My life has always been about forgiveness. I came in being called to forgive. I was adopted and I couldn’t understand how a mother could give her child away. I carried this anger, abandonment and grief into my adulthood where I gave my own child up, walked away because I had so much forgiveness to process. I found so many people in my life that I was called to forgive but didn’t. Carrying this pain inside like a festering boil for years. I met so many abusers and encountered them first hand, carrying the scars to this day. It was as though I was a magnet for troubled souls, violence was natural in my world from the time I was 14 years old. Sexual trauma visited me as a young child into my teens and as an adult. The load had become unbearably heavy, I felt as though I had run out of space to store all the trauma. But it all seemed to find a place to settle in. It stayed locked in for a very long time until one day I started to hurt others through my narcissistic, selfish and wounded ways. All this trauma that never found its way home. Home was never a place I stayed long! As I moved in, I was already packing and moving out. Never could I stay long enough to anchor in, hang my hat and stay a while. A gypsy, wild, sore and deeply wounded, moving from place to place. Carrying more than my worldly possessions, I had another heavy load that I lugged around with me.

I was so angry, enraged and had built a wall around me so thick nothing could squeeze through. Until one day I had gotten so lost, strayed so far away from home I didn’t remember who I really was. Drug and alcohol induced coma, years of abuse, self-inflicted and at the hands of others! I had so much hatred, betrayal, abandonment and self-loathing that I could never settle in. Safety was something that was in the next town, out of sight, out of mind. Terrified, living in horror and fear all the time, I knew something drastic had to be done, but what?

Forgiveness knocked one bleak, dark and rainy night. Who was this stranger asking to come in out of the storm? It was just that, a stranger! Unknown, kind, soft and gentle but still a stranger. I rose above my terror, invited the stranger in and welcomed the newness of it all. Soon this visitor had discovered all my secrets, the trauma that kept me a stranger to myself and others and that I was waiting my whole life for this moment.

Forgiveness reached down into my deepest pain and suffering and asked if it could help me. I hesitated at first and then surrendered because I really had nothing else to lose. Forgiveness taught me that it wasn’t the person who wronged me I was forgiving but how and what I did to myself that needed forgiveness. Then I began Gestalt 2 chair work and that’s when I found forgiveness for the person who had abused me. This is when my life began to change for the better. Forgiveness became a constant companion and friend. It stays close by always reminds me of its presence.