Thank you so much for this article. So much good writing you do!! :) I know a lot of people will see this and feel such a sense of freedom and relief.

I will write about forgiveness in the context of karmic healing on my own page to not take up too much of your thread here. I completely agree that the mainstream notions of forgiveness in the spiritual community are very distorted.

What you said about determining our own definition of forgiveness is completely true. I don't think that forgiveness it is necessarily the key thing that brings about healing for victims who do not feel that justice was done anyway. In those cases, a lot of times it's more like the natural passage of time, and having a different focus in life is what brings the most healing... when someone gets to the point that they want to live their life and spend more of their time thinking about the experience of new things vs. reliving the hell of their trauma over and over every day. I understand that's not always easy in the moment. This is one of my complaints about our current mental health system - getting people stuck in storytelling mode, fixated on the one thing, reliving the hell into infinity, numbing it out with meds...terrible.

I believe that a lot of things happen because of Divine Law. Karma as I understand it, is essentially Divine Law. It's just one way balance is achieved and sometimes it takes lifetimes of pushing back and forth until someone decides to break the cycle. To me, that's what the karmic work is....deciding to break the cycle. The actual healing process is similar to what you offer as breaking the ties. In my work, each party energetically or symbolically returns or retrieves what energy may have been gained or lost in the exchange, and it has such a calm, wholesome feeling of closure and finality. Everyone moves on, with the wisdom of the exchange intact, but no longer with the dynamics of a connection anymore unless there is a mutual agreement for it.

Not everything that happens is karmic - and this is not at all to say that as victims, we somehow deserved it or brought it on ourselves.. As you said, I think our most precious gift is free will, and people can choose evil and initiate a karma in this lifetime if they want to. I think we see a lot of this when people have evil attachments which act out through them. The entity gets the thrill of the evildoing, and the person who was the puppet gets to bear the karma. There's more to that -but my point is sometimes wrong/evil are just wrong/evil with no rhyme or reason and it is not the responsibility of the victim to love it, or forgive it. I like the karmic healing framework though, because it helps to compartmentalize what happened and turn it into a useful teaching that can be learned from, therefore the situation doesn't have to always be a loss.

Thank you very much for the wonderful ideas and the discussions!