While I wait for the next episodes of “Murderbot” to drop, I’ve been binging “Shrinking.” Just watched the finale of Season Two, and as I wipe the tears from my face, I’m inspired to write.

When I was 11 years old, my next-younger brother was killed. It destroyed our family. My mother retreated emotionally, going through her day automatically and drinking from 5 pm on, while my father retreated physically, going to work for 12 hours a day. We never held a funeral; we didn’t even talk about what had happened. We children were left to get through our own grief and our own lives as best we could. I tried to help the younger siblings with breakfast and getting dressed for school (Mom was usually too hungover to get up early enough for them), but no one helped me. I remember sitting on my bed and thinking “this is how my life will be. I will always be left alone to deal with things.”

Fortunately, when I was 19 a friend’s mother, a psychologist, noticed me, and convinced my parents that I needed to see a therapist. He eventually got them to come see him as well. And things changed. We started to talk. My parents realized that they had handled things in the worst way possible, and they expressed regret. But long before that, I forgave them. I realized that they were not equipped to handle the situation–their own upbringings did not give them those tools–and I was able to let go of my own resentment and grief over how I’d been left alone to cope with something that was beyond my own abilities as well.

In “Shrinking,” the central characters are a father, Jimmy, and daughter, Alice, who have lost their wife/mother, Tia, in a car accident where she was struck by a drunk driver. The father, despite being a therapist, finds it too much for him. He withdraws into alcohol and leaves 15-year-old Alice to cope on her own. Fortunately, she too is seen by the mother of a friend and helped. Over the first two seasons, father and daughter find their way back to each other, Jimmy is finally able to own up to just how badly he handled the situation, and Alice says, as I did, “I’ve already forgiven you.”

Alice is also carrying a burden of guilt. In a bad moment she kissed her best friend’s boyfriend, one thing led to another, and they ended up having sex. The friend finds out, is furious at the double betrayal, physically attacks Alice, then releases a video where she sings “cheater bitch” to Alice, shaming her publicly. But in time the two friends also find their way back to each other, after Alice owns up to what she did and apologizes.

That’s not the end of the forgiveness. The man who killed Tia, Louis, has served time and is back out. Alice confronts him one day. He tries to apologize, but she can’t hear it–yet–and storms away, leaving her wallet behind. When Louis tries to return it, he runs into a friend of the family who at first yells at him, but then, somehow, sees just how sad Louis is, and starts to talk to him. And keeps talking to him. And eventually gets Alice to talk to him. When Alice realizes that Louis’s life has been just as devastated by the death of Tia as hers has been, that he too will never be okay again, she is able to forgive him. And eventually, so is Jimmy.

In my post on Will Trent I talked about the moment when we learn “the full horror of who we are,” the moment when we realize that despite our best intentions, despite our desire to see ourselves as good people, we fuck up. We do horrible things–mostly without meaning to, but we still do them. We don’t want to admit it, but we all are capable of hurting even the people we love most.

The message of “Shrinking” is that while this is true, we are also capable of grace. We have the capacity to rise above our own grief and anger and desire to blame and get revenge and hurt others in turn, and instead, forgive. We have the ability to look beyond the event to the person themselves and see that, just like us, they never meant to do harm, that they regret the harm they did, and if they only could, they would undo it. And when we can see them that way, we can forgive them. We can even come to love them.

I know for myself that when I could sincerely offer forgiveness, I didn’t just bestow grace on my parents, I gave it to myself. I felt much better and I was able to let go of my old story of being neglected and abandoned and get on with life, and my relationship with both of them improved greatly. (They did not let go of their own guilt entirely; I don’t think one ever does, but it gets softened.)

We are living in a time when revenge, deliberate cruelty, malice, and lack of forgiveness are being promoted by certain people as righteous and necessary. This is not the path to grace. “Shrinking” offers us a better way.