Silent Treatment 101
Forget the chill pill. It seems like forgiveness is harder to swallow.
I have been given the silent treatment for exactly two days now. I don’t know how it is in other families but two days of not talking for us feels like a decade. Thankfully, the house isn’t divided. No one has been taking sides. My sister and I are the only ones engaged in this silent warfare.
We fought over the smallest thing. She cried out to me and said that I was being too annoying. I was too dense and insensitive to the fact that I had been repeating a request I had to her over and over again. I didn’t want to blame my poor memory. I couldn’t use that as an excuse — at least, not again. At the end of it, I pushed down my pride and looked down in shame for the whole car ride.
Now, two days later, the hurt is fresh. There seems to be a renewal of tears every time I reminisce about what happened. My sister said hurtful things about me — what makes it worse is that I had to hear myself being spoken about in third person in her phone call to our mother for the whole ride home. The way she treated me? I felt like dirt. Stepped on and even spit on by the uncaring passerby.
To cope with the pain, I‘ve written this as a way to process. Also, I just want to share my main realization:
Forgiveness is a free act but it presents itself with an expensive price
Forgiveness — especially true forgiveness — is a free act in the sense that there are no conditions that have to be met before the act is done. There are no constraints, no set of criteria, no barriers that will hinder you from forgiving if the forgiveness is real. After all, why hold on in your heart to the bitter and festering feeling of not having forgiven someone? I don’t see the benefit of it to either party involved.
Forgiveness — the real kind — presents itself with an expensive price in the sense that what you have to sacrifice is your pride. Our pride is precious to us, I noticed. We fan the flame of our egos to fight back when we are offended. We excuse our pride when it leads us to wish ill upon others — after all, we got hurt, right? Real forgiveness forgets about pride. And it’s in the forgetting, the setting aside of our pride that burdens our emotional wallets the most when it comes to forgiving. It’s freakin’ hard to do.
What’s sad is that there are people who are too blinded by the expensive price that they do forget that forgiveness is a free act.
But I’m not one of those people. I’m ready to pay the price. I’m ready to step down. Sweep pride to the side. I’m taking advantage of the free-ness of this act and I will make sure this silent treatment won’t go on any longer — because really, another day of not talking to my sister will feel like a century next.
I planned on writing this article about the silent treatment but I ended up with a revelation on forgiveness instead. But maybe it’s because the silent treatment is no treatment at all. The true cure to this pseudo one is the ever trustworthy act of forgiveness.
Now, as I type these ending words, I’m going to prepare to close my laptop and I am going to start up a crucial conversation with her.
It will begin with two words.
“I’m sorry.”
Whether I am forgiven or not, it is no longer up to me. What matters is I’ve partaken in the free act, I’ve paid the expensive price, and my sleep tonight will be better and more sound than it was yesterday (haha.) But seriously, it’s because I’ll be getting what the payment of my pride promises.
