perhaps forgiveness looks less like "it's okay that you did this to me" and more like "I recognize that your actions were as much a product of your past as mine are", less "this is on you" and more "there were two of us in this situation"

mb it's about accepting that it happened

feels difficult to let go of a painful surprise before you fully understand it; if you didn't predict this one, what else is out there waiting for you? gotta ruminate on it to extract all available insights, to best guard against a potential recurrence

and yet, we can never fully understand any given experience; our observations are limited, our memories imperfect, our reasoning clouded and our motives suspect. given this epistemic context, grasping onto the desire to eliminate all doubt is a maladaptive cope, an avoidance

but just what is it that we're avoiding? integration

every social relationship has its terminals anchored in a mental model of the other person; imagine a tensioned cable from A's model of B to B's model of A

when a relationship is severed violently, the ends whiplash

the sharp end of the connection injures the other-model, their tulpa; that subsection of your psyche begins to hurt, radiating pain outwards

if the prediction error was severe enough, the tulpa may become inconsistent; the apparent modeling failure can become infectious

a grevious mismodeling can trigger an epistemic crisis, the contagion leaking outwards from the injury; often, the mind chooses to quarantine the damaged region, suppressing the memories and dulling their associated emotion

this contains the psychic prion, but it causes a split

the goal is to slowly, gently, work thru the layers of muffled emotion to unpack what transpired, to understand rationally the error & learn from it

but sometimes, the split remains even after the lessons have been learned; the spiritual equivalent of psychosomatic pain

when you hurt your back somehow, your muscles lock up around the injury site, stabilizing your spine and enabling healing

sometimes, however, they don't release after the injury improves; your nervous system is overactive, too eager to protect you, too scared to let go

forgiveness seems to be the emotional equivalent of allowing the locked-up muscles to relax, to release the defensive posture and move on; is it any surprise, then, that I also struggle with psychosomatic back pain?

this tendency to cling onto past hurts spans domains

when your muscles are locked up, you trade safety from injury for access to a part of yourself, to the memory, knowledge, and skills within

and indeed, I've felt cut off from the part of me that loves them; I have trouble remembering what it was like to be him, what he knew

being unwilling to cross the chasm of forgiveness keeps me from reintegrating that self-aspect, it saps psychic energy into the barrier's upkeep

do I really need to be paying this tax? is this still serving me? or are my spiritual muscles just locked up out of fear and inertia

the person who loved you is dead & you killed him; but that's ok bc he wasn't very kind to you. you deserved better & so did I; the hurt you gave me was a reaction to many others I'd given you. I forgive you, and I'm sorry. I hope we both can let our tulpas back into our hearts.

@pee_zombie indeed, an important part of forgiveness is giving yourself the permission to stop feeling angry.

(/sad/betrayed/a whole cocktail of emotions, with a dash of regularity; it's not that you'll never be mad about it again, but that you don't have to be mad all the time.)

Releasing yourself is an active ingredient.