Forgiveness: Why You Should Consider It and How to Forgive [PsychCentrail.com]

Jane Stevens posted:

I'm glad that EMDR has helped, Bob. And I hope writing about it gets you the rest of the way.

Thank You so much, Jane. I got through last night in a much better frame of reference/attitude/outlook.

Thank You, Jane.

I'm glad that EMDR has helped, Bob. And I hope writing about it gets you the rest of the way.

     The night before I witnessed my mother's handgun suicide, as a teenager, she approached my [younger] sister and I in the backyard, and said she wanted to apologize for being 'such a lousy mother'. I replied: "It sounds like you're going away, and I don't believe you'd do that, so I refuse to forgive you." The following morning I asked my father, as he prepared to give me a ride to summer school, why his [on-duty] gun was in the car. We both knew he had two handguns, but he 'ignored' my question. When I got a ride home after school, I noticed a note to my father in my mother's writing, on the kitchen counter. My sister was not at home, yet. As I was getting hungry, I thought I'd see if Mom was taking a nap. I found her with an open Holy Bible in one hand, my father's off-duty handgun in her other hand, and 'her brains' all over the wall/headboard. At hat time, state law prohibited "aiding or abetting a suicide attempt". My father re-married one month and twenty days later......

     After almost 30 years, I did EMDR which stopped the flashbacks and intrusive recollections of this event. However, much of the 'guilt' about my reply to her the evening before, and my 'less than assertive' query to my father that morning, seem to have been 'stuffed', and as I approach the [52nd] "anniversary date" of this event, this year, I thought I'd write about it, as you had suggested in the article.

     I had another 'incident', where I was less than forgiving, that I was going to write about, where someone who chaired a governmental committee of 'consumer survivors', who tried to 'coerce' me into not talking about "trauma-informed" services... (almost three years after the committee had established a goal of developing a position paper on 'Coercion'), and I ['vengefully'] raised the issue of that 'Coercion'position paper, every [executive committee] meeting after that--until his term as Chairperson expired. We even began to make headway as a group on the 'Coercion' position paper, after that ...