[anbende]

Thanks for saying this. It's really heartening to see people with this understanding.

So typically there's a lot of exposure, facilitation, and processing work FIRST. There's not really a route to forgiveness in my opinion until someone is pretty deeply in touch with all the feelings associated with how they were treated. I take a mindful self-compassion approach to experiencing and reprocessing memories and emotions drawing a lot from Paul Gilbert, a self-compassion researcher and advocate in the UK.

Once a lot of the feelings have been processed, including anger and resentment, we often get to a point where the anger doesn't seem to serve much purpose for the person anymore. It's not covering up something they didn't want to feel (guilt, shame, sadness, fear, etc) and it's not "punishing their parents" in a way that many people hold on to. More often than not, the client just spontaneously forgives at that point, and forgiveness looks like seeing the situation as a bad one that everyone involved was stuck in and no longer having a need for the perpetrator to suffer or take responsibility.

So acceptance and compassion then processing and reprocessing with self-compassion. Sometimes a discussion of blame and forgiveness and what they do and don't mean.