Forgive and Forget — The Lie We Were Told

The previous post opened something I was not entirely expecting.

Messages arrived. Privately, carefully, from people carrying things they had not said out loud in a very long time. The same struggles. The same weight. And threaded through many of them — the same question about forgiving other people that I had wrestled with myself for years.

So let me tell you a story. And then let me tell you what I learned.

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She Came to Us in 2012

She was fifteen years old.

Small. Petite. Her growth — physically and mentally — had halted at around nine and a half years old due to trauma that had begun when she was five. Ten years of sexual abuse at the hands of her father.

The system failed her in ways that are difficult to write about without anger rising. At one point she was removed from her father’s home. Then returned, after he completed a parenting course. Her mother knew. Her grandmother knew. Neither of them did anything.

When she came to us, something in my chest ripped open.

I was no stranger to sexual abuse. My experience was different — not a father — but the emotions were ones I knew intimately. The anger. The shame. The confusion. The hatred that sits in you like something alive. I had wished, more times than I can count, the fleas of a thousand camels on the person responsible, and that his fingers would turn to fishhooks the moment he thought to scratch himself.

But I had learned not to talk about it. Nobody wanted to hear it. So I pushed it down deep and ignored it, the way you ignore a wound by simply not looking at it.

When that girl arrived, everything that had been buried came up to meet me. I was confronted not only with her journey but with my own.

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The Remark

One day, a woman made a comment that she almost certainly intended kindly.

She said that the girl simply needed to learn to forgive and forget.

The anger that moved through me in that moment was something I am not entirely able to describe. That I did not slap that woman is, in retrospect, genuinely miraculous.

But the remark lodged itself and would not leave. Because I was — and am — a Christian. And I knew the Bible instructs us to forgive. I knew that. I had known it for years and had quietly failed at it for just as long.

I did not want to forgive my own abuser. And I could not bring myself to tell that girl to forgive hers.

So I went to my yarn.

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What the Yarn Absorbed

I was in the early days of running a small yarn shop at the time. I was working with t-shirt yarn — t-yarn — a waste product from fabric mills that arrived in thirty-kilogram bales. One enormous, knotted mess. My job was to unknot it, sort it, and wind it into balls.

I can tell you now, with the benefit of hindsight, that trying to unknot thirty kilograms of tangled yarn while carrying the kind of rage I was carrying is deeply, profoundly therapeutic. I cursed continuously. Every knot that gave way absorbed something. Every completed ball that I kicked across the room took something with it.

I tried to crochet during that period. It was not possible. My tension in one row would be so tight I could not get the hook into the next. Then it would collapse into something so loose and sloppy it had to be frogged. I frogged so much that the cotton became thin and hairy and eventually unusable. I tried knitting. That did not work either. I tried spinning. I treadled the wheel so fast and so furiously that what came off it was twisted so tightly you could probably have towed a truck with it.

Every single one of these was a failure as a craft project. Every single one of them kept my hands busy while my brain did something it could not do any other way.

And over those months, I learned four things.

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What I Actually Learned

One. Forgive and forget is not in the Bible.

Not anywhere. We are instructed to forgive. Full stop. The forgetting was a verse taken out of context and twisted into an expectation no human being is equipped to meet.

When God forgives our sins through repentance, He chooses never to think of them again. That is what He does. It is not something we are expected to replicate. How could we be? That would require voluntary, selective memory loss. If that were possible, there are many things I would have chosen to forget long before forgiveness ever entered the picture.

You do not have to forget. You are not failing if you cannot forget. That was never the instruction.

Two. You do have to forgive. Not for them — for you.

Unforgiveness changes you. I have worn that t-shirt. Resentment, carried long enough, hardens the heart into something that keeps people at a distance and steals the joy from every ordinary morning. I became one of the hardest of heart people during those years. That anyone chose to stay beside me through that is something I do not take lightly.

Living in bitterness is not a punishment you inflict on the person who hurt you. They are almost certainly not feeling it. It is a punishment you inflict on yourself and everyone around you. It is not worth it.

Three. Forgiveness is not a feeling. It is a decision.

If you wait until you feel forgiving, you will wait your entire life.

I made a decision. Every morning I got up and said out loud — to myself, in my own voice — words something like this: Today I choose to walk in forgiveness. I will not allow the chains of anger, resentment and hate to steal my joy today. I forgive this person for this.

I named the person. I named the specific things. Then I prayed for the strength to stand by that decision for just that one day. Not forever. Just today.

Some days were easy. Some days were extraordinarily hard. But gradually, over months, the easy days began to outnumber the hard ones. Gradually, what I was deciding and speaking out each morning began to move — slowly, without fanfare — from my head into my heart. And one day I realised that what had begun as a decision had become something that felt, at last, like it was real.

Four. Forgiveness and reconciliation are not the same thing.

This is perhaps the most important thing I learned, and the one that is most often confused.

You have to forgive. For your own sake, for your own joy, for your own freedom — you have to forgive.

You do not have to reconcile.

Reconciliation is a separate decision, made by you alone, based on circumstances that only you can fully assess. No person in their right mind can expect a young girl who was raped for ten years to reconcile with her rapist. It makes no sense. And God does not expect it. Forgiveness releases you from the weight of what was done. It does not obligate you to hand that person access to your life again.

You get to decide that. Only you.

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How We Got Through It

After the initial storm of anger passed, I crocheted through the months of forgiveness.

It took months. For me and for her.

For me, yarn therapy. Row after row after row in whatever I happened to be making, my hands busy, my mind processing, the slow work of forgiveness happening somewhere underneath the surface.

For her, animals. She loved the animals on our farm with a fierceness that was not typical of any teenager I had known. A fifteen-year-old girl sitting in a large puddle of mud and water with a pet pig is not normal teenage behaviour. But she did it. Regularly. Without self-consciousness. For her, the animals were safety. They did not judge. They did not ask questions. They simply were there, and that was enough.

We all find our way through in the end. It does not look the same for everyone.

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What I Cannot Tell You

I cannot tell you how to do this. I cannot give you a formula or a timeline or a guarantee.

What I can tell you is that it is worth it. Even if it takes months. Even if it takes years. Even if some days feel like you are back at the beginning.

Take back your joy. Knit or crochet or spin your way through the struggle. Let your hands be busy while your heart does the work it needs to do.

And pray. Whatever that looks like for you — pray.

It will eventually drop into your heart. Not because you forced it there. Because you kept choosing it, one day at a time, until one day it arrived on its own.

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This is part of an ongoing series of honest posts. If something here resonated with you and you would like to share it, please do. There are people carrying this quietly who need to know they are not alone.