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To forgive is to make yourself a willing sacrifice.

I am not speaking of situations where someone wrongs you and makes earnest efforts to return to your good graces. I’m speaking of situations where you are deeply hurt, abused, neglected, taken for granted, taken advantage of – and the idea you should forgive these things. Turn the other cheek. Be the bigger person.

“Carrying the weight of grudges is heavy and wears you down. Forgiveness is for you.”

Except this is false – and worse, it’s bypassing.

Forgiving when you don’t want to is an act of self-betrayal, and it’s self-martyrdom done in the name of personal liberation that instead represses emotion and builds a sense of resentment.

You are not rewarded for kindness to those who have done you wrong. When you forgive them, you are not liberating yourself. You are taking their karma as your own. You suffer ego death so that they may continue without consequence, at least so long as they encounter others who are willing to spare them the results of their poor decisions.

The reward for the martyr is martyrdom itself. There are no virgins waiting in the afterlife. No chests full of treasure at the end of the rainbow. All that willing ego death brings is more ego death.

The Facade of “Christ Consciousness”

There’s no talking forgiveness without addressing the elephant in the room – that modern ideas of forgiveness are taken wholesale from Christianity.

Jesus as presented in the gospels and the culture at large is an artificial creation pulling from many sources, but venerated primarily as the lamb of God – the one who suffered and died for the totality of mankind’s sins.

Personally, I don’t believe this accurately represents who Jesus likely was. I think, if he was ever a man, he was a magician who became so skilled he was worshiped as a god and mythologized.

And I see remnants of this within the Christ story. The Bible is full of esoteric symbolism for those with eyes to see it. Christ nailed to the cross is a man whose body is fixed to the four corners of the abyss. It is a metaphor for initiation, death, crossing between the Sefirothic and Qliphothic trees – from life into the underworld.

But this is not the Christ new agers and Christians adore. That Christ is a martyr with unconditional love for mankind.

And everyone wants to be that. To be so loving, to be so good they are truly above all human concerns and can immerse themselves in a state of pure love.

I think embodying that sort of love is possible – the kind reflective of Gaia, where it is at once all-consuming and impersonal, coupled with a chaos that could eat someone whole without a second thought – but to worship and emulate Christ is to embody the scapegoat.

Seeking bliss while modeling Jesus will never end well. The end of his story has already been written – he lost everything and everyone he loved betrayed him. This is the nature of accepting others’ karma.

If they do not crucify you, the ritual is incomplete.

Hence the martyr who dies to themselves expecting reward will be left wanting every time.

And this should be plainly obvious to anyone who has been in an abusive relationship. When has loving an abuser ever ended the abuse? Perhaps loving with boundaries and accountability – a wakeup call – but not love that’s truly without conditions. To be without conditions nothing would be deprived from them no matter how horrible they were.

For all practical purposes unconditional love doesn’t exist on Earth or among humanity. Unbreakable love? That’s possible – built on the back of overcoming shared hardships, built on a mutual trust and adoration of each other’s character.

But unconditional love? The only place that exists is between a parent and child – and anybody from a rough background knows even that ain’t guaranteed.

Unconditional love sounds amazing until you are confronted by pedophiles and rapists. Who can truly say they experience love for them? And who among those could truly be said to be of sound mind, capable of comprehending the true depths of what these people have inflicted upon others?

Perhaps a kind of love and compassion could exist, but in the sense that it would be sending them into the afterlife wishing that they be purified and reincarnated into a form where they will not repeat their mistakes. That someone could feel light, fluffy love toward them sounds like derangement more than it does an ideal to strive for.

Getting Clear on What You Mean

It might look like I’m playing petty semantic games. What’s the difference if someone says they have forgiven someone if they successfully release and move on from a situation? And why would being Christ-like entail going all the way and embracing martyrdom as a way of life?

It matters because collective trauma runs deep, and so do personal traumas. We are a people waging countless wars within ourselves that are so complex they make War and Peace look like a pulp novel.

Whether or not you truly “forgive” someone matters when you are trying to put words to a mess of complex emotions that are difficult to separate and define. You cannot process what you feel and truly move on until you can give your feelings their proper names and let yourself feel what has been locked away.

We talk about our feelings a lot these days but very few of us are emotionally literate, and this is disastrous on both a personal and a magickal level.

You can lie to yourself and say you’ve let things go, but the subconscious is laid bare in the ritual chamber, and sooner or later you will face yourself.

I Did Not Heal By Forgiving

I talk about – and can talk about – these things because I’ve had to recover from heavy trauma.

Sparing my audience the gory details, my father was a bastard and his death was the best thing that ever happened to me. I tried pretending that wasn’t true. I knew the abuse he suffered at the hands of my grandfather. I knew how he’d been rejected and wounded and how it seemed no matter what he did or what he tried he never gained any ground. On a human level, I was and still am perfectly capable of empathizing with him.

But as his child, he had a responsibility to me – and he, as a grown man, had a responsibility to delve within himself and get a handle on the forces he so brashly unleashed on anyone who stoked his temper.

When I followed the common wisdom – that I needed to forgive him in order to let go and move on with my life – all it did was bring more pain. And I wondered – was there something wrong with me? Was there something I was missing? A step that I had skipped?

And what I came around to is that there wasn’t a bone in my body that felt any kind of forgiveness was anything but a betrayal of myself and the child still within me that cowered in fear as that man went on his tirades.

Wherever he is now, I don’t wish him ill. In fact I hope he finds peace and is reincarnated in a place where he’s able to work through his traumas and emerge as a better being than he ever was here.

But as it stands, I also never care to see him again – across the rest of eternity if I can help it. I won’t hold his next incarnations responsible for anything this one did, but wherever his path of evolution takes him, I want it to be far away from me.

Forgiveness ≠ Letting Go

Divorcing concepts and feelings from actions has been absolutely disastrous for both communication and relationships as a whole.

Take love. “I love you” doesn’t mean jack shit if the person isn’t there for you when you’re struggling or need someone to talk to. Genuine love means they will carve time out for you when you need someone at your side. When you’re in the thick of it, they’ll hop into the trenches with you and pull you to the end if they have to.

Love that’s just a word and a feeling is fleeting and worthless – the cotton candy of emotions. Love carries a bond of blood. “I will bleed for you, and you for me.”

Someone who spreads warm fuzzies with unearned words of affection is just feeding off dopamine hits, not establishing bonds of real worth.

I see forgiveness as an action. When I forgive someone, I consider their debts to me paid in full and their relationship with me restored. There may be cases where, for whatever reason, it’s best we’re not in each other’s lives, but I’d be open to it somewhere down the line if I have genuinely forgiven a person.

When I hear of forgiveness in a context where, “You can forgive them and never let them in your life again” my question is – in what way is that forgiveness? “I consider your debts paid and hold nothing against you but I never want to see you again” doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. You clearly are holding something against that person if you’re never letting them in again.

Dishonest language sabotages healing. Say what you mean – if they’re not welcome, they’re not forgiven.

If you’re kicking them out of your life a sound “fuck you” and “I’ll see you in hell” seems both more cathartic and far more honest. Even just an, “I’m not feeling this anymore” comes off as less self-righteous than “I forgive you.”

Making Everything About Forgiveness Is Bypassing

Anger makes people deeply uncomfortable – especially their own.

And people want simple answers, especially when they’ve been traumatized. Something that makes their emotions easier to categorize and move beyond, but too often these structures come down to avoiding what we feel and trying to reach catharsis without getting deep into the mud within our own hearts.

If you look around, it’s pretty obvious many people saying they’ve forgiven everyone from their past is just repressing everything they’d rather not feel deeper within themselves. And the more they talk about how much they’ve forgiven, the less they have.

They’re martyrs in their own lives, hoping that if they follow the blueprint given to them that someday they’ll actually mean the words they say.

You can’t care about old situations forever and live a good life. You have to let things die sooner or later. Get it out of your system and move on from it for good.

But there’s no singular solution to that.

Forgiveness is the right move in some cases. Building bridges and repairing bonds. In others, nothing less but fury and a stern middle finger will do the trick.

Honesty is what puts the heart at ease. Yeah, if you’re pissed off and never get it out of your system it’ll eat you alive. If you’re pissed off but you do something about it and you use it to put yourself in a position where that situation or person can never hurt you again, it’s your ticket to closure and moving on for good.

You haven’t reached the point of peace when you’ve forgiven someone – you’ve reached the point of peace when you can look back at situations with little to no emotional charge and you know if similar circumstances arise you will be entirely capable of handling it.

When you have been deeply wounded, forgiveness sets you up to be devoured by your grief and anger. It’s an act of self-abandonment – you are telling yourself and the world at large that you don’t matter. That what they did wasn’t so bad because they matter more than you. We can intellectualize that all we want – the body and nervous system know what we’re doing and don’t care about how we explain it. Our actions matter more than our thoughts and words.

So often what you’re dealing with is a wounded inner child, and what that inner child needs in the here and now is a parent that doesn’t abandon them when they’re threatened. You are the only one who can fill that role for yourself. You need to demonstrate that YOU have your own back and that those wounded and betrayed parts of yourself are safe with you.

That’s what healing looks like, and if you have to forgive yourself for the times you’ve abandoned yourself, do that. By all means, do that. That kind of forgiveness IS essential to healing. You have to forgive yourself for the times you didn’t know better. You have to forgive yourself for the times you let people cross your lines without speaking up or walking away. You have to forgive yourself for the times you took abuse to keep the peace.

But if you’re angry, pretending you’re above it won’t bring you peace – it’ll craft a bigger cross.

And you will die for the sins of those who hurt you over and over again until you’ve learned that lesson. You alone decide when you come down from that cross.

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