Forgiving his torturer

I have never been physically tortured and I have never sufferd sustained mental cruelty; those little instances of cruelty and pain I have suffered mean that my imagination can take me into some pretty unpleasant places especially when helped by descriptions of things such as the interrogation chambers of Saddam Hussein's regime. The combination of pain -both as mental anguish and physical abuse- and hopelesssness in the face of apparent malice and lack of common humanity must be so hard to process afterwards. And indeed the story here gives some insight into that.

Eric writes: "My turning point came in 1987 when I came across The Medical Foundation for Victims of Torture. For the first time I was able to unload the hate that had become my prison."

This picks up the Desmond Tutu contribution about forgiveness tying us to perpetrators and forgiveness as a becoming free. I wonder too whether here we are seeing something of the process of naming and 'owning' the hurt?

In the next bit I actually had tears in my eyes as I read it, as Eric finally comes face to face some forty-odd years later with his former torturer whom he had fantasises about killing after giving him a taste of what he had inflicted ... "He was trembling and crying, and he said over and over again: “I am so sorry, so very sorry.” I had come with no sympathy for this man, and yet Nagase, through his complete humility, turned this around. In the days that followed we spent a lot of time together, talking and laughing. It transpired that we had much in common. We promised to keep in touch and have remained friends ever since."

I think that there is something here about having a sense of compassion and shared humanity which helps us to forgive; when we see the other as a fellow human being, as not malicious towards us, as repentant perhsp even deserving our pity [?], then we are more able to consent to absorb the hurt ourselves rather than to attempt to discharge it onto the other