring out how to undo trauma, and teaching the traumatized to let go of their natural fear, pain, grief, anger and shame.