Partial nonforgiveness requires a person to bear alone the burden of intense ambivalence and continuing grief. The illusion of family harmony is lost forever, but it is replaced with something limited, painful and real.
DETACHED UNFORGIVERS
Anybody who struggles with intimate betrayal must reengage with the experience, actively choosing to think and to feel what was once unbearable. But understanding need not lead to forgiveness. Indeed, it is a major accomplishment for some men and women to temper their hatred and tolerate their indifference. For the sake of their own emotional survival, they can do no more.
Disengaging from a fatally flawed parent or intimate, sometimes seems to come naturally, without anguish. Biochemist Annie Travers remembers never feeling anything but contempt for her father. "He was a selfish brute who considered his children his property. Once when I was a teenager, he said, 'I can do anything I want with you'--and he would have if my uncle hadn't threatened to call the police." Annie's uncle, a blind biologist who lived with the family, was her protector, mentor and soulmate. "He taught me how to think," she said.
Annie discussed what must have been a miserable situation with scientific detachment, and not a hint of recrimination. Throughout our interview, she referred to her father as "this guy," and seemed surprised when I asked what qualities she had inherited from him. "I'm my uncle's daughter," she said. Many children who had a poisonous parent identify someone else as their "real" parent.
Under the right circumstances, a traumatic past can be left behind without being consciously mourned. Living with a beloved, admirable uncle who shared and validated her feelings--"I always knew we would be better off without my father and my uncle agreed with me," Annie said--made her solution possible.
Still, no daughter is born despising her father; what became of her original love? "You have deep feelings, but they get lost," Annie admitted. "What love there was initially got strangled." As Annie matured, her fear and hatred evolved into indifference, and though she still speaks of her father with distaste, she is not bitter. "People are much too willing to blame others. Since I moved out 30 years ago, my life has been what I make of it--I'm responsible." A self-reliant attitude, the opposite of vengefulness, circumscribes the influence of a bad father.
Annie was away on a fellowship when her father died, and she had no qualms about not coming back for the funeral; in their last conversation he had berated her for not going to medical school. Annie is the first to acknowledge that her father had a negative impact on her life--"It took me a long time to feel men could be trusted," she said but she claims never to have been disturbed by her unwillingness to reconcile with her father. "I never felt the slightest need to do it."
Though friends and therapists have repeatedly warned her that her unforgiving attitude would eventually be her downfall, she isn't afraid they're right. "People try to convince me that because I didn't make peace with him I'd suffer for it down the line; they feel that there hasn't been closure. I think it's more about them and their own fathers. I'm fine. It hasn't been a trauma for me." For others to find Annie wanting because of what she has not done is an imposition of alien values. Annie is a woman at peace, at a price that does not seem excessive.
For many others, however, achieving that sort of detached peace does not come as easily. Jessica Kramer was devastated when a close friend died, but not when her mother expired. "She died of cancer when I was 38 and I was mostly glad to be rid of her," she says.
Jessica's distancing from her mother started at an early age. "She was cold, uninvolved, and rejecting and never interested in me," says Jessica. "By age five, I had given up on her. I was never sure whether she hated me or was just indifferent. I was a burden and a competitor." Her mother was so detached from Jessica that she was surprised to notice that her 28-year old daughter was left-handed, and so mean-spirited that she used the money earmarked for Jessica's education to speculate in real estate.
Jessica initially blamed herself for her mother's inability to respond and condemned herself for despising her mother. And her lack of grief at her mother's death made her question her own character; what kind of a daughter--what kind of a human being--was she? We are, after all, commanded by scripture to honor our mothers and fathers, even to love them, no matter the transgressions. Not to do so is unnatural, we are led to believe.
"To mourn my friend and not my mother seemed like what a monster feels," recalls Jessica. "It was a shining moment when my analyst said, 'It's okay to love your friend more than your mother.' What had been disturbing me was not so much that she didn't love me but that I didn't love her. Not loving her meant I was like her, a person incapable of love. When I realized that I didn't love her because she didn't love me, I understood that I could still love. I haven't forgiven her, but I'm not angry anymore. She had some nice qualities, like liveliness. But in the most important way, she was never really my mother."
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