“Therapy sessions can last a hundred years or a few seconds.” I’ve said it many, many times, because it never ceases to amaze me. Duration seems to depend on density, depth, strength, absorption, strength, resiliency, thickness, and much more. Clients will often say, even when I’m sorry, “I can’t believe this is the end of the session already.” While others look at the clock and wait for the ordeal to end! How long does a therapy session really last and what do we mean by Really – actually, practically speaking, in real time, objectively? How is it that we seem to enter a realm that proves that time is not real? It is a world full of the past, the dead, the discarded, the abandoned, those yet to come, the future and very little, often, of the present. It is a world populated by the loved, the hated, the desired, the envied, the avoided, the rejected, the forgiven, and the unforgiven. It is a flexible world of memories, hopes, present circumstances, judgments, punishments, and uncertainty. How can we measure these things? Everything potentially alters, permutes, improves in perception, quality and perspective. Nothing is fixed – this is the nature of therapy and counselling. Without the possibility of change, what would be the point of it? How long does a therapy session last? How long does the therapy last? How long does it take to forgive?

How long did it take Mandela, coming out of prison, to forgive? How long did it take for Jesus of Nazareth, a wandering rebellious rabbi in an occupied country, to forgive? How long did it take for Robert Rule, the father of raped and murdered daughter Linda, to forgive? How long did it take me to forgive?

My first therapy sessions were about rejection and abandonment. They were not dramatic, mostly images and sensory impressions of lying in a dark room, feeling completely abandoned. I said they weren’t dramatic, but the crying and wailing that I remember seemed endless. I always thought someone would complain about the noise. He had no way of assessing the damage, trauma, and pain of neglect. One day I read a book that included the term emotional abandonment and he knew what it was and how serious it could be. Later in my sessions, for these and other offenses against me, I dragged my mother and father over hot coals. I would have preferred cut glass. I was angry. I had been angry for a long time and had sublimated my anger into a variety of demonstrative activities that made the anger acceptable. I burdened my parents with a long list of complaints, mostly true I’m sure, and what’s more, my therapist took them seriously. This had not always been the case. For example, a kind elementary school teacher once gave me a long talk about the value of being a good child with parents as loving and caring as my own.

For a period, my therapy turned into full-blown revenge. I wanted my parents to suffer, even as I had suffered, to know how it felt, so they could experience the pain and hurt that oppressed me so much. I had been his responsibility; They should have been able to raise me. I was angry, I was in pain and I hated them for what they had done to me. Revenge is a dish best served cold, as we all know. I survived the cold for a long time. It was certainly (along with a romantic relationship that reflected some of the murky suffering of my childhood) what sustained me the most in my therapy.

How I Came to Forgive Them coincides with a little anecdote I shared in my book Your Essential Self. Sitting with my parents one day after lunch, I resisted my father’s attempt to routinely humiliate me with some routine comment or other. It was less the exchange and the content of the interaction itself, more what my refusal to comply with represented. He must not have known that he was the hundredth string or the straw that broke the camel’s back (in a positive way). I never danced to the beat of my parents’ drum after this event. I had found a way to love them, respect them and relate to them as people, above all, as people and no longer as the shells of parents who had not been able to love me as I wanted and deserved.

A rush of neutrality, positivity, honor, and broad feelings of liberation went through me because of what happened that day. I had no idea that it was possible to be so free in heart and soul. I also had no idea that this individuating fact had moved me, after so many years of hard work of personal growth, beyond And took me to a place I didn’t recognize – I could not acknowledge – until some time later, when I began to reflect on my personal journey in meticulous detail in preparation for writing The flight of consciousness.

I have spoken of the Transformation Threshold as being necessarily an unconscious event. Forgiveness is too. Either the past self is completely renounced or the veils between oneself and the other have been removed through the ability to see that the other and oneself are the same. How can this happen without undergoing a radical process of transformation that reshapes thought, feeling, and experience itself? At SAT we call this radical process the first stage of awakening. It means waking up from your childhood conditioning, freeing yourself from your first life conditions and survival strategy, risking living naked in the world, feeling the water, feeling the wind, feeling your emotions without the filter of those jailers that were once yours. angels Is the road long? For some. Is short? For some. How long does it take to forgive?

For all, the condition of the first stage of life implies deferring responsibility. Self-responsibility is compromised, it is not total. Everyone, therefore, is in some kind of victim condition. Victimhood implies the perspective or disposition of what-they-have-done-to-me, how they have made me suffer, perhaps deceived, damaged, sacrificed. The victim is injured, one casualty. They may have a martyr complex, seeking suffering or persecution to avoid responsibility. The victim blames others for herself, for her life circumstances, for her unhappiness, for her dissatisfaction.

Inevitably the main caregivers, the parents, are to blame. Who else? It was through his wasteful actions that the victim is here. Some victims do not blame their parents. They may have idealized them to console themselves for their unhappiness. For some, having parents to blame is consolation. It is less important who is guilty, blamed and punished than the victim’s strategy in life is blame, blame and punishment. Because the deep-seated belief in fault and culpability supports guilt, the right to judge and condemn supports guilt, and the assigning of penalties and punishments as a means of retribution and atonement characterizes the unforgiving and unforgiving.

How long does it take to forgive? The seeker (your client, yourself) seeks forgiveness for himself. The cultural message of our time confers a lesser status on the individual who may be the sinner, the shameful pleasure seeker, the private alcohol or substance abuser, the compulsive eater, the pornography addict, or the exploitative sibling who harbors fantasies of violence. . abuse and cruelty to themselves and others in their souls.

The victim creates victims. The victims feel sorry for the victims. Sometimes victims abuse others so that they too become victims. Shame and suffering through humiliation, shame and degradation are usually buried deep in the unconscious, the pain is so acute that reliving it can be avoided to the last. In fact, there are many terribly painful events, spiteful and cutting experiences, that resulted in deep wounds to uncover, unload through painful feelings, and finally break free from the deep graves of the psyche before forgiveness is possible. No hurry. Hasty forgiveness carries hidden the danger of guilt. You simply have to do the work. And when you get the job done, you can let your customers do it too.

How long does it take to forgive?