January 19, 2024

Forgive Your Mum or Rot In a Hell Stone: Forgiveness Narratives & Self-compassion

The imposition, expectation, and false moralism of 'forgiveness', wrapped up in a Vampire Diaries rant.

This week’s thought™ is about the stories we tell about forgiveness, and how some of our most popular forgiveness narratives lack compassion for the ones doing the forgiving.

Not all forgiveness narratives are the same, as evident in distinguishing features such as the actions that caused harm, the circumstances surrounding it, and the power dynamics at play, to name a few. However, the forgiveness narratives recurrently portrayed in media tend to assert that forgiveness is a necessary part of one's ability to heal or live a full and satisfying life. 

This particular narrative really crumbles my biscuit.

Why? It perpetuates the idea that forgiveness is essential and that without it, you are wrong, mean, immature, or doomed to a life of bitter resentment and sadness.

If I might don my less-than-acedemic sounding hat for a second: this is dumb.

Disclaimer: these opinions are personal and subjective! This post will contain spoilers for The Vampire Diaries TV show, all seasons.

Forgiveness is often understood to be an important part of the process of "letting go", of moving on from resentment and hurt.

The ability to forgive is also often seen as a virtue–you’re the bigger person! You’re not holding a grudge! You’re letting someone go without guilt, and isn’t that such a selfless gift? Isn’t the ability to grant forgiveness quite the mark of strength?1

For some, the idea of 'forgiveness' also goes hand in hand with 'reconciliation'.

It’s this understanding of forgiveness that I see in media a lot, and it’s a specific narrative that I feel undermines, dismisses, and doesn’t allow victims to rightfully feel resentment, hurt, and discomfort, or to maintain boundaries with the ones who have harmed them.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of catharsis to be had in certain forgiveness narratives—the ones that are restorative and vulnerable, with work being put in by the wrong-doer and not just put on the victim of harm. But this isn’t the one I see most often.

A few weeks ago I was reading ‘How To Read Now’ by Elaine Castillo (highly recommend!) and amongst critical essays on writing and media, they shared an experience that really spoke to me.

Elaine speaks about someone who had been in her life when she was younger and caused her harm, who had been sent away, and who came back when she was older. "Things were not perfect: that person came back, slowly, into our lives, tramping through that weedy, high grass of redemption, and I spent a long, long time trying to forgive; trying even to forget. Trying to make restitution happen, because I do believe in it..."

And when it comes to forgiveness: “And this is the gift I’m giving to myself now: to not be there. To not bear witness to his eventual death. To not console him, or be with those who would console him…”

There. A gift.

Forgiveness is often seen as a gift we can and should give to others. If we are the more virtuous person; If we are ever to move on, let go, and live healthy fulfilling lives free of resentment. It can be considered a gift because it’s often given to people who do none of the work to build trust, reconciliation, or safety. It can feel like it is asking us to foster ‘undeserved qualities of compassion, generosity and even love’2 toward those who have hurt us, while telling us that doing so is inherently rewarding.

But what if forgiveness is also a gift we can reasonably and rightly give ourselves, in choosing not to grant it?

People who live in abusive situations often actively and subconsciously rely on the fawn response, which involves “people-pleasing to the degree that an individual disconnects from their own emotions, sensations, and needs”3 to survive. It entails withholding our emotions, our hurt and sadness and whatever else we might be feeling in reaction to a horrible situation, to avoid more cruelty and harm.

So when “forgiveness” is suggested to me as the ultimate way of healing, I want to grab people and shake them and ask why “moving on” and granting my abuser forgiveness is the answer. Why can’t I heal without granting an abuser forgiveness and compassion? In my personal experience, suggesting one needs to forgive the people who have caused them trauma and harm can create additional guilt, stress, and overwhelm, and can even add to the trauma rather than help the healing process. It is not ‘the solution’; It works for some, but not all.

This is something I’ve spoken about with my therapists, the idea people have when they’re trying to be helpful, when they’re concerned for me, that I should forgive my abuser. You can 100% be unwilling to forgive someone, and still live a healthy, wonderful life that isn’t eaten up and poisoned by bitterness! To refuse to forgive someone is not to sign up for a lifetime of victimhood rather than being a survivor. My resentment is not a poison, it’s like a bit of ribbon knotted to the huge tree of my life, flapping prettily in the wind. Allowing it a place there has been so freeing and empowering; it’s the gift I’ve given myself.

How does The Vampire Diaries handle forgiveness?

I’m going to be talking about this narrative in a bit of a bubble, acknowledging that none of these characters are without fault, and not delving into the many, many, many crimes everyone has committed. I’m not judging these characters or looking to label or diagnose them.

Though there are many examples of forgiveness in The Vampire Diaries, today I am examining the forgiveness arc surrounding Damon and his mother.

Context: In The Vampire Diaries, brothers Stefan and Damon lost their mother to consumption when Stefan was around 10 and Damon was around 18. As we learn throughout the TV show, their father, Giuseppe, was physically and psychologically abusive. Their mother Lily tried to hide money and eventually bought train tickets for the three of them to run away, but Guiseppe found the tickets before they could leave. I’ll add here that before this, Lily had actually allowed Guiseppe to believe Damon had stolen the money, and had let him be physically punished for it.

Fast forward, Lily dies, but this later turns out to be a lie. In reality, she became a vampire and ran away on her own.

This is a narrative in which a mother knowingly leaves her children in the “care” of an abusive man, who had many opportunities to come back and get her children to safety but instead chose to abandon them. Later, when she comes back into their lives, Damon has to feed her a speech she can say to Stefan in order to get him to turn his humanity back on and get him to stop rampaging around Mystic Falls, because she has no maternal feelings for him, doesn’t know them anymore, and therefore simply cannot even pretend to think of anything to say. We also see her with a new family of vampire-witches whom she loves and protects way more fiercely than her own flesh and blood sons. Ouch. 

When Lily dies for real, Stefan says goodbye with forgiveness in his heart, having already been open and willing to forge a relationship with her, while Damon says, “You made your bed, now lie in it.” 

Not to be dramatic, but my heart stopped. It might seem harsh, but I felt seen that someone who had experienced such familial abuse, trauma, and abandonment was openly unwilling to engage in the narrative of deathbed forgiveness.

Deathbed forgiveness often feels like a situation in which all the onus of soothing “bad” feelings or being a “good person” is placed on the shoulders of the victim. In this narrative, the wrong-doer is being centred, and there’s this idea that the victim’s unwillingness to forgive is inherently “wrong”, unkind, or even cruel, with no acknowledgement and acceptance that the real “wrong” was the trauma the victim experienced. 

Not to sound crass, but we’re all going to die one day. Dying doesn’t make anyone suddenly and automatically deserving of or entitled to forgiveness.

I hoped, for a moment, that The Vampire Diaries would validate the idea that the victim does not need to forgive the one who wronged them because someone is dying, or forgive them in order to heal. Damen not forgiving his mother could have been the gift he gave himself! Feeling his feelings and not absolving his mother of her harmful choices and behaviour! We could have validated Stephan’s desire for a mother, while validating Damen’s feelings and experiences with the mother who abandoned him to an abusive father. After all, what efforts had she made towards restoration and repair of their relationship?

But alas…

In a flash-forward soon after, we see Damon hallucinating Lily and showing sincere remorse over how he treated her in those last few months she was alive. Which, sadly, felt to me like more remorse and sincerity than Lily ever showed him.

Damon is later stabbed with a sword that has a magical Phoenix Stone in it, which captures his soul and puts him in “hell” —  a horrible day he re-lives over and over and over. He is forced to relive his time in the civil war, a day in which he’s been seriously wounded by shrapnel and has to watch soldiers be shot and killed by explosions. This sounds traumatizing enough on its own, but that’s not all.

Damon also sees his mother (ugh) and, of course, fights what the stone is seemingly asking of him: to confront his feelings and forgive her (ughh). The longer he resists this, the longer he’s trapped (ugggggh). And the only way out is…

I bet you can guess where this is going.

Unfortunately, Damon’s prison time in the Phoenix Stone leads him to regret his last words to Lily before she died. We learn that deep down, Damon has always missed his mother, though he’s never explicitly admitted it. He finally says he’s sorry for what he said, and that’s when he’s finally freed from his personal “hell”.

I feel it bears mentioning that I have a lot of empathy for people in Lily’s situation. This isn’t about branding her as a point-blank terrible person, and I’m not saying it would have been easy for Lily, even as a physically empowered vampire, to face down her abuser and remove her children from that harmful environment. I understand her marriage was terrible, that she was living in fear, that she was conditioned to put aside her own wants and needs in order to survive and avoid conflict.  She struggles with this explicitly near the end of her life, when she realises her current partner is much the same as Giuseppe.

However, even with that empathy and understanding, I still do not think Damon should have been mad to forgive Lily. Understanding and forgiveness do not need to go hand-in-hand.

Forgiveness VS Resentment

The idea that resentment (a feeling of displeasure or persistent ill will at something regarded as a wrong, insult, or injury5) is “like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die”6 feels like a bit of a horrid take. What that tells me is that my rightful feelings of displeasure are inherently harming me, and because I won’t or can’t forgive, I’m essentially engaged in an act of perpetual self-harm that is only going to ruin my life. It presents resentment as an emotion that is inherently damaging when I don’t believe that is true at all.

This take doesn’t allow for the self-compassion, self-respect, empowerment, and (gasp!) healing that can come from not granting forgiveness to someone. It reduces a complex issue into a binary of forgive-don’t forgive, good-bad, healthy-unhealthy.

One’s healing should not be reliant upon exercising the empathy, compassion, understanding, and forgiveness that the one who wronged you could not and did not spare for you.

I think that presenting ‘resentment’ as an inherently harmful, narcissistic, or blinding emotion is to strip it of complexity, nuance, and contextual significance. I resent my abuser — I believe it is a reasonable, complex emotional reaction to being abused. On its own it is not inherently a bad emotion, but it can become a problem if it’s unchecked, builds, and colours your worldview to an unhealthy reality-altering degree. Some might say Damon fits this bill.

I think it’s horrible that Damon is made to relive his trauma over and over, and then forgive his mother to earn freedom from the stone. His freedom is contingent on him changing his mind not by any journey of self-compassion or self-validation, or through any meaningful efforts from his mother (who is already dead).

He has no choice in it at all. It’s Hell Stone or Forgiveness.

This premise feels manipulative and harmful and gross. I hate the way it actualises the idea that his emotional turmoil from trauma inflicted upon him is a prison of his own making—if only he would grow up and realise he should have forgiven the one who hurt him… boooooo! The forgiveness doesn’t feel healing or productive, it feels like a consequence of intense, violent, non-consensual conditioning and dismissal of his hurt. How wonderful!

When I consume narratives such as this, where a wronged party expresses hurt, and people react by telling them to forgive, it feels uncomfortable and often potentially harmful. Where is the support in helping the victim process their emotions? Where is the shoulder to cry on? Where is the validation of their feelings, thoughts, and experiences? 

Sometimes healing is about holding some indignation about the circumstances you were in and the people who enabled it, because you realise that you deserved better and that what you got was unacceptable. There is a difference between disliking what happened to you and being unwilling to forgive VS being lost to bitterness. Humans contain multitudes and can in fact hold more than one idea within themselves at any one time.

The Imposition of Forgiveness, and Self-Gaslighting

When it comes to The Vampire Diaries and Damon, I read this narrative as one in which a young adult is abandoned by his mother to an abusive home, is parentified and left to care for his younger brother, and often put himself in his father’s eyeline in order to protect his brother from being harmed. He has an abandonment wound. He has trauma from living at least 18 with a physically and emotionally abusive father.

In this kind of living situation, it can be easy to subconsciously condition ourselves to engage in self-gaslighting, that is, rationalising an abuser’s behaviour according to your shortcomings, which may or may not be true or reasonable. It’s easier to reconcile an abuser’s harm when you realise you could have breathed quieter, after all. You failed, you’re bad, you deserved it.

Then someone, likely well-meaning, comes along and says “That was so long ago.” or “They’re your parent. You should forgive them.” But you don’t want to, and because you already think you could have done better, your unwillingness or inability to forgive your parent now seems to legitimise those horrible misbeliefs that you’re bad or that you deserved it.

“Imagine you are told that you must forgive someone who has harmed you…. When you seek social support, you are told things such as, “That was years ago, let it go,” and “You shouldn’t feel angry; move on.” These messages demonstrate a lack of acceptance and even empathy on the part of those who express them, and may cause you to feel as though your perceptions, emotions, and experiences are illegitimate, false, or misdirected; they might suggest that your pain or well-justified anger is simply less important than your ability to forgive your abuser.”7

It can send you right back into denial and minimisation of your trauma, which brings your healing to a screeching burnt-rubber halt as your self-loathing takes the wheel, turns the car around, and tells you off.

I see this in Damon’s narrative. At the end of this forgiveness journey, he’s even shown pleading for a chance to be a better son! (Insert Backstreet Boys singing “Tell me why”). He avoids thoughts, feelings, and conversations that might acknowledge that he’s been hurt, and it seems like a reasonable reading to me that he engages in this behaviour not only to spare himself from feeling shitty, but to protect himself against being vulnerable and not being met with empathy. 

And I can’t blame him, because when we get to the whole “you should forgive your mother” part of the show, there is no room for Damon to feel what he needs to feel, or rightfully already feels (resentment). When he dismisses the idea of forgiving Lily, his brother Stefan pushes back on this multiple times, while other characters can’t even seem to validate or accept his choice to not have a relationship with her.

Some people do benefit from forgiving the people who have harmed them. Others do not. It is my opinion that both responses to trauma should be met with equal empathy and the understanding that one is not inherently more moral than the other. People can live healthy, full lives without having forgiven people who have hurt them, and I think it’s unfair that forgiveness lives in the public consciousness in the way that it does. 

And that’s all without even mentioning the work that is ‘forgiveness’, which is not always easy— it demands energy, mental and emotional labour, and can take a long time. Forgiveness, as it is commonly imposed, often '“places the burden on the shoulders of the survivor of abuse rather than where that blame should actually lie–on the person who abused you.”8

Forgiveness is a choice, and it’s a choice without the morality and virtue that society often attaches to it. It can be an act of love, both for others and for yourself, however you choose to gift it. You have permission to not forgive. You are human.

In 2024, I hope to see more media that allows characters to choose not to forgive and be supported in that choice, even when someone is on their deathbed. That, and I want to see the wrongdoers actually make real and meaningful strides to earning their forgiveness—a narrative which doesn’t disregard the victim and can end in forgiveness, too.

What do you think?

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