“As soon as you will accept yourself, without conditions, you will burst into joy. Your abilities will blossom, and your life will become ecstasy”
Osho

“Father, forgive them because they do not know what they are doing!”(Luke, 23,24)
Jesus

“Hear ye, hear ye, no thought of tomorrow; men and women, young and old, today let’s be happy; away sad thoughts, away: let’s rejoice. Be happy, ye: tomorrow, who knows.”
Lorenzo il Magnifico

Acceptance and forgiveness: living in the present


To introduce the subject of this chapter, I will use a recent clinical case.
It was about a year ago when a 25-year old woman, I’ll call Carla, came for a visit. After years of conventional therapies (all ineffectual) Carla had decided to try homeopathy to get rid of her scleroderma, a very serious this condition; in fact, this disease causes skin ulcerations that tend to heal forming ugly scars (sclerosis). When these scars occur on the face, the person loses the ability to show facial expressions, and becomes inexpressive, just as when wearing a mask. If the scars occur at a joint, little by little the joint becomes stiffer and eventually rigid.

When I visited Carla for the first time I realized her condition had reached an advanced stage. I gave her a complex homeopathic prescription. My goal was to clean up and revitalize her body, which had been poisoned by the many drugs taken before and to relieve her from the acute pain she was feeling.
After one month I saw her again. The slight improvement that had occurred made me decide to start the psychotherapy that I had, already during the first visit, considered absolutely necessary.

During our conversation (made somewhat difficult by Carla’s reluctance to open up), what emerged was a traumatizing childhood, due to the continuous and brutal fighting between her parents. Carla was now living with her mother since her parents had separated when Carla was ten. After this event, she saw her father only a few more times: in fact, one day he disappeared, never to be seen or heard of again. In talking about those times Carla words were often broken and she could not suppress her emotions. It was clear to me that she was still suffering from what she had gone through when she was little.
When we met for the third time I was elated in seeing clear evidence of clinical progress and decidedly rising spirits. After advising her about what exercises she had to do to help her to get rid of the negative feelings she had been tormented by for years, something totally unexpected happened. All of a sudden she burst into tears and cried in a rage: “I hate and despise my father so, for all the pain he has inflicted to my mother and to me. I’ll never forgive him for what we had to suffer. I don’t want to be cured, I don’t care about healing. The only thing I want is that that bastard pay for what he did”. While still sobbing and letting out her rage and rancour, she went to the door, asked her mother to go (she was with her during this visit) and point blank left.
A few days later Carla’s mother phoned to apologize and to thank me. She told me she was convinced, like me, that her daughter’s condition was due to her childhood suffering and that had become worse because of the resentment toward her father she was still nurturing.
Since then I have not seen or heard from Carla again and I do not know what might have happened. I can only say that I prayed that her rage and hate outbursts would become the starting point of a path leading her to acceptance and forgiveness. Getting in touch with her pain and expressing it to the fullest was the only thing enabling her to accept the past and then to forgive her wounds, including those she was consciously inflicting upon herself. If she did so she had a chance of stopping the course of her disease and of getting well again.
Acceptance and forgiveness are two fundamental aspects of our lives as human beings and, in particular, of parents. By refusing to accept what is taking place (or what has happened), by refusing to forgive who, consciously or not, has done us wrong, disentangling ourselves from the past becomes impossible. It is just as impossible then to live a life of consciousness, peace and love.
 

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