#263 Family Dynamics and Rewriting Our Stories with Joon Park, Chaplain and Author

You have an incredible chapter about abusers.

and the intensity of those bonds, those trauma bonds with abusive relationships and how those play out at the end.

Would you say more about that?

Yeah, you know, I see this very anguished, sorrowful, difficult obligation, a sense of obligation from those who were abused to visit their abuser, whether they are dying or have died.

And the conversation around forgiveness, that's an ongoing conversation.

And I do think that I named something in the book forgiveness propaganda.

I do think that church culture, pop culture, whether it's self-help or spirituality, really overemphasize and push hard on forgiveness.

And if the victim can't forgive their abuser, then somehow they're the ones who are in the way of a beautiful Hollywood reconciliation, right? But still, I get why that narrative is pushed, because we do want to see, in some sense, some sort of happily ever after come out of this.

We want to believe that abusers can be redeemed.

We want to believe that victims find the courage and strength to overcome the pain that they were dealt.

It makes for a great Hallmark movie.

And at the same time, I don't believe, having seen what abusers do, having been through so much abuse myself, I don't believe that forgiveness is owed at death.

What the abuser owed the victim was a life.

And there are times when I'll process with adult children, what does it mean to forgive? What does it mean to forgive after death? What does it look like to reconcile? There are some adult children who end up taking care of their abusers after their abuser has had a serious medical crisis.

And now the power dynamic is flipped.

It's inverted.

Where suddenly the victim has more quote-unquote physical power, right? So do they need to take care of this person that they feel so compelled to? And the hardest thing I've seen, Diane, I think is it's not that victims have a hard time leaving what is bad, but it's leaving what is good.

That's the hard thing, holding on to those little flecks of gold in a wasteland.

If I just told someone, you need to leave them because they're so bad, that's not enough to convince them.

usually, most of the time.

But if we can talk about how do we grieve the good, that's the harder part.

How do we leave that? It's so complex and it's so difficult and tightly woven because we build a life with this person that we trusted.

We want to explain away their pain.

It's hard to unravel from that.

But my hope as a chaplain is to use that word, facilitate, to maybe give permission.