The first chapter from Dr. Garfield's upcoming book, "Irreverent Forgiveness":

“9 Myths About Forgiveness"

(That Stop Forgiveness in Its Tracks)

When a deep injury is done to us, we never recover until we forgive. - Alan Paton

When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realised that the Lord doesn't work that way so I stole one and asked Him to forgive me. – Emo Philips

There are lot of misconceptions out there about what forgiveness is, and each of these myths can make forgiveness stagnate like meat in hot sun.  Worse, they may also leach all the fun out of the process and make even the facsimile of forgiveness a sweaty, horrible, slogging effort.  This chapter is about debunking forgiveness myths.  And even if you’ve got a serious challenge to forgiving, like a friend of mine whose young, beloved nephew was recently murdered, there may be some useful surprises for you in here.  In fact, no matter how big or small you consider your forgiveness load to be, this is applicable for you.  And in the process of reading this, you may already begin to feel freer, lighter, less constricted in your being.  You may find that by the end of this chapter your new understandings of forgiveness trigger some major life changes, and perhaps a few laughs of one kind or another.  At the end of this chapter, I have a few suggestions about what you can do with these revelations about forgiveness for yourself so you may take your own forgiveness journey forward.

And I wanted to share with you a little about my own personal journey before we launch into forgiveness myths.  If anyone has a right to speak about forgiveness, I’m one of them. When I was 4, my drug-addicted mom took me to drug parties.  I was taken to a back room where unspeakable and savage things were done to me.  By the time I was 5, I had what is commonly known as a multiple personality (Dissociative Identity Disorder, or DID).  By the time I was 6, I was suicidal.  And I did try, but it didn’t work out, or rather, it did, because I am still here.  Since I got all As in school, nobody noticed that I was drowning, like, all the time.  The severe asthma I had as a physical expression of my emotional trauma went completely unnoticed, and I was put on heavy doses of steroids for asthma that, since taken over years, puffed up my face like a full moon and padded me out like the Michelin Tire guy.  (My teen years, needless to say, were also miserable.)

Of course, having a drug-addicted mom and a well-intentioned but mainly absent dad (he and I are great buddies now, by the way) meant that there was lots wrong in my life besides being tortured.  By the time I was 11, I had finagled (‘managed to arrange’) my way into getting therapy, and stayed in therapy for 20 years, which is a really, really long time.  I spent YEARS cursing my mother and being horrible and feeling horrible.  When I was in my 30s, I was introduced to some forgiveness techniques which I will discuss in later chapters, and which I teach in courses and help people with individually.  I have finally, after years of belief-breaking hard work, forgiven, completely, the people who tortured me, and my mother, and most people who I have been hurt by to date.  It could have been done in a much shorter period of time, but I didn’t know how then.  I was inventing my own forgiveness system.

 And this is why I am writing this – for you, because I care passionately about you being happy, and I know with complete and utter certainty that if you do not forgive, you cannot be truly happy.  I am happy in my every day, even joyous on most days.  I have awesome people in my life who love me.  I have satisfying, profound, spiritual relationships.  I have fabulous sex that just keeps getting better (if that’s an over-share for you, sorry –and please consider loosening up!).  The fact is, given my history, just by not being a truck stop waitress in Idaho (no offence intended to truck stop waitresses in Idaho), just by not being a prostitute again (no offence intended to prostitutes), just by not being a miserable git (no offence intended to miserable gits), I am a wild success.  But I want more. 

So, I’m not just another PhD with a pretty face who has been working with people for over 20 years to transform their lives and recover their lives from the ashes of horrific experiences.  I’ve been there too, ever so personally.  And I want you to be blissfully happy as soon as possible.

I have heard such utter misery in my clinical practice.  One was a woman who was tortured as a baby by carers, then sodomised by her father for years, starting at age 2.  One was a man who truly had to kill a child in the line of duty.  Another was a man who as a boy endured a complete withdrawal of physical touch from aged 4, and he craved it like a starving thing, which he emotionally was.  Another was a woman torn by her husband’s infidelity and what to do with their family and marriage.  Another was a woman who was a refugee – and the misery she had whilst awaiting her status in her adopted country.  Another was a man who was bullied at work into severe depression.  Another was a woman who as a girl... etc.  And I have helped them all to free themselves.  There is nothing you, nor I, can go through that is not transcendable.  That’s one of the myths, by the way, that some things are just too big to forgive. 

And I’ve had clients who come to me practically apologising for being in pain because ‘it wasn’t that bad’.  Hey, if you’re in pain, you’re in pain.  There’s no competition. 

I’m clearing my life to allow more and more enlightenment and that deliciously Divine something in my life.  Forgiveness is key, and I so love handing this key over to you.  Your joy awaits...

Myth # 1: Forgiveness means ‘It’s OK’

The Truth: It’s NOT OK

 We have this problem thinking that if we forgive someone, it makes what happened OK.  Whatever happened to you, or you think happened to you (you may not remember consciously, or, you may think your father abandoned you when he went to get the newspaper but what really happened was that he was kidnapped by a serial killer) – whatever it was, it was not OK.  Loads of things we do to each other are not OK, some of them very subtle but devastating nevertheless. 

IT’S NOT OK.

Even AFTER you forgive, it’s still NOT OK.  Forgiveness is not some magic wand that makes the moral fabric of the universe do some bizarre, contorting calisthenics to make room for what happened to you or your loved one to be OK. 

Part of the problem is one of perspective or definition; what seems like betrayal to one person (e.g. cheating on a partner) is survival to the other (being sexual with another person is a way for the unfaithful partner to get themselves to stay in the marriage).  Adults who abuse children often frame things in ways that erase the horror of what they are doing, for instance: ‘It isn’t sexual abuse, it’s initiation’.  Or, abuse may be framed in a way that justifies it, as in, ‘I’m beating you for your own good’.  And most often, they really, really believe it, too. 

How can you know if it was OK?

My suggestion is, if you’re still trying to figure out if it was OK, to go with your feelings.  If you feel awful, trust that you have a good reason, that something happened to trigger it.  Trust that something happened to make you feel awful.  It may not, however, be what you think it is.  And if you have some memory loss, you may never, never ever, remember clearly anyway.  You don’t need to, actually.  Your feelings are indications of your internal geographical fault lines.  Trust you.

And, trust the feelings rather than the cognitions that may come with them.  I’ve known people falsely accused of sexual abuse, just as I’ve known people who I KNOW abused others offer such convincing denial I could almost believe them myself.  And I was there when the crap happened! 

Another reason why it’s better to go with your feelings rather than turn to your immediate thoughts about your distress to find cause is the 90/10 rule – if something really upsets you as an adult in a current situation, chances are, about 90% of it is coming from your past, and only about 10% of it is from what is actually in the current situation.  I once knew someone who was really sensitised to criticism, and it was really hard to be around her because she was 90%’ing all over the place, and didn’t want to hear about it.  Actually, she was a right pain in the keister and stretched my kindness and patience to the limit because – on the one hand, because she was a real drain on my resources, and on the other hand, she just would not take responsibility.  We’ll be talking more about that responsibility issue.  Also, you could feel awful because you don’t know how to not feel awful – at some point, we need to stop blaming our parents or the mugger or the boss or whatever and really start processing, start learning how to live our lives without feeling awful, start learning how to be happy, even joyful, ANYWAY.  Then eventually, the joy is even partly generated by the meaning you make of your painful experiences.  Easier said than done, I know.  I’m not being flippant, I’m just wanting to save your life here.  Remember, forgiving does not make it OK.

Another part of the problem is simply language; we may bump into someone on the street, mutter a quick apology, and they reply, ‘It’s OK’, or, ‘It’s alright’.  It’s almost as if we say, ‘That’s OK’ as acceptance of an apology, of indicating forgiveness, and that’s the end of it.  But it isn’t, which is the next myth.

Recap

IT’S NOT OK. It will NEVER be OK.  Got it?

Myth # 2: Once you forgive, that’s the end of it.

The Truth: The end of it, if ever, can be a long, long way off.

Forgive and forget, right?  Actually, no way. 

The fact is, some very serious stuff happens to people.  And even after we forgive truly, you may still be running behaviour patterns or beliefs that undermine you that you still need to work on.  You may forgive your boss for being a bully, but still want to get a new job, or still be so nervous that you don’t quite do your job well.  We may forgive someone for a date rape, but still be stuck with being so  cautious with someone with the same background of the rapist (e.g. being a man) that you miss out on good, safe relationship opportunities.  You may have forgiven your parent(s) for quietly undermining your capacity for self-love with their insidious yet well-intentioned parenting, but still need to learn how to love yourself.  You may have forgiven yourself for not knowing your child was ill before it was too late, but still be angry at God for making your child ill or at doctors for something about the treatment.  And so on.

Or, you may generally forgive someone for something, but then other details may come up, like, say you forgave your partner for a past infidelity 3 years ago.  But then you found out about another infidelity, perhaps 4 years ago, and it was with your best friend at the time.  It wasn’t that the person had been additionally unfaithful after the confession and your initial processing, it was just that you hadn’t yet processed the additional infidelity.  There’s just more to do.

And – you may find this comforting – forgiving doesn’t make you stupid, either.  You may forgive your step-father for sexually abusing you, but it wouldn’t be too bright to leave your kids with him, now would it?  I’ve even known women who were abused as girls right in the middle of family gatherings.  You wouldn’t let your child sit in that person’s lap, would you, or dry your child between their legs after swimming, right?  And if you’ve forgiven your brother for seducing (now ex)girlfriend (that he dumped two weeks later), you don’t have to encourage your new girlfriend to go out for coffee with him, do you?

Sometimes, reservations, behaviour patterns or beliefs left after forgiving are not indicative of a need for further healing; it’s just wise to be cautious with some people. 

It is often so very hard to tell the difference between baggage and wisdom, between forgiving/cautiousness and unforgiving/punishing.  And sometimes, we can do the right thing for the wrong reason(s), and still need healing.  I had told my mother to not attend my wedding, please, and if I had said it with any punitiveness or anger in my heart, I would still need to do work on myself around forgiveness, of myself as well as of my mother.  It still would have been the right thing to do, it’s just that it would have been coming from a tainted place.  More on that later.

The point is, there is no Forgive and Forget. It’s, Forgive and Be Wiser.

Myth #3: Forgiveness is easy, you just do it.

The Truth:  It’s NOT Easy

Why isn’t it easy?  First: Time does not heal all wounds

People get impatient.  Maybe it’s been several years, even decades, since something happened.  And people can get irritated if their own sense of what is appropriate is violated by you taking ‘too much’ time.  Even worse, we can internalise those somewhat aggressive voices that say ‘Oh, just get over it already, will you? Huh? Huh?  It happened so long ago and you’re still upset - what’s wrong with you!’

That assumption that there is something wrong if some arbitrary time limit is exceeded misses out something rather important.  Time does NOT heal all wounds.  I remember a time I was doing some research on GP surgery responses to domestic abuse disclosures.  I interviewed a woman, let’s call her Anna (other details changed too to protect anonymity), who came into the practice on the few days I was in town, and one of the women I spoke to was elderly.  Although I was specifically asking about domestic abuse, she felt compelled to tell me a little something different about her life story.  She was just about in her early 20s in the beginning of WWII.  She had married her childhood sweetheart, with whom she was very much in love.  They had a few blissful months together before he went for training and was then shipped out.  He died within weeks of being on the front line.  Her father had taken ill in those few weeks, seriously ill, and she spent the rest of his life, decades and decades, caring for him.  She genuinely didn’t mind, and she loved her father very much.  She never married again; in fact, she never even dated again.  “For me, there is only my Harry.”  She was crying and trying not to, and I was doing my best to keep my academic demeanour despite the fact that my eyes were watering away.  She even tried to apologise for being emotional.

Time does not heal all wounds.

Why isn’t it easy to forgive? Second: Forgiveness needs time

So forgiveness is not easy, not least because, like a math equation (and here, ‘process’ is the verb used to describe all the ways you work through your pain and upset and other negative feelings):

TIME + PROCESS = FORGIVENESS.

I didn’t say how much time.  Things take the time they take.  If you need decades, then take decades.  The thing is to keep going.  If you want to make pasta, you need to turn the heat on – equivalent of process.  No sense putting the water in the pot and then complaining in a half hour that you haven’t eaten yet and that the dang thing hasn’t even boiled when you didn’t turn on the hob, is there?

Sure, forgiving can be easy, like forgiving someone for bumping into you (which some people, mainly men, have great difficulty with too.  How many pub fights start with an accidental elbow nudge?)  But in the main, forgiveness is NOT easy.  Especially for big stuff, such as childhood betrayals (for instance: abandonment, abuse (of any and all kind, in any combination), insidious undermining, neglect, shaming, etc.), or when someone gets physically injured, perhaps permanently.

Why isn’t it easy to forgive?  Third: Forgiveness has to come from a deep, genuine space

You won’t truly forgive just by forcing yourself to say ‘I forgive you’ while you mutter under your breath something like, ‘you miserable old (cow/sod/expletive)’. 

Sometimes I see parents in the playground when they push a kid to say sorry when she or he is clearly not, and then push to get the other kid to say that it’s OK when she or he is clearly not, and then rush them both back into play with all their raw feelings flapping all over the place.  The apology could be offered with insincerity or grumpiness, and the other child could be brimming with resentment or still be really upset. 

The other day my daughter, Aliyah, picked up and lobbed a fist-sized stone (my fist, not her wincy one) from the top of a small hill so quickly I didn’t have time for a verbal intervention, and as if in slow motion, the stone sailed elegantly... and arced right into the chest of another child.  Aliyah immediately apologised, and I checked in with the girl, asking, ‘Are you OK?’  When she said she was, I turned to Aliyah again and suggested we roll stones down the hill instead of throwing them because we wanted to play safely and meet everyone’s needs for play and safety at the same time.  Aliyah sat down grumpily and that was it, she was out.  I just sat down with her, reassured her that we all knew it was an accident, that she was still a super kid, of course, and gave her room to say and feel anything she wanted.  Then, quiet. Accepting, still, quiet.  After about 40 seconds, literally, all three of us (Aliyah, the other little girl, and I) had a great game of Roll the Stones Down the Hill for the next half hour, until the girl was called away by her parents.  And they thanked us for being with their daughter (maybe they didn’t see the initial stone incident, huh?).  Aliyah had needed to process forgiving herself for playing unsafely, and she needed time for that.  She didn’t need much time, but she needed time nevertheless.

It tends to get more complicated than that, obviously.  If Aliyah’s throw had landed a bit higher, she might have broken that girl’s jaw or cracked her skull or knocked her teeth out, or worse, and the rest of the story would have been very different.  It still would have been accidental, completely devoid of malice or bad intent, and Aliyah would still be a super kid, but those kinds of injuries are still serious, with potentially long-reaching complications for everyone involved.

Why isn’t it easy to forgive?  Fourth: When stuff is still happening, it’s even harder, because there’s more to forgive all the time!

It’s also really hard to forgive when stuff is still happening.  I split from Aliyah’s father (let’s call him John) some time ago, and Aliyah lives with me.  He doesn’t call the house to speak with her or otherwise have contact with her (e.g. letters, Christmas packages) at time of writing.  I don’t enjoy contact with him, so his silence is kind of nice for me, actually, but it sucks for Aliyah.  John has only called once in 10 months now, and it would be easy for me to get caught up in bad-mouthing him, because, as per point one, it’s not OK.  But neither Aliyah nor I are victims.  Nor is John, for that matter (although he says otherwise, I know).  My jobs as a mother in this case are to hold compassion for her Dad and Aliyah simultaneously, to help her have room for him when/if he decides to come back into her life, and ensure she knows his daily absence is not about her.  Sometimes I do slip off the wagon for a small rant, but then I get right back on the compassion wagon again.  And I forgive myself for slipping, and forgive John for being overwhelmed and for his best not being good enough for Aliyah.  I find that the upsets at John are getting shorter and the duration between them getting longer.  It’s a process, and, forgiveness is not easy. 

Why isn’t it easy to forgive?  Fifth: You have to give up the moral high ground first, even though you ARE right!

I could joke and say that having the moral high ground makes it easier, but in actual fact – moral high ground is an obstacle to forgiving, not a catalyst.  Sure, I’m the better parent, obviously (although John would say otherwise, I know.).  But if I make being a better parent than John (according to me, anyway) mean that I’m a better person than John, I’m in very dangerous waters indeed.  Do you see that?  I would keep him stuck in Bad Guy role, Aliyah in Victim Mode, and no forgiveness would be even vaguely possible.  Aliyah, if she has any sense, and she does, would grow up to eventually despise me for filling her with hate over the years (which she would then need to process and let go of and forgive me along the way if she ever wanted to be happy), nobody would win, and I would lose out on a great relationship with my daughter.  Who is totally awesome.  No moral high ground, no empty and false superiority, is worth that.  Am I right or am I right?

Ooooh, but the moral high ground is soooo seductive, isn’t it?  Because what they did was wrong, so you were right about them being wrong.  OK, you were right! ...  ...  ...  ...  ... ... ... Now what?

Myth #4: Forgiveness means it doesn’t matter anymore

The truth: It matters

This myth is something of a corollary of the myths above, of forgiveness being the end of it and forgiveness makes things OK (in other words, that forgiveness contorts the moral fabric of the universe).  My father and my mother, who split, thank God, when I was 2, are great examples of what Myth #4 here is all about.

My father, when I was younger, wasn’t such a great Dad, although he wanted to be.  I don’t need to go into too much detail – it’s enough to know that, for instance, I was physically afraid of him all the way to my early 20s, and that he often didn’t show up when he said he would.  Sometimes he would keep us waiting for hours.  Sometimes we would just have to unpack.  When I was in my early 20s, my Dad figured out that if he didn’t do something drastic, like, take responsibility and change himself, he was going to lose me.  So, bless him, he did it.  And we have an utterly wonderful relationship now, and it is no small part down to his relentless encouragement that you are now holding this book in your hands.  When I told him Aiden (my son, his grandchild) died, for example, he was literally on the next plane to London from New Jersey.  He was in the middle of a conference he had paid a lot of money to attend, and he just came, no questions, no change of underwear (he had to buy stuff here, this is not an implied critique of personal habits). He’s become someone safe that I can really count on. 

Does this mean that since he’s changed so much that it doesn’t matter for all those times I was crying for him on my doorstep? (Technically the hallway of my New York City apartment, but it doesn’t sound as neat.)  Of course it matters!  Even though I’ve forgiven him, I still go and do healing for myself now and again when I come across some corner of hurt I’d not realised was still there.  Those younger selves would be pretty pissed off, rightly so, if I tried to whitewash them into oblivion. 

And what if I got to a point where I was truly all healed up from all those mini-abandonments and broken promises?  Would it still matter?  Of course – because I honour my journey.  Having something matter doesn’t have to mean it matters in terms of being uptight or upset about. It just counts somehow, and you have to create your own meaning, preferably positive, out of it all.

An example of how it still matters after forgiveness

My mother, also, wasn’t such a great Mum, although she wanted to be.  But just before she died, she still wasn’t such a great mum.  And that’s OK (although simultaneously not OK; it’s the language thing in action).  I’ve forgiven her, and I love her, although not in a way that I imagine she would appreciate very much even if she were still alive.  When I was arranging my wedding to John (it seemed like SUCH a good idea at the time, he really was exactly what I wanted in a mate back then), my mother was too ill to travel to the UK for a wedding.  Now, she happened to live in Las Vegas.  So, we thought it would be a real hoot to have a wedding in Vegas, a Jewish wedding, with schmaltz (Yiddish for, I guess, bling, overly fancy) – we were even going to have it in one of the hotels on The Strip, in a hotel called The Flamingo.  My mother had the responsibility for arranging it, which was a win-win situation for us all: she had something that was truly important to arrange, and she was kept out of the UK wedding, so we (John and I) had something for our choices.  (And by the way, if you are OK with second hand jewellery, Las Vegas is a spectacular place to pick up some serious bargains.) I was thrilled at the idea of a Jewish wedding.  Mom and my step-Dad, let’s call him George, were so supportive they arranged a rabbi to meet us when we came out for our pre-nuptial visit.  Turns out that there is no such thing as an inter-faith Jewish marriage; both parties have to be Jewish (live and learn!  It would have been easier to learn this before my Mum and George paid the deposit to the Rabbi, but never mind.)  John was unwilling, due to his definition of integrity, to ‘convert’ ten minutes before the ceremony and convert back to his own unaffiliated status afterwards.  Which meant the Jewish wedding was off.  Which meant the rabbi kept his non-refundable deposit (“The easiest $150 I ever earned,” he said).  By this time we had returned to the UK, with loads of great gifts for our wedding party from the second-hand jewellery stores.  Which meant that if my mother wanted to come to my wedding, she would have to find a way to come to the UK.  Which meant that she would be in the same room as my father for the first time in untold years.  Uh-oh. 

We spoke by phone about it on, as it turned out, our last contact.  She said she would do her best to get there despite her health issues, and when she saw my father, oy gevalt was she going to give it to him. 

“For what?” I asked. 

“For not paying child support (etc etc etc, rant, rave), of course,” was her reply. 

“Are you sure that’s what you really want to do, Mom?”

“Yes, I’m going to give that schmuck a piece of my mind...”

I interrupted.  “But are you sure that’s the right thing to do?”

“Of course it is!  Didn’t you know your whole life how your father left me all on my own (etc. complain moan) 2 young children (etc.).”

“Mom, I’m asking you again.  Are you sure this is what you really want to do?

“Yes, absolutely.”

“OK, then”, I said.  “I love you, but you can’t come to the wedding then.”

“What?” she screamed.

“You can’t come to the wedding.  If you can’t figure out that attacking my father is inappropriate at my wedding, then it’s not right that you are there. It’s my wedding, and I have the right to have a nice day.  A wonderful day, in fact.  You’ve just told me that you would make sure it won’t be.  Why should I let you come?  And, I love you.”

“I changed my mind.  I won’t attack him.”

“Well, you seemed pretty committed to it there.  I trust you, you know.  I trust that you want to attack him on my wedding day.  So with genuine sadness, and please know that this is not out of anger, and I do love you, that you are no longer welcome at my wedding to John.”

...And so it continued for a few more minutes, with me holding my ground calmly, and my mother spinning to ever greater depths of hysteria.  She wound up hanging up on me.  I sent her ‘The Art of Happiness’ by the Dalai Lama.  She never read it.  She had major surgery about a week later, and died about a week after that, two weeks after that phone conversation. During that time, she apparently made the time to visit her lawyer and cut me out of her will, which she had told me she had already done when I was teen at university in the States, Dartmouth, an Ivy League, and I got a D in biology.  The low grade meant my dreams (resolutely held since I was 5 years old) of being a medical doctor were trashed.  And, since I was the first woman in my family to even go to university, there was a lot riding on me in terms of making the family proud. I apparently let the whole side down. (The D grade was a shock to us all; I had been brilliant in bio up until then.  Why I got the D is another story; suffice to say I’ve forgiven myself, and only recently at that.).  I had apparently been written back into her will a few years before her death because I was talking with her again, although I have no written evidence to support the claim. (I have the chorus from the Hokey Pokey children’s song running through my head – ‘...In, out, in, out, shake it all about’.) 

Any take-away points hit you straight away?  Besides that children’s songs can take on bizarre relevance?  Here are a few that I notice out of the many possible... First, my mother had a serious grudge problem. This is a woman who did not do forgiveness.   It really mattered to my mother that over 30 years after the fact she couldn’t work out financial issues with my father, but it mattered for reasons that really interfered with her ability to be in the present. And it really mattered to her that I dis-invited her from the wedding, and she was willing to punish me (or try to, anyway) from beyond the grave to make sure I knew it. (If you are a parent considering my mother’s course of action, please reconsider.  If you cut someone you love out of your will, you might regret it after you’ve died, and then there won’t be anything you can do about it.)

The second point, is that holding a grudge (well, there are few you could point to in this story) really cost her.  It cost her being welcome to my wedding, it literally cost her, in money, to go to her lawyer to get me written out (if indeed I had ever been written back in, for which I have no evidence).  I only cried once after she died, for less than ten seconds, years after her passing (I had done my grieving and rivers of crying in the years before she died).  So her grudges cost her an intimate relationship with me too.   And they may have contributed to costing her life

Third, it is possible to have the past matter (I learned to trust her intent to create drama) without the mattering being toxic, even with such a toxic person as my mother.  I was able to hold my space calmly and lovingly.  Had I made the right decision?  It was right for me at the time.  I can imagine some family members will be even more enraged with me for being so calmly public with this event, so upsetting to them, that was so close to my mother’s death, but by now I guess you’ve figured out that I really do want to give it to you straight.

So, giving it to you straight – It matters.  It matters, until it doesn’t.  And it may matter in ways that you don’t expect, or not matter in ways you really don’t expect.  There is no formula for this, no right, just what is right for you.  Just please don’t turn into my mother.  For your sake.  She wasn’t very happy.

Myth # 5: Forgiveness lets people off the hook

The truth: Nope.  And anyway, what hook?  And who is really on it?

This one is about responsibility.  It’s as if people really believe that if they forgive someone, that someone somehow stops being responsible for their actions.  So let’s say Albert kills Beatrice, and Claire and David are left grieving horribly for their daughter (in the UK, two to three women are killed each week by their partners or ex-partners, by the way.  And kids get killed too.).  If Albert got caught and put in prison, and Claire and David forgive Albert, then, presto!  A moral Get Out of Jail card.  (Maybe you think Claire and David should never forgive Albert because then Beatrice would be spinning in her grave – one of those belief obstacles to forgiveness – ‘I’ll do you a favour.  I’ll be angry on your behalf because you’re dead and can’t do it for yourself!’  Guess what?  Beatrice is dead and has left all this mishigas behind (mishigas is Yiddish for craziness).)

There is no moral Get Out of Jail Card.  There is only early release and probation, literally and proverbially speaking.  Very different.  We are responsible for our actions.  We did them, after all.  We can forgive ourselves for making a complete hash of our lives; you still need to be the one to get up the next day and brush your teeth and get dressed and do something.  Preferably something constructive.  Or else you are just making more work for yourself, making a bigger pile of junk you need to forgive yourself for. 

Even if the person who did it really, really couldn’t help themselves, were really, really trying their best, and your heart still got mangled – they are still responsible.  My mother, although not officially diagnosed, was probably mentally ill.  And she had a really rough childhood, which she would happily talk to you about in Technicolor horror if she were still alive.  I do get, I do, that she was doing her best to mother me as best as she could, day after day, year after year.  And, no matter how much I love her, no matter how much compassion I genuinely have for her unprocessed, foetid pain, it still wasn’t OK, for instance, for her to take me to drug parties where I was taken to a back room and tortured into a multiple personality.  Yup, understanding and compassion for the person who hurt you does not diminish that person’s responsibility.  I know I’m being controversial in terms of mental illness and responsibility; the fact is that the overwhelming majority of people with mental illness are not in the least bit criminally inclined in any way whatsoever, much like most gay men have utterly no interest whatsoever in buggering little boys.  The criminal activity, as far as I am concerned, is not about mental illness or sexual preference.  And personally, I think most people who murder another person are, by dint of their actions, off their rocker and need serious help.  And any person who sexually abuses children are in the same off-the-rocker and need-serious-help category.  So, perhaps the definitions of mental illness and responsibility sit in a different place for me than for most people.

I am seriously passionate about this responsibility angle.  By the way, I know you’ve most likely heard that children who are abused may forget.  I know one woman, who did a stint as a prostitute in her 20s, who has absolutely no memories whatsoever before the age of 20.  Blank. Completely.  It happens.  And, this you probably didn’t know: people who abuse are even more likely to forget than children who are abused! So the plausible denial may not be lying, they may really believe it.  And guess what?  They are still responsible.  They just have a long, long, long road to work their way back from their horrified overwhelm into a place where they can begin to process the nuclear fallout from the bombs they unleashed on others, maybe you.  They did it. Their load.  Their responsibility.  Their possibility of making their journey through their responsibility a gift to the world.

When I did my doctoral thesis on treatment programmes for domestically abusive men, I came up with a term, ‘boundaried compassion’.  This means: have immense, unlimited compassion for their pain, and no truck whatsoever with harmful, even criminal, behaviour.  It’s a fine line, and a challenge. 

There is no moral Get Out of Jail card.  There is responsibility.  Forgiveness is still possible, and even necessary if you are to ever really be happy.  All in its time.  It’s not easy, I know. And I think you can do it, or learn to.  There‘s a lot at stake here if you don’t, you know? 

As for who is left on the proverbial hook without forgiveness, this is in the next myth...

Myth #6:  Why should I forgive? They should be punished.  Preferably forever.

The truth: Punishment doesn’t work, it makes YOU unhappy.

I’m not saying that prisons should not exist and no one should ever be physically separated from the rest of society.  Prison could be a great concept, it’s just done awfully poorly, generally speaking.  And physical separation for a spate of time, sometimes a long time, is really necessary.  If we, or the people entrusted with making such decisions, can’t trust Albert to stop hurting women, then by all means, keep him contained.

But punishment doesn’t work.  Threat of punishment, even of death, doesn’t work.  That’s a good deal of why we still have crime.  Don’t take my word for it; go ask any decent Criminologist at any university.  People stop perpetrating when they choose to stop perpetrating.  That’s it.  How do they get to the point where they both want to stop and can stop?  Now that’s a good question.  The answer?  We don’t know that yet for sure; my personal view it is that we need a combination of effective emotional rehab (including physical separation where necessary) and genuine structural support post-treatment, emphasis on ‘genuine’ and ‘effective’.  But I could be wrong too.  Hey, it happens at least once a day. 

The fact is, when people hurt other people, the people they hurt tend to get angry.  And when we are angry, we want some recompense.  But no recompense is ever going to be enough.  No punishment of Albert is ever going to get Beatrice back.  Ever.  Her life was cut short (maybe not; more on this later), and it totally sucks for the people who love Beatrice.  No punishing of Albert is ever going to fill that horrifyingly empty white space where Beatrice used to be.  Painful, and true. 

Punishing Albert will not in any way replace Beatrice.  So what’s the point? 

Indulging your rage, that’s what.  And as we will discuss with relish, rage can be really useful as a step to something far better.  Rage is necessary in the forgiveness process, utterly necessary.  But it’s a desolate place to live. 

Punishing someone will not make you happy.  It CAN give you a kind of satisfaction.  But compared to the expansive fulfilment you feel once you’ve really forgiven, that satisfaction from punishment is utterly tepid and tasteless.

I spent years wishing my mother all kinds of colourful curses and painful deaths.  And I was a right git at the time.  Ask any of the people who don’t speak to me anymore, they’ll tell you.  All I got myself with all that teeth gnashing and revenge/punishment fantasies were lost friends, broken relationships, and worn teeth.  If you put any stock into the Law of Attraction, which I do – if you don’t know what it is, please consider seeing the movies The Secret or What the Bleep, or read anything by Abraham Hicks or Lynne Grabhorn’s ‘Your Life is Waiting’.  – If you put any stock into the Law of Attraction, then you know shit sticks. You throw it around, it flies back at you.  Stinky, messy, unpleasant, and sadly, not always recognisable as the shit you chucked around earlier.

Here’s another analogy from Richard Wilkins as told to me by my good friend Jamie Smart who is also an awesome Neuro-Linguistic Programming and Enlightenment teacher: Life is a sausage machine.  If you put in turkey, you get turkey sausages.  If you put in pork you get pork sausages.  If you put in meat substitutes, you get vegetarian sausages.  It’s obvious.  So there’s no point in putting in pork and then complaining they aren’t vegetarian.  If you put in rage, you get rage sausages in your life.  If you put in loving kindness, you get that back in your life.  What you are feeling now is feeding your Sausage Machine of Life – what kind of sausages are you making, right now?

You cannot be happy while you rage.  It’s that simple.  If you want to be happy, you have to forgive, amongst other important things.  You want to prove yourself right about how horrible something was that happened to you by shitting on your whole life, the lives of the people in your life, and being miserable? OK, you are free to do so.  But it ain’t too clever, is it?

Uncritically accepting your desire to punish is a way of putting your healing on STOP.  It’s one thing to know that rage and anger are completely necessary for the forgiveness process, and then to support and nurture your anger and rage appropriately, which is a lot of what this book is about and part of what I address in the next myth for this chapter.  It’s quite another thing altogether to get lost in the righteousness of your pain.  Your pain is big and huge enough without the righteousness that cuts you off from your own humanity.

Cultural and religious instigations to punishment – and dangers thereof

This isn’t just applicable to individual biographies.  Whole nations get caught up in this.  If Israel, bless it, were a person, s/he may say something like, ‘Well, look at what we’ve been through.  People have been trying to kill us off for thousands of years.  So, if someone uses some extra force against those (expletive) Palestinians, so what?  Can you really look me in the eye and tell me they don’t deserve it?’  Similarly, the torture of suspected terrorists on behalf of the US and the UK (at least) is in no small part allowed by the voting populace because of the continuing, collective, punishing rage against the actual terrorists – never mind that most people who are tortured in this hunt are not involved with terrorism any more than you are likely to be.  So, whole cultures can get caught up in the whole punishment detour.

Anger and rage, however seemingly justified, in the long run just ropes you into the whole victim mentality.  Ghandi got the danger of punishment, a bit cliché now but rather chilling when you really let yourself think about it: “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind”.  What are you blinded by in your own desires for punishment (if any)?  What are you so overwhelmed by that you may have to spill it into hunger for punishment instead of your own healing and happiness?

Anger and punishment, by the way, are not necessarily proverbial bedfellows.  Our examples from above, Claire and David, may not want Albert punished, and may still feel continuing rage, anger, and unresolved loss of Beatrice.  There is nothing in anger and rage that demands punishment.  This is a deeply entrenched cultural error, reinforced by such authorities as the Old Testament, which 3 of the world’s most important religions share.  I remember reading the bible about 10 years ago – I literally felt sick and had to put it down.  All that smiting and smoting and genocide not only in the name of God but allegedly made possible by God simply turned my stomach. 

If you think that anger and rage are necessary for punishment, and you believe in God, you may want to think this through very carefully.  For instance.  Children die.  They die for all kinds of reasons.  They can be murdered.  They can sicken and die.  They may even die as a result of toxic medical treatment.  And they can die for no discernable medical reason, as was the case with my son, Aiden.  It’s lovely to think about children being wonderful and innocent and being in heaven.  But who took them there?  Whether or not there is a human agent to blame regarding the death of a child, the metaphysical questions remain.  Did God take them?  What kind of God does sick stuff like that?    And if you want to punish the ones responsible for the death of a child – you want to punish God?  Maybe your whole relationship with God needs a rethink and rehaul.

I have found that in almost every piece of trauma work I do, we come to anger at God.  Anger at a God that allowed this horrible-beyond-words, bring-you-down-to-your-knees, like-being-flayed-alive experience into your life.  Or worse, made it happen. 

I say, go ahead and make a safe space in your head and punish God for what he did.  Then get over that whole Big White Man in the Sky nonsense.  Because the God that you are punishing, or wanting to punish but are too terrified to give yourself permission to punish, is not what I think of as real anyway.   For me, the typical Westerny God is some punitive, conditional father figure who only loves me if I cave in to being powerless in the relationship. The typical God is one who is willing to punish me for things I didn’t even know I did, or give me massive, horrible consequences for silly, small things, and hold me captive by obsessing over hundreds of daily rules (Jewish orthodoxy from my perspective, I know others have other perspectives, equally valid to mine).  That God does not make me happy, or facilitate my happiness or joy.  If that God were my boss in physical life, I’d quit.  If that God were my father in physical life I would need even more therapy than I’ve already had.  For me, a (the?) real Divinity is ever-merciful and unconditionally loving and phenomenally creative.   It’s not about ‘God’ taking little Johnny or little Aiden or whatever.  It’s about us as conscious beings making our own decisions and having our own consequences – the old free will argument.  Look at it this way.  No one can prove or disprove God.  So we may as well believe in what brings us peace and joy and connection to something awesomely beautiful – dare I say even Divine. 

Punishment is a massive red herring.  It can only make you feel ‘good’ if you take the moral high ground.  And, as I’ve discussed earlier, even though the moral high ground is ever so seductive, if you ‘live’ there, you are diminishing your life in a tragically massive capacity – you are giving in to victimhood and false superiority, ultimately denying yourself your real power, your dignity, your wisdom, your happiness, and your fulfilment.  Would any truly wise person want to stay there? 

Myth #7: I forgive because I am a Buddhist/Christian/Jew/Moslem/Etc.

The truth: You forgive when you do the work of forgiving.

You may be inspired by the incredible people that are in the various world’s religions. Putting Satan worship aside, they all have beauty at their core, and have pretty much the same messages about living with love in your heart.  You know, turn the other cheek kind of stuff.  The 8 right ways of living.  Teshuvah.  Strategies and mandatory allegiances demanded by different religions differ in ways that may seem downright competitive with and disrespectful to one another, but (and I say this respectfully, despite how it may seem or sound to you) to me it looks like a fierce war between brands of sticky tape.  The point is, no matter what your religious affiliation, they all hold dear such things as: forgiveness, letting go, community, and loving and respecting each other deeply. 

The thing is, if it were easy, we would all be our own enlightened version of Buddha, Moses, Mohammed, Jesus or Mother Theresa already.  And there are rumours about some of them too – especially Jesus, for some reason!  Mohammed Ali, ballet dancers and ducks all share something in common – they do amazing feats, and make their great effort to do so invisible. 

There are monks imprisoned in China, Tibetan monks, who report that their greatest hardship is not necessarily being tortured, although that certainly is not at all fun.  It is not the lack of heating in Northern winters, although that is physically challenging, nor is it the severely substandard, barely-keep-them-alive nutrition of the food.  Their biggest challenge is not having lives almost entirely devoid of hope.  The biggest challenge many monks report is to retain compassion for their Chinese captors and torturers (hence, forgiving).  And these men have trained for years, full-time, to be compassionate.  It’s their JOB.  A lot of them can do cool stuff like have cold, dripping wet sheets wrapped round them and they dry them with their energy quicker than a Siemens electric clothes dryer off the National Grid.  And they find it tough to be compassionate and forgiving sometimes too.

So what’s the big deal if you find it tough?  So what you are not already a Buddha or a Jesus or a Moses, or a Tibetan monk?   Buddha had to work at it; he spent his youth, according to reports, in indolent luxury, then spent donkey’s years (reportedly 21) wandering around.  Moses blew it at the end and wasn’t allowed into the promised land.  Jesus – well, I’m Jewish, so don’t get me started (I have no trained resistance to taking on board implications from various BBC and National Geographic shows about some shady origins of Christianity.  But, hey, I think all people should be allowed libido, so I’m OK with that.).

So many of us walk around with these massive expectations that we should forgive because it’s the right thing to do.  And then beat ourselves up for not reaching these impossible ideals.  Or worse, lie to ourselves.  This is the way it works: you believe that you are a good person as long as you are a good (fill in appropriate religious affiliation).  And being a good (fill in name of appropriate religious affiliation) means that you forgive instantly don’t hold onto anger, etc.  So, in order to be good, you need to forgive instantly and let go of anger.  Instantly.  Or, not even get angry in the first place – which would make you inhuman, by the way.  So you lie to yourself and say it’s sorted when you are really just simmering with unacknowledged resentment. And worse, you haven’t yet forgiven!  And you never get the chance to engage in the forgiveness journey until you can admit that you still need one. 

We’re human.  We need time.  We need time to process.  Accept it.  Gosh, if you’re not human, what the heck are you?  In which case, you should hand yourself over to some government organisation which will tell you that you are a guest and then they will imprison you and experiment on you the rest of your shortened days. 

Some people use their religion as a hiding place.  They tell themselves they forgive, but haven’t – because their anger is so massive it feels like it could shake the world’s foundations to the core.  And it might shake their world its core. The mothers I’ve spoken to or helped who have lost a child, the people I’ve worked with who have experienced abuse at whatever age, the women I’ve worked with who coped with the terror of domestic abuse – if they accept their rage, then they accept the consequences of being rageful.  These can range from a complete disaffection with their notion of God, a complete shake-up of their families and personal networks, the ending of relationships, homelessness.  And this is another thing that rage can lead to: true forgiveness.

In fact, the only way to forgiveness is through the crucible of your rage and anger. It’s like one of those mazes you see in kid’s activity books; there’s a place to start and a place to get to, and there is a way through, but it isn’t necessarily obvious and you might get stuck in the various dead ends along the way.  The only way out is through.  There are no shortcuts, but the good news is that unlike the children’s mazes, there are motorways through this rage.  The entrance toll onto the motorway of forgiveness, however, is acceptance. Of yourself.  As you are.  Angry and rageful.  Instead of fighting it, your anger and rage become your building materials over that underground river of Completely Stuck. They only become building blocks if you accept them.  If you resist them, they just fester and turn into resentment and bitterness, and even physical illness.  To chuck in yet another metaphor, it’s like the magic gold coins in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. There, wizards can make money, piles of gold coins. But they only last until morning; the magic is illusion, like pretend forgiveness.  It doesn’t last, it’s just illusion, distracting you from what you really need to be getting on with.   So, here’s what looks like a no-brainer (and another metaphor).  It’s as if you are given an envelope, special delivery.  You have three choices.  Don’t open it, and it will explode in your face.  Or, pretend to open it, and it will explode in your face.   Or, open it, find the courage to really stick your hand in there right to the sticky bottom, and not only will it not explode in your face, you will have untold wealth and gifts.  For real.

But you have to be willing to challenge your notion of what it means to be a good (fill in religious affiliation), and even risk being labelled ‘bad’ for awhile by yourself or others.  You have to be willing to be honest with yourself in ways that may be excruciatingly unfamiliar.  You have to be willing, despite seeing so many people with anger envelopes blow themselves up (or implode, as with alcoholism or drug abuse or depression or all three even), to have faith that there is another option with that special delivery.

It’s your gift, truly, although it may not or may feel like it from this end.

Myth #8: Some things are just too big to forgive. 

I know this one so very well – I lived under the harsh whip of it for such a long time.  Like so many of the myths here, they link together.  Because, I told myself at the time, I didn’t want to let my mother or the fuckers who did that shit to me off the hook, because it was so unfair that it happened to me, because I never got an acknowledgement or ‘Sorry’ from any of the parties involved, I was carrying around things that just poisoned me.  The most important three are: a feeling of being utterly dirty inside, a feeling of righteous victimhood, and unrequited rage.  And I was willing to spoil the rest of my life with my unhappiness to prove me right in the face of their silence and denial.  Although that is not how I would have put it at the time.  I would have said something more along the lines of: “Of course I feel like a toilet bowl in the inside!  Of course I am so angry I am like a volcano that WANTS to wipe out Pompei (as long as Pompei was my mother and those awful people) – how could I possibly feel otherwise?”

It was where I needed to be at the time.

Maybe all I lacked was vision.

But perhaps it is more about needing time to simply allow myself to feel rageful after keeping such painful, devastating secrets for so long.

I remember years of being very angry at the God I believed in at the time.  When I realised that ‘he’ loved my mother as much as ‘he’ loved me, I was really upset.  How dare he!  I hadn’t done all those horrible things!  SHE did!!  Grr, Argh.  And I grr’ed and argh’ed for a long time, until I could come around to my own love of my mother, so it was easier to accept that The Isness, Divinity, Source, Higher Power, whatever you choose to call it that is meaningful to you, well, All That Is loves her too.  Is her, too.

We humans are AWESOME.  We can transcend ANYTHING.  As long as we choose to.

Myth #9: Forgiveness is necessary to be free
Truth: There is nothing to forgive.  So how can forgiveness be necessary, for freedom or happiness or anything else?

I can practically hear some of you screaming, “What!?  Of course there is something to forgive!  Do you know what that (expletive) did!”  And “Hey – didn’t you open this chapter with a quote about how you needed to forgive to be free????  What kind of operation are you running here anyway!?”

And yes, people can do unspeakably horrible things to each other – ask Alicia Partnoy, for instance, who had her tongue cut out by Argentinean torturers in the 1970s so she couldn’t speak about her experiences.  And I am genuinely certain what happened to you is, in its own way, no matter how big or small you may consider it, equally devastating to the moral fibre of the universe. 

And yet. 

 I know this seems to completely contradict just about everything I’ve just passionately and carefully made an argument for in the previous 8 sections.  It’s a paradox rather than a contradiction; it depends on perspective.  For instance, the world is made of objects that are solid that respond in a predictable manner.  So, we cut solid vegetables or touch another person or sit on a solid chair (or a wobbly one). 

However, the world is also made up mostly of empty space that is simply void, we never really physically touch each other and physical matter is suspiciously like very slow energy.  If you scale up an atom to make the nucleus the size of a pea and put it in the goal at one end of a football field, the first electron would be far at the other end.  It’s really amazing when you let yourself think about it. But, we do need to get dinner on the table or touch people (or think we do; sex wouldn’t be as much fun at all otherwise) or just sit down once in a while. 

We also need to consider the energetic nature of physical things to explain why prayer for sick people so often works (there is more research on this ‘complementary modality’ than any other in the West), and perhaps to be motivated to pray.  Both perspectives are true, insofar as truth can be determined.

By the way, nothing I’m saying to you is true.  Nothing.  It’s either useful or not useful or somewhere in between.  We determine our truths, just like we determine if we will rot on stagnant moral high ground or forfeit our righteousness token to get on the forgiveness motorway.  Take what is useful for you.

It’s about perspective.  ONLY once you’ve done with the necessary rage, ONLY once you’ve managed to gently, lovingly, relentlessly muscle your way through the previous 8 myths and what they mean to you, does this transcendence of forgiveness begin to be possible.  ONLY then may it even begin to be possible to begin to see that we are all (as far as I’m concerned – remember, nothing I say is true, just possibly useful to you) – we are all pieces of Infinity experiencing itself, and we therefore only have the ILLUSION of harm.  Never harm itself.

It took a long time for me to figure out that my innocence had never been stolen when I was tortured as a child.  It was seemingly dirtied, and trampled in the mud, and hidden, but it was still there.  I had spent years mourning the loss of something I still had – but I didn’t have access to it.  At least, until I did.  After years of healing.

It took me a long time to figure out I was complete – because I was already complete.  All the healing was stripping away, layer by slow layer, the graphically convincing illusion of having being blown into bleeding chunks of meat. 

Eventually, I came to understand that if I really believed we are all expressions of the Divine experiencing itself, then we are all One.  So, continuing the logic, if we are all one, then it’s always just us, no matter how separate we feel, even when just the thought of a particular person really, totally, utterly makes us feel sick right down to our toes (I had a client once who told me she felt so sick about what had happened that she wished she could vomit not just through her mouth, but through every part of her body, like a really gross vomit fountain).  We have an illusion of separateness that is very useful for everyday living, just like the illusion of walking on solid ground.  Compelling, but not really true or real.  Like Santa Claus, say, or the strength of the British pound. 

So if we are all One, why in the world would we do such horrible things to each other?  What are we as a race, some equivalent to a self-harming person bent on self-destruct?  OK, I see how it can look that way.  I’ve been on the sharp end of the humanity stick myself, remember.  You feel the world is a teeming mass of corruption and evil?  I used to feel about the world that way too.  But, what I’ve found is that no harm can be done.  And if no harm can be done, it’s all just a convincing illusion, like going to a really good movie on the big screen. 

We’ll be talking about this more in later chapters, and I know this is an enormous concept.  In a nutshell, there is nothing to forgive because: no harm is ever really done.  Ever.  Even to Alicia Partnoy.  Even to you. If anything, the only forgiveness you eventually really need is to forgive yourself for forgetting how we are all One. 

Forgiveness Play – Stuff For You To Do

Now that you’ve read about it, how about figuring out even more deeply how these may apply to you?  Remember, you don’t have to forgive at any time; you are free to feel what you feel and think what you think.

You’ll need to have a journal or open a folder for documents on your computer if your handwriting is even vaguely as appallingly unreadable mine. 

1.       Write down the Big Thing(s) that you experienced that helped you buy this book/download this chapter.  This is just so you know what you are thinking about.  Some of you will have only one thing on this list, such as. “(-----) killed my son/daughter.”  Some of you will have things on your list such as “All the things I can’t remember and yet I know were wrong.”  And some of you will tire out your wrists pouring it all out.  Let the journal keep it for you, whether it is electronic or paper. 

2.       Write down how you feel about your list of things, or about individual entries, one sentence at a time.  After each sentence, write or type: “And this is perfectly OK to feel.”

3.       Transcribe to your journal this question: “What stops me from forgiving?” and make a list of the answers.  You may need to keep asking – if one of your reasons for not forgiving is “I don’t wanna!” then say, “OK. it’s fine to not wanna.  I accept myself exactly as I am.  And, I’m curious, why don’t I wanna?”   Then when you are done with that, transcribe this question and ask yourself: “What bad thing(s) happen when I forgive?”  Once you have your answers to both, read over them carefully and figure out which ones are due to adhering to the first 8 myths or pushing yourself too hard to get to the 9^th, and which ones are due to just being where you are.  Take two coloured markers or highlighters and mark them out. 

4.       Here’s another question for your journal: “What has the cost of not forgiving been in my life?” And when that is done, ask: “What will my life be like in 5 or 10 years if I still do not forgive?”

Right.  You've made it to the end of this Chapter now.  That's great!  And I hope you enjoyed it along the way.  Now what?  Well, you've got those explorations you could do on your own.  And, to really turbo-charge and accelerate your forgiveness journey, I highly encourage you to watch my "Forgiveness Demystified" Programme http://unlimitedemotionalfreedom.com/forgiveness-demystified.html

Shoshana

Dr. Shoshana Garfield, PhD