Forgiveness As the Way to Liberation
Disclaimer: The following blog post details emotional abuse, including transphobia.
"I want to forgive my parents," I told Astaroth.
I blocked my mother's and father's phone numbers two weeks ago. I blocked my mother because she stopped calling me, while guilt tripping me about how she "worried" about me whenever I confronted her about it, never realizing that an actually worried mother would call her child. I blocked my father because he set off another cycle of emotional abandonment—offering to come meet me in Oregon and then deciding not to, citing "homeless people"—and coercion—trying to get me, a grad student, to take a 14+ hour trip to visit him instead before later attempting to get me to move back East in proximity to him. This is the 84oo0th way my parents have treated me with these cycles.
They pay for my tuition, housing, basically my life. I am risking literally everything. My current stability and safety, and my future. It's an enormously stupid decision, one that I am facing all alone except for my spirits who encouraged me to go through with it, and are stopping me from unblocking them. Even if I did unblock them... emotionally abusive parents don't express that they are concerned about you. They twist your attempt to protect yourself emotionally into an attack on them, which justifies to them their screaming at you, cutting you down, and berating you.
My therapist said that science indicates that these assaults on your psyche are both more difficult and take longer to heal than physical wounds. People raised in emotionally abusive environments endure them every day for decades. For that reason, self worth never given a chance to develop, they either never leave or do so via entering romantic relationships with similar dynamics.
"It must take years of no contact before they can't hurt you anymore," Astaroth tells me.
I know she's right because my father's brand of coercion is new. Sure, he once called over 13 times while I was at work, left the most horrible voicemails and messages on every platform no matter where I blocked him, calling me "mentally ill," a "pain in the ass," "ungrateful," "making stuff up," "get the fuck home right now or I will get on a plane and make you," "i am taking you to the hospital you are sick," "everything I have done for you..." after I came out to him as transgender. But he apologized for that, when so many people I know who have been raised by abusive parents have never received anything close. Now he sends me Pride flyers in New York City, and used "the gay community is really friendly" as if he knows anything about the gay community there, as part of his most recent manipulation when he wanted me to move back. He can watch himself and his behavior, he has the free will and the ability to learn; he just won't do it unless forced with extreme and drastic consequences.
At the same time, he and my mother won't come here to find me. They don't care enough.
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I don't want to forgive my parents for them. I want to forgive them because the rage, pain, and resentment can literally kill me.
On my trauma class on Saturday, I learned that people who have 4 or more Adverse Childhood Experiences are 3-4 times more likely to develop heart disease and cancer, even if they don't use substances or partake in risky behaviors as coping mechanisms for what they endured. I counted at least 5 for me out of 10 offered examples in one survey.
In addition, 15 million people are diagnosed with an autoimmune disease in the US and the majority of them were assigned female at birth. 21 million experience undiagnosed chronic pain. I have met so many people among them, sometimes women with histories of self-hate and abuse, and many transgender. More evidence is coming out to illustrate that queer people have higher rates of disability than their cishet peers.
Every time my feelings about my parents rise, my body gets heated, tightens up, and sends a bunch of energy through me. I punched the wall of my shower this morning trying to get it out of my body. I can feel these daily incidents happen to me at least a dozen times a day, to varying intensity. I notice the exhaustion, a burnt out texture to it. I worry that these incidents are wearing away at my health and I believe they eventually will if they continue.
I don't want my hatred of my parents to make me sick. Some parts of me don't hate them at all, actually. And it seems to me as someone who has been in therapy with minimal breaks in the last 15 years, who is now on the pathway to becoming a therapist zemself, feelings toward any kind of object never end. They just change.
My feelings—according to the religion I just was initiated into as of this writing as well as the Shaivist via Luciferian practice I have at home—are not reality. There is in fact no objective reality, as Buddhism, Hinduism, and Judaism all agree. It is always established via our perceptions. That is the purpose of life; to experience and have perceptions so that reality can come. So I must change my reality with my parents by transforming my feelings for them into softer phases. Anger must become sadness. Sadness must become understanding. Understanding must become compassion.
When I learn to forgive my parents, and when I learn to forgive everyone who does wrong to the world, that is when I will become truly free.
"Let's make a deal," I say jokingly to my mother spirit, "I promise to stay away from them, if you promise to take care of me!"
Astaroth smiles, a maternal warmth softening her cheeks. She raises her arms and pulls me in. She smells like a strange citrus and pepper mix. "I always will, my darling boygirl. I always will."