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what does it mean to forgive someone you'll almost certainly never see again? what form does this act take, and what significance can it hold? isn't forgiveness something you give to one who's wronged you? but how can you give it to a person who's no longer there?
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I know, in theory, forgiveness can be a gift you give yourself to stop nursing your grudge, to release the psychic resources w/ which you're feeding the attachment to the hurt
I know a lot of things, in theory. but I'm not so sure I really understand
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RT @pee_zombie
lowkey one of my biggest struggles is continuously realizing how much of what I "know" is but flickering symbols on the cave wall, dimensional reductions missing the co…
https://twitter.com/pee_zombie/status/1615228268403167232
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if I forgive them, from where will I get my satisfaction, my closure? isn't it wrong of me, to forgive such an act? doesn't it mean I'm weak, spineless, too credulous even? to let this slide?
and yet, who can see that I'm holding on? to whom am I trying to prove myself, exactly?
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to myself, ofc; some subself wants to convince another of its worth, to justify its existence & allocation of resources. it hasn't fucked up, it isn't weak, just look at how firmly it's holding the line; to acquiesce would be to admit defeat, to dissolve
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RT @pee_zombie
reassuring your anxiety that you understand what it's trying to protect you from, that its done it's job, gives that self permission to dissolve
meditating on memen…
https://twitter.com/pee_zombie/status/1488659661364645890
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and yet, isn't this the point? is not the fate of all beings to die? and are not our egos but ephemeral convergence of memory, emotion, and striving?
what job did this self have? what goal is it striving for, fueled by the emotions generated by the memories of this hurt?
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does it really want to hold on forever, to bitterly point at these painful events & use them absolve itself of responsibility for the subsequent?
mb that was what I needed, once; assurance that what happened wasn't my fault, that it was done to me. but that's not the whole truth
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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@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.
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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