Forgiving the “Unforgivable”?

I’ve been thinking about forgiveness a lot lately, and all its forms and applications. It’s been easier to forgive in sobriety, but not every case is the same.

As a drinking person, I was quick to forgive on the surface, yet held nasty grudges and spiteful feelings toward people who I felt had wronged me.

I was angry and spiteful about my ex-husband for over a year after we split. I spent my time spitting sarcastic venom about him to my family and friends, and even after telling myself I had forgiven him, a reminder of him would pop up and the anger would settle back in, like rainwater setting into a thirsty garden. Being angry and unforgiving felt like my right. And, in all honestly, it was my right – everyone has every right to feel whatever they feel. I’d never be one to tell someone else that they have no right to feel angry, joyous, sad, content, confused, frustrated, scared, safe or otherwise. It’s not my place.

So, more than a right, I felt it was the correct way to feel. He had done me so wrong. He had hurt me so badly, cut so deeply to my core. How could I turn the other cheek to that? How could I actually embrace forgiveness and feel it within my heart, rather than just lying through my teeth about forgiving him for how inconsiderate he was, and how horribly he shattered my heart?

I think that I can say now, without lying or hyperbole, that I have forgiven him. I don’t condone his actions, and the hurt is still very real, but somehow, i’ve come to a place of honesty with myself that has shown me that staying angry with him and refusing to forgive him for any real or perceived sins isn’t doing a damn thing for me or mine. He and I don’t talk. There’s no reconciliation in the near future for us. I could just as easily walk around with a chip on my shoulder about what he did.

But I just…can’t anymore. Not with him.

The interesting thing, though, is that even though I’ve reached this point in regard to my ex-husband, I still feel like I’m failing to forgive other people in my life whose words and actions caused me pain. There is one person in particular, my most recent ex, whose actions post-breakup made me feel unsafe, uncomfortable, and disrespected, and I’m getting to the point where I feel like I need to forgive him in order to move on with my own life. That’s proving to be extremely difficult.

After we broke up, he stalked my social media accounts and stalked around my neighborhood; he took photos of places near my apartment and posted them to social media with vague but pointed attacks on my character; he believed that I was communicating with him via Spotify playlists, and once he realized my public playlist had music on it that implied I had found someone new, he emailed me to ask about it and created another playlist directed toward me, with songs on it about wanting to hurt someone, kill someone, etc.

He sent me mail to my apartment after I asked him not to contact me, moved to my city (he lived out of state when we met and dated) in a self-admitted attempt to try to get back together with me, and then publicly tried to bash me on social media once he learned I wasn’t going to give into him.

This all came to a head last March when, after I tried to block him on Instagram, he came after me and called me — and I pull these insults from the last email he sent me — insecure, paranoid, uncivil, delusional, messed up, passive, a bad communicator, a monstrosity of a paranoid woman, and stupid for feeling uncomfortable. He told me I needed to “woman-up” and be civil with him if we ever crossed paths again. He was still living out-of-state at the time.

But then, he moved to my city in April, a month later.

Since then, I’ve directly run into him twice, and have probably crossed paths with him unknowingly a few more times than that.

Knowing that he lives here is hard for me. It was much, much harder at first. I was never sure if I would walk around a corner and bump into him. I couldn’t ever be certain that the meetup groups I was going to at the time would be a safe space for me. I tried talking to the group leader, who initially blocked my ex from the group Instagram page, but she relented and unblocked him after he put up a huge stink and started instant messaging random people, asking them why they were treating him unfairly.

Now — and hear me out, I know this sounds crazy — I want to make peace with the situation and forgive him. It’s been over a year since the blowout email exchange and I still walk around my city sometimes with the fear that I will be confronted by a chance encounter with him. He has made his mark in the community already, establishing himself as an active member in the local Preservation Alliance, a keen local Instagrammer who attends the many Instagram-friendly events in my town (which, originally, I attended as a way to meet people), and a vocal advocate in local policy creation within his specific field of interest.

I know this is all kind of vague, but the main point is this: there is someone living, working and socializing in my community who made me feel very unsafe and uncomfortable in the past. I want to forgive him. I don’t know how.

Something tells me that there’s a way through sobriety to find the kind of inner peace needed to forgive. I wasn’t truly able to forgive my ex-husband until I’d been sober for some time. The way I managed to do it was to constantly remind myself of all the ways my ex-husband is 100%, undeniably human. He is made of the same matter as me, and has just as many faults as I do, even if they’re different. He hurt me badly. He lied. He cheated. He ripped my life apart. But He is human, and the only way I’ve found myself able to live with the ache he gave me is by knowing that his humanness guarantees him a certain ache, as well. I wasn’t the perfect wife or partner to him. There were things I did wrong, and there were times when I failed him. Neither of us are perfect, and now that it’s over, the only way forward from that is to make my way through all the dark clouds of reasoning I could conjure about why he’s undeserving of my forgiveness.

And the truth of the matter is this: I’ll never forgive him to his face. At least, I doubt I will. It’s not that I wouldn’t tell my ex-husband that I forgive him, or that I’m sorry for how I failed him, if he and I were to sit across from one another in a room. it’s that I don’t think I’ll ever have the chance. He and I will probably never have the opportunity to speak face-to-face again. We don’t email or text or stay connected on social media. The line is permanently severed. So, I’ve had to find peace with forgiving him internally, without him really knowing, and I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that I might never get my actual, genuine, honest-to-goodness apology to him. And I’m okay with that. I have to be.

With this other ex, it’s a different story. He’s in my space, crawling around my city, permeating my previously safe socializing spaces. I don’t know what part of town he lives in, where he works or what he does with his life, but the few times I’ve crossed paths with him have been enough. They made my hands shake. I get that weird sensation all over my body, where it feels like all of the veins in my face, neck, arms and legs are expanding out of my skin. My vision turns tunneled. How can I forgive when such a strong, uncomfortable feeling rises up within me at the mere thought of him?

I think, in part, I want to forgive him because I also feel some small need to apologize. When I broke up with him, I was cold. Distant. Calculated. I pulled the plug and didn’t give him any room to sneak back in. At the time, this was my defense against a relationship that I saw developing into something really unhealthy, really fast. He had problems setting boundaries with me, he wanted me to be his 110%, his everything. After dating for only a month and a half, he was asking me to help him make healthy life decisions, and was talking about the decorations we’d put into the home we would someday own together. He started mentioning his ideas for wedding photos.

So, yeah, I fled. I severed that connected quickly once I knew it was over for me. I didn’t want there to be any room for interpretation or a chance for him to sneak back in. And, understandably, he did not handle it well.

A year and a half later, I want to apologize to him for how coldly I treated him, but I know that opening that line of communication with him is putting me at risk of opening a door that won’t be so easily closed again. I also want to find it in my heart to forgive him for how he acted afterwards, including all of the nasty things he said to me in private, and the nasty things he said about me online.

I need to forgive him. I need to remember what I learned when I finally came to forgiveness for my ex-husband. But for some reason, I can’t. There’s a block up in my mind that’s making it incredibly difficult to forgive his immature, abusive behaviors. There’s a deeper, darker part of myself that was so fascinated by his obsession with me, that it made it hard to look away, even if it was him saying something hurtful about me or bashing my character.

But it’s over now. Really over. As far as I can tell, we’ve both moved onto the next phase in our respective lives. There’s no connection. It’s been over a year since our last interaction. The world has moved forward.

I need to move forward, as well. It’s going to take a lot of quiet reflection and deep, inner-searching to understand how his vile behaviors toward me came from a place of hurt, fear, insecurity and sadness. It is going to make me uncomfortable to come to a place where I genuinely forgive what he did, and where I can be comfortable moving forward without being able to offer him the apology I think he deserves.

I’m curious to hear from other sober folks out there who have mastered the art of forgiveness: what other ways are there to forgive someone who cut you so deeply, other than trying to see them for the human they are? I’m struggling right now with this and would love some perspective.

❤ Em. Day 271.