Sunday, 22 August 1999f o r g i v e
By Bonnie Henry
To forgive is divine. It also may save your life. Suicide, rage, addiction, guilt, depression, withdrawal, physical ailments - all can be traced to an inability to forgive. So says counselor Patti Harada, who for the last few weeks has been holding weekly how-to sessions on forgiveness to anyone who feels the need. There is much to forgive on this particular night, including: * Betrayal. * Rape. * Abuse. * Death of a spouse due to someone driving while drugged. * Loss of health. * Suicide of a loved one. Here, in a community room at University Medical Center, 18 men and women, ranging in age from late teens to late 60s, struggle to resolve those issues - by forgiving. Most of the struggles are anonymous, read from cards the group turned in the week before. Harada has no trouble adding her own issues to the pile. ``In April of last year, my brother committed suicide. He was 49,'' says Harada. ``But the losses with my brother have been going on since he was 8.'' And every issue of forgiveness, she adds, ``is an issue dealing with loss.'' A grief and trauma counselor since 1984 and a 1998 graduate of the University of Arizona's psychology department, Harada, 52, did her honors thesis on forgiveness. The idea, she says, came from clients as well as through co-teaching with UA psychology professor Gary Schwartz in his Psychology of Love and Spirituality classes. She will pursue her doctorate this fall with the Saybrook Institute. ``I've been giving the forgiveness lectures for two years in the class,'' says Harada. ``A significant number weep with relief when they learn you don't have to apply compassion in order to get better.'' The weekly sessions at UMC loosely follow the format - if not the same material - of relationship lectures Harada used to attend in Southern California. ``There was this psychologist who gave a lecture every Wednesday night for $5,'' says Harada. ``We all loved it.'' Harada's forgiveness sessions do much more than just haul out old hurts. They also define what forgiveness is - and what it is not. ``To forgive means to release, to let go of the resentment, the hatred,'' she says. Forgiveness does not, however, mean reconciling, excusing, forgetting, or pardoning someone's behavior, Harada stresses. ``People think forgiveness means to love the injurer and be compassionate. People get on talk shows because they've forgiven someone who murdered their children or their spouse.'' But that kind of compassion, says Harada, takes years, if ever, to achieve. ``There is no way possible for most of us to apply compassion over that kind of pain.'' And forgiveness doesn't require it, says Harada, since it's about freeing yourself from the pain of your injury, not about freeing the injurer. ``Forgiving is for you. Once we allow ourselves to be free-flowing, the anger, hurt and grief will dissipate, as well as the sense of betrayal, the sense of abandonment.'' To achieve that divine state takes work, however. It involves self-love, self-honesty and a willingness to absorb and accept emotional pain, says Harada. ``You don't ever get over the loss,'' she cautions. ``You stretch your capacity to feel the loss. You sit still and feel the pain and go on.'' The first step, self-love, means getting ``very tender and very kind'' toward oneself, says Harada. ``You're interested in the fact that you hurt.'' Maybe you meditate, hug a favorite pillow or gaze at baby pictures of yourself. Next comes trying to see the truth through self-honesty. ``That includes being willing to recognize your own psychological defenses to your pain, such as resentment or self-righteousness,'' says Harada. Last comes surrendering to the pain and grief, then letting it go.
Yet anger, she says, is good. ``Experience your anger and your grief deeply and completely and respond to your experience with kindness.'' Being caring and kind, she adds, is also ``absolutely critical and changes how you experience the loss.'' It's a kindness that extends even to total strangers, says Harada, who advocates such tiny tasks as passing up a prime parking spot to the car behind you. One who is trying to apply these lessons of forgiveness in Harada's class is Traute Witlox, 58, whose husband is suffering from a variety of ailments, including Alzheimer's. ``I never really addressed that I was angry with my husband,'' says Witlox, who also has to deal with the guilt of putting her husband in a care home. ``You see a little bit of this person die every day and you have to deal with it on a daily basis,'' says Witlox. ``Usually, somebody dies, there's grief, and you go on. With me, it's been 15 years.'' Harada, she says, ``is giving us the tools we can use to heal ourselves.'' Rosemary Shogan, 52, also is learning how to forgive. Fourteen months ago, Shogan's husband, D.J. Adams, aimed a shotgun at his head and pulled the trigger outside his Sahuarita mobile home. Though the couple had separated a few months earlier due to what Shogan says was Adams' increasing moodiness, they had remained close. ``We saw each other all the time,'' says Shogan, who had moved to Tucson. During that time, her husband ``was very confused and would cry a lot,'' says Shogan, who blamed her husband's problems on a history of alcohol abuse. Only after his death did she learn that her husband had a brain tumor. The day before his death, says Shogan, her husband called her up and told her, ``Honey, I don't want you to worry, but I'm feeling very suicidal.''
A few hours later, her husband was dead. Now she's working to forgive not only him, but herself. ``It's hard to say, `Wow, I love you, Rosemary,' '' says Shogan, who attends Harada's sessions as well as a grief support group. ``Being kind to me is a hard one right now. He had talked about suicide before and I didn't do anything except worry about a stupid cake.'' Shogan learned about the forgiveness sessions when Harada visited her bereavement group, conducted by grief counselor Janna Excell. ``Forgiveness comes up in grief because of the emotions,'' says Excell, who works for Evergreen Mortuary, Cemetery and Crematory. ``After a death, people may feel guilty. With suicide, there are very intense emotions and anger.'' And anger, says Excell, is bondage. ``It controls and manipulates.'' About seven of the 10 or so now attending her weekly group have started going to Harada's classes. Excell says she is already noticing the difference. ``Their faces are not as tight, they come in smiling, they're a little bit lighter about things,'' she says. Once so despairing that she, too, considered suicide, Shogan now says, ``I feel pain every morning when I wake up. ``But I'm making a new life. I want to love my life. I want to feel again.'' |
