To Forgive or Not: Dealing with the Deeds of the "Dirty" Dead.

Speaking truth to deeds that were done over "protecting" the reputations of those who did them.

Image by Olga Bast on Unsplash

“Do not speak ‘ill’ of the dead,” is one of those sayings that vibrates the taboo bone in exactly such a way as its prohibition must be violated.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not into gossiping about the living or dead for the sake of being mean or venal. However, there is a distinct difference between telling the truth and “spilling the tea”. For every survivor of abuse, truth telling is a vital component of recovery, being believed is another. Too often “systems” seek to suppress the truth for the sake of comfort, deniability, or even to downright gaslight the victim.

“Do not speak ill of the dead,” is exactly the sentiment that keeps survivors in “survival” mode and allows toxicity to spread like cancer through families.

Imagine finally garnering the gumption to speak out about something heinous that you lived through only to be told, “So and so may have had some ‘problems’, but we don’t want to ‘drag his name through the mud’ because he is dead.”

Death does not offer wrongdoers the shelter of protection any more than it guarantees them the grace of forgiveness. Forgiveness is earned.

What? Does “earning forgiveness” not fit into your model of martyrdom or spiritual passivity? Does accountability following a being beyond the existence of their flesh suit feels too harsh? Maybe you, like so many others who have been abused by the living as well as the “dirty dead”, you have been told that you will find salvation for your trauma in “letting your perpetrator off the hook.”

Have you tried to forgive? Did it not work? Are you still hurt, angry, and entirely too fucked up by what you lived through or what you know?

Yea… funny how trauma doesn’t follow religious doctrine which is all preemptive forgiveness is: infiltration of a private and intimate process by a system which is designed to disable your sense of self, your instincts, and externalize your inner authority to some imaginary “godhead”.

The real Gawd does not want you inept, groveling, or apologetic about protecting yourself. You are fire, stone, soil, and stardust—act like it!

As a practitioner, I will listen empathetically to clients telling me some truly awful stories. And I do mean awful. I tend to attract to my practice people, but women, specifically, who have been brutalized—emotionally, physically, sexually, narcissistically, and spiritually—who have survived incest, rape, assault (sometimes repeatedly), and even some who were ritually abused. More often than not they are trying to “apply” the typically prescribed method of “getting over” something that nudges people to bypass their own feelings and more importantly their somatic—lived—experiences.

“Forgive them,” is the typical advice that is doled to those who have been done wrong. “Fuck them!” is my advice.

In session, I will await the moment when—after having “spilled their guts” and often viscerally twisting themselves into knots of guilt—a client will sigh resignedly that they’re “Still struggling to forgive ‘them’,” and that is when I will lean forward, drop my shoulders, look into their eyes, and from the bowels of my soul say, “Fuck forgiveness.” Often there is a perceptible relief in my client’s physiology. Their shoulders drop. They sigh with relief. If they themselves do not say, “Thank Gawd,” their bodies say it for them.

We do not forgive on cue anymore than we can heal in that fashion. When it comes to forgiveness, time and the return of our own sense of self, agency, and power are what determines our capacity to extend benevolence towards a perpetrator. And it may never happen. We may never forgive someone who deeply hurt us—and we do not need to forgive them for ourselves to heal.

Although some people propose the idea, “Forgiveness is not the perpetrator, but for us.” I don’t necessarily agree.

Anger is for us. Righteous rage and holy fire is for us. Forgiveness may be part of our process, but it does not need to be in order to heal, and in some cases it can bypass healing and leave our systems in “freeze” or “fawn” mode by perpetuating the story that the blame lies on or within us for being hurt and abused in the first place, and so therefore it is up to us to “make amends.”

Well, guess what I have to say about “making amends” with predators? FUCK THAT!

I happily share that sentiment with my clients as well. I am also more than happy to interrupt the “forgiveness trance” with a little well placed vulgarity and ferocity. But is it really vulgar to stand up for yourself and to burst into language that makes your intention utterly clear? Fuck no!

What is vulgar is abuse, rape, and incest. Although I do not think that “vulgar” covers it, especially knowing vulgar’s “roots” simply mean “common”. What t is entirely too common is abuse rape, and incest. Words that describe those experiences are better uttered as horrific, grotesque, nightmarish, and oh… unforgivable.

---

I recently sat with a person who is not a client and I listened keenly as the deeds of someone I know were released from the mouth of the person to whom they were done.

I was aghast, appalled, disgusted, and viscerally repulsed—all the feelings I would feel for a client, all the feelings I would feel directed towards their perpetrator. Only I know these people. I know this energy of perpetration intimately. I hear in this story the words of dozens of people I have helped over the years to re-integrate their very being after being caustically and intentionally tortured.

My compassion for perpetrators comes on the edge of a sword—a mercy from the Mother to end their ability to cause any further harm or damage—a severing of what may remain of their soul from from the insidious infestation of The Parasite.

Who am I to make this call, this judgement?

I am a mother, a grandmother, a sister, a lover, and a friend. I am a woman who remembers the peace of blood on a sword blade, blood drenched leather, vengeance taken, and the satisfaction of severing offending limbs from the heartless houses that pump bile into their actions.

I am a warrior who likes to garden, not a gardener tossed into a war.

As I listened to this story about this “dirty dead” to whom I am related, I knew in my bones why I know and have always known how to “sniff out” this energy—that of predation—how to track it to its origins, how to stop the monster in his offending tracks, and take back the essence of innocence that was wrongfully stolen.

My belly quivered for a week, as it did when I was a child, as I “digested” this information—this on top of what I already knew, but what I have also always known.

My own flesh remembered violation, subtle and less invasive compared to some, compared to the stories I have heard and the pain and horrors I have sat with, compared to what was shared with me. How do I say how deeply hurt I was? How I spent the last 5 years recovering from what I slowly remembered that had happened to me? Now to hear this story—to have it all come “flooding” through, to know what I know, what I have always known, and have spent years, maybe lifetimes learning how not only to confront and defeat but also to become the healing balm for the bloodied as well.

I am overwhelmed. I continue to be overwhelmed.

I bow to my anxiety, my panic—my knowing. I bow to the reclamation of instinct. I bow to the bearers of lineage pain. I bow to the chain breakers, to the ones who say, “This ends with me!”

I bow to the truth tellers, to the ones who know life is life not reputation, that reputations crumble with memory and decay quicker than dust—but life finds a way. Life goes on living and living and living and the dead stay dead as dead as the anti-life that some of them perpetrated.

Dead and scorched soil. Dirty, dirty dead.

And the mycelium feast on their flesh and bloom.

Perhaps that is the meaning of forgiveness—when it comes to the unforgivable—all will eventually be consumed by the mushrooms.

Love.

Justice

I am preparing to offer a course that has been brewing in my blood for a long time on Ancestral Healing. I am feeling this energy to aligned to the time between Samhain and Winter Solstice. Stay tuned….