Wow. Striking share. Thanks for sharing that powerful NPR story. I resonate with this way of defining forgiveness, especially with atrocious harms like the Rwandan genocide or your own personal experiences. It reminds me of a Buddhist saying that rage is like holding onto a burning coal with the intention of throwing it at someone else. You are the one that gets burned.

I think forgiveness is a reclaiming of our unconditional dignity, in spite of (and maybe because of) whatever happened to us. As Maya Angelou said, encountering what hurts us invites us to know who we are, what we can rise from, and how we can still come out of it. I've always felt that forgiveness was more of an internal process of freeing ourselves from what holds us down, burdens us, victimizes us. The responsibility of the other person changing or healing is not ours to carry, but maybe our own liberation can be contagious and impact those around us. Violence and hate only multiplies without this liberation.

When I look at all the ways in which I've tightly held onto some sort of revenge or hatred because of something that happened to me, I've found myself making choices that weren't the healthiest or most conscious. So it kept me in this negative feedback loop. I would cut myself off from pleasure, joy, compassion, self-love. My ability to know myself outside of the state of distress or oppression. I started wondering if this anger really served me and my healing... let alone the consideration of people or things that hurt me. How do we unknowingly keep ourselves small, trapped in a set of circumstances, believing we have no agency?

This freedom we give to ourselves when we forgive is a way of life for the courageous. And it's a way to honor the pain and suffering we've went through. There's a quote from one of my favorite books Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini: “I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.”

Sounds like you're on a healing path. And so even though this nightmare of your past emerged, you are different. Your life circumstances are different. Maybe this dream is also a reminder to reflect on how far you've come, as imperfect and messy as this journey has been for you.

"Some events and feelings remain raggedly unsettled in us, and we have to trust that they make our human system work better - who knows how? This may explain why not every one of our psychological issues can, or is meant to be fully addressed, finally processed, or completely resolved. Our assignment is only to let go of our relentless need to control our feelings and to keep granting hospitality to our story, with all its gaps in need of mending and all its griefs that have no tidy ending. What a complex and enigmatic challenge it is to understand and to become fully human." - David Richo