What to Do When You Are Haunted by Ghosts

Let me tell you a ghost story. 

When I was 12, a math teacher humiliated me. That year in gym class we had to run a mile and a half. My gym teacher told my math teacher how long the run took me. My math teacher, in turn, told my class. Everyone laughed at my slowness. I was made an amusement to be mocked by the man entrusted with my care that hour. This was just one of the terrible things he did.

For a long time, this incident and others he instigated haunted me. About 15 years later, I went back to seventh grade. Near the end of the school day, I showed up to talk to him. My palms were sweating, my gut roiling. I waited in the hallway. I waited in the library. Finally, I saw him. I recognized his loping gait. We went to his classroom, and I told him what he had done, how it  had hurt me.

Then, he did the most unexpected thing. 

He cried. 

He embraced me and asked me to forgive him. I remember his saying “Well, you seem to be doing ok now”. 

After that day, I never again bore animosity toward him or felt that those bad memories had any power. My willingness to confront him had driven the ghosts out of that particular corner. 

In one of my favorite songs, John Darnielle from The Mountain Goats whines:

There's bound to be a ghost at the back of your closet 

no matter where you live. 

There'll always be a few things maybe several things

that you're gonna find really difficult to forgive. 

Neither Darnielle nor I are talking about the paranormal. “Ghosts” here is a metaphor for things we’ve suffered or experienced that, even years later, continue to have powerful and negative feelings associated with them. They hang around the dark corners of our hearts like spirits unwilling to depart.

Most people have more ghosts than they know what to do with. 

Talking about these bygone experiences using the metaphor of ghosts emphasizes their staying power. 

I prefer to talk about them as unfinished business because this metaphor emphasizes the positive possibility that the business could be settled. The reason I never again felt animosity or shame when I thought about 7th grade math is that in that short meeting, Mr. S. and I settled our business.

We go through terrible situations in life. These may involve conflict with another person, abuse, manipulation or any other kind of mistreatment. Most people handle these through a combination of passivity, compliance and perhaps an eventual angry explosion. They repeat the pattern until the situation becomes so bad one person just ghosts the other or, as in the case of my 7th grade math class, time passes and the situation that threw us in with the abuser naturally dissolves. The end result is that we walk away with tons of unspoken hurt and bad memories. 

We deceive ourselves into thinking that once the situation ends, the suffering it causes also ends. It never does. What doesn’t get resolved just dissolves our peace. The ghosts we don’t exorcise wake us nightly with their moans. The business we don’t finish stays on the agenda.

So long as we do nothing about our unfinished business, the work of our lives remains at least somewhat stalled. We will never be all we could be with a list of unresolved situations accrued over years that we are avoiding bringing to a conclusion.

There are really two ways we can finish our business with those who have wronged us. We can confront and we can forgive. These are not tools we use in isolation, but in tandem. They are complements not competitors in the work of bringing to a close the past’s lingering harm.

Confronting someone from your past who has harmed you takes a lot of thought to do wisely and safely. It takes courage. Many of us would rather just jump to forgiveness. But, forgiveness deep enough to free is often easier to offer when we have at least tried first to balance the unbalanced scales of justice. Offering forgiveness without confrontation is an expression of cowardice and cowardice never heals.

Confrontation alone, of course, does not heal. Some measure of forgiveness must be the aim. In forgiveness lies the freedom we seek. Offering confrontation without forgiveness is an expression of bitterness and bitterness never heals.

Just as confrontation must be approached wisely, so forgiveness must be too. Trying to rush it or to forgive prematurely may do only more damage in the form of self blame when the old resentments creep back in. Though forgiveness is a process rather than a one time event, it remains a necessary element in full healing.

Few of us are at peace, at least not as much at peace as we could be. We are castles stuffed with spirits of old conflicts, endeavors that failed because so many agenda items never got discharged. There is no shortcut to changing this. The only way is to take up the harrowing work of clearing what lingers, of purging one at a time via the tools of forgiveness and confrontation whatever remains on the books. 

This is the way business is finished. This is the way ghosts, even those that have haunted us for years, are finally put to rest.