How to Move On Without Forgiving | Lori Gottlieb

If someone really hurt you, maybe you can have compassion for the woundedness in them that made them treat you in that way, but you don't necessarily have to forgive them. In fact, I think that can do more damage than good. When you tell yourself that you forgive someone when you actually don't, that forced forgiveness can be a trap, and it can leave you in a stuck position for much longer than you would be if you just acknowledge that I don't actually forgive them. I can see that they were wounded. I'm not going to put myself in that position. I'm going to choose a different kind of partner next time.

Right. I'm not gonna. I don't need to beat myself up or hold a grudge anymore, but I don't want to forgive. Is there a way to, like, not hurt yourself and still not forgive?

You know, it's like, we only have so much emotional real estate. How much time are you thinking about thinking of this other person? We had this again. I keep talking about the podcast because these are such common issues that on the Dear Therapist podcast, we had this. This woman come on, and she was spending so much emotional real estate on. On this person who. This person who had treated her badly. And we were like, you are spending so much time on this that you are not even available for another person right now. You are not available. You won't even think about people who are. It's kind of like, I use this analogy, the dry well, that there are people who. They keep going back to the dry well. They know there's no water there. They know that there's like, an emotional void there. And they keep going back every day, expecting that there's going to be water there.

Just thinking about it or trying to talk to them.

Yeah, like, thinking like, I'm going to keep trying to get this. Like, this time you're gonna be emotionally. The person has never been emotionally there for you in the way that you want.

What should they do? Just move on then?

So it's like, go where the water is. Go to a different well. And they don't. They're so focused on. But I want water from that well. I want it from this particular well, the dry well. It's like, you're never gonna get water. That well is dry. Go where the water is.

Psychologically, why do we fixate on that sometimes?

Because they had a dry well somewhere in their lives and they think, I'm going to. Now, we call this repetition compulsion. Freud called it repetition compulsion. And I'm not all on board with Freud. But there are certain things that he wrote about that actually do play out that I see all the time and one of them is we say this time I'm going to choose a partner who is exactly like that person who didn't meet my needs. We don't do that consciously, right? In fact they look very different. We think aha, I won because I chose someone very different. But then when you get into relationship with them you see they're also not emotionally available or they also have an anger issue or they also are withholding or whatever it is. And so then we say unconsciously but this time I'm going to win, this time I'm going I couldn't get my parent to do it but I'm going to get them because sometimes they can be so loving and kind and all of these other things. So this time I'm going to get them to do that but you won't. Again we don't change another person.