Forgiveness With Dr. Fred Luskin

Why forgiveness can be hard? To forgive, one has to grieve first. Forgiveness is a skill that almost anyone can learn. There are health benefits to forgiveness. What's the connection between loss and forgiveness, gratitude and forgiveness, and how to practice self-forgiveness with the world's foremost expert on the topic, the director of the Stanford Forgiveness Projects.

Transcript

I am Anna Siwald and this is Authentic Parenting,

A podcast about personal development in the context of parenting,

Where I explore how you can find more calm connection and join parenting through the process of self-discovery and inner growth with a trauma-informed lens.

I'm a parent educator and my mission is to help children by helping parents.

The motto of this podcast is raising our children,

Growing ourselves.

Today,

All about forgiveness.

I am thrilled to bring this conversation to you.

It's an important topic and the teachings and the work of my guest deeply resonate with me.

There are many misconceptions out there about forgiveness.

I hope today's conversation will help you to understand what forgiveness is and what it isn't.

Forgiveness is not the same as reconciliation.

To forgive someone doesn't mean you somehow condone their bad behavior.

But forgiveness somehow lets somebody off the hook.

While pain and disappointment are inevitable,

They need not to control us.

It is vital to our health and well-being that we handle what comes our way without getting stuck in blame and suffering.

My special guest today is the world's most foremost expert on forgiveness.

A pioneer in the science and practice of forgiveness,

Dr.

Fred Luskin.

He is the director of the Stanford University Forgiveness Projects,

A senior consultant in health promotion at Stanford University,

And a professor at the Institute for Transpersonal Psychology as well as an affiliate faculty member of the Greater Good Science Center.

He is the author of several books,

Including Forgive for Good,

A Proven Prescription for Health and Happiness.

Dr.

Luskin and his colleagues have developed a nine-stepped method for forgiving almost any conceivable hurt.

They have tested that method through a series of studies with people who had been lied to,

Cheated,

Abandoned,

Beaten,

Abused,

Or had their children murdered.

The forgiveness project has successfully explored forgiveness therapy with people who suffered from the violence in Northern Ireland,

Sierra Leone,

As well as the attacks on the World Trade Center on 9-11.

In addition,

Dr.

Luskin's work has been successfully applied and researched in corporate,

Medical,

Legal,

And religious settings.

In this episode,

Dr.

Luskin talks about that it takes a willingness to practice forgiveness day after day to see its profound benefits to physical and emotional well-being and to our relationships.

He discusses why forgiveness can be so hard to practice and explains the connection between loss,

Grief,

And forgiveness,

That before you can forgive,

You have to grieve.

He also talks about the connection between forgiveness and gratitude and emphasizes that forgiveness takes practice.

It's a skill that almost anyone can learn.

We also talk about self-forgiveness,

Like other positive emotions,

Such as hope,

Compassion,

And appreciation,

Forgiveness is a natural expression of our humanity.

Please enjoy this enlightening conversation with Fred Luskin.

Fred,

Welcome to authentic parenting.

I am so deeply honored and delighted to have you here.

Thank you.

I really,

Really deeply resonate with your work,

How you communicate,

How you teach,

How you speak.

I absolutely love your sense of humor.

I love the things that you say.

It's just so powerful.

When I first discovered you,

I devoured every bit of talk,

Every YouTube video that there is out there and read everything that you've written.

I'm really honored that you're here today.

Thank you because what I have tried to be is simple and like a normal human being talking to other normal human beings,

Not like pointy headed Stanford person.

I think that comes across.

Yes.

So I want to talk to you about,

Obviously,

The topic that you are expert in and you're passionate about.

You dedicated a lot of your work years to forgiveness.

I think we all know what forgiveness is,

Right?

We sort of know intellectually and we feel what it is because we have hurt people and people have hurt us.

We have forgiven people and people have forgiven us.

But again,

I think I would love it if you could just frame what forgiveness is from your perspective,

From your point of view,

And then we'll go from there.

You must hang out with really smart people because I'm going to say in the work that I've done or we do over the last decade,

Most people have no idea what forgiveness is.

That's probably the biggest obstacle to their forgiving that they think it's like a gift for the offender or it's some way minimizing the hurt or it means that they have to like run home for Christmas to deal with somebody who beat the crap out of them.

What they don't realize is it's an inner decision to release oneself from the bondage of our own grievance.

It doesn't always even require an outside participant.

It's an inner healing and cleansing that has really positive effect for our inner world.

But the other piece that people don't recognize is let's say you were badly hurt by an ex-lover.

The damage you're going to do is to the new lover.

If you hold a grudge,

You're going to be less open and less trusting and more defended.

So when you forgive the ex-lover,

It may have no impact whatsoever on that person,

But it's kind of a forward-looking dividend.

Wow,

That's so powerful and so true.

But what gets in the way of,

For most people,

Of letting go and of forgiving,

Being able to forgive?

Why forgiveness is so hard for some people?

It's amazing how hard it is,

Isn't it?

It is because some people can hold grudges for years.

They can resent their parents.

They can simmer in anger for years.

I work with toxic couples who fight and have high conflict.

They go through divorce.

It's like striking how people can hold grudge and anger and resentment,

Which hurts themselves,

Right?

There's a good saying by Mark Twain.

It says,

Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.

Well,

You know that's true.

Whenever you're pissed off,

How bad you feel.

Let me take,

I'll take the one question and then I want to give you a comment.

Forgiveness is hard for a variety of reasons.

One is simple lack of education.

We don't teach people to forgive.

We don't model forgiveness.

It's not discussed culturally.

When there's plenty of models for anger and resentment and bitterness and there are cultural models of it.

There are tribal religious models of,

You know,

We paid those bad people back who hurt us.

So a lack of education is one.

Second,

For whatever reason,

Human beings really don't like to be vulnerable and you need to be vulnerable in order to move on.

You need to acknowledge that something painful happened that you didn't control and that lack of control is not always remediable.

So you don't always get back into control.

You need to make some peace with the parts of this life that are not in your control and having that acknowledgement is really hard for people.

A third reason is our kind of ego sense posits us as at the center of the universe somehow that the world revolves around us and that we come at it from the center and that's an inaccurate perception.

There is no center.

I mean,

Everything is literally as important as anything else,

But from that position,

Which we make believe that we have from the center,

That center is always being disregarded.

The ego senses,

People don't care about us,

People jump in front of us,

People lie to us,

People do all sorts of things to us,

But it's that illusion of being in the center that makes it so hard for us to simply like see things clearly,

Which is in this big swirling mass of energy and human beings.

People do disagreeable things to other people,

They make mistakes and they are sometimes even maliciously inclined,

But it's not one center.

It's an enormous force field of energy and beings.

So those are the three things that I thought of.

The one other thing that I was going to say to you is in all these years that I've been doing forgiveness work,

The most important place that I believe forgiveness needs to be more applied and is most crucial is in the home with intimate partners,

With parents and children,

With exes,

That the amount of damage done to the culture and the humanity writ large by all the contempt and criticism and aggression out there that people who could be in loving relationship commit,

That's probably the most crying need for forgiveness in this world.

Yeah,

The vulnerability piece that you're speaking about is so huge,

Right?

Everybody wants to feel vulnerable,

Accept their vulnerabilities,

Admit them out loud.

I mean,

They do everything just to mask and cover up and armor up,

Just to feel human,

Just to feel vulnerable and authentic.

It's like we go to such depths to avoid vulnerability,

Even if it hurts us,

Right?

In some kind of long way.

I've been really trying to observe this in people,

In myself,

Trying to be more vulnerable,

Be okay with that,

But man,

It's hard.

It's really hard.

And look at when you struggle to be vulnerable,

What you're doing is eliminating the possibility of real grieving because grieving is an experience of vulnerability.

And I'm going to say that most of us have the choice between grieving and creating a grievance that when you grieve,

You allow feelings and ideas and thoughts to be experienced for a while.

Some of which are very hostile,

Some of which are very scared,

Some of which are very lonely,

And some of which are empowering,

And grieving is all of that in relationship to a loss or a wound.

And when you are unwilling to go through that grief process,

What we tend to do instead is to make a grievance out of it,

Which is an object of scorn or an enemy out of the experience that might have forced us,

Were we healthier,

To grieve it rather than fight it.

Yeah,

I love how,

You know,

This forgiveness is tied to that sense of loss,

To grieving,

Right?

Of course.

And I want you to speak about this more.

As I'm getting older,

I'm realizing,

If not most,

But a lot of our problems come from not being able to deal with loss,

Fearing the loss,

You know,

Not metabolizing losses of our lives,

But our lives are full of losses,

Right from the moment we're born.

And when I heard you speak about those things,

That's what deeply resonated with me.

And so I want you to speak about this grieving loss aspect a little more,

You know,

The connection with forgiveness.

You bring up some very deep reflections.

What one of the things that people don't recognize often is that a lot of their forgiveness is around grieving and letting go of certain dreams,

Certain hopes,

A good marriage,

A good job,

A safe home,

That a lot of the issues are existential and deeper than just my partner cheated on me.

Because you're dealing with the loss of innocence,

You're dealing with the loss of trust,

And you're dealing with the loss of a certain faith that human beings are going to treat you a certain way.

So it is a struggle that everybody has to recognize how much loss there is in life and not to just arm our up to protect ourselves from it.

And those are very deep questions,

But from a forgiveness point of view,

What we're doing is recognizing that if we do not put ourselves smack dab in the center of things where we never were anyway,

Then we can see how much suffering there is in this world,

How much beauty there is in this world,

And dealing with both without getting so caught is part of a healthy life.

But you can't do that when you're stuck in a kind of,

You know,

Like a pout that the world didn't treat me the way I thought I should be treated,

And I'm taking my toys and I'm going home.

Yeah,

Yeah.

And it's like people choose the victim path,

They become a victim as hard as it is for them to accept or recognize.

And what I also love about your work is you do speak about that personal responsibility.

You know,

Like you're an adult now,

This is your life.

You can choose to be happy,

You can choose to forgive because it's for your own benefit,

It's for your own health,

Right?

We're not doing it for other people.

This forgiveness is an inside job,

Like healing is an inside job.

And it does have health benefits,

Right,

From your project?

No question it has health benefits.

Can you speak more about the health benefits of forgiveness?

Let me take your questions in a little bit of order.

I remember,

I think the first one was about being a victim.

When we feel out of sorts,

Either physically or emotionally or spiritually,

We have a decision to make as to where the responsibility lies for that out of sortness,

You know,

So.

And we've dealt with people who have had really horrible experiences,

So the period of grieving is essential as a precondition to forgiveness.

But when you look at victimhood,

If let's say something really bad,

Not terribly bad,

But at work,

You're fired without justification,

And it has a real impact,

And it is perfectly healthy for a month or two,

Let's say this is a really long term issue,

To feel sorry for yourself and to kick your boss in your mind and to feel like just pity.

But that's grief,

That's allowing the brain to assimilate change and to like negotiate how it is your future is going to look.

But when you become a victim is when you refuse to move from there to,

Well,

Okay,

Yeah,

My boss didn't do right,

But that was two months ago,

And now it's my life,

And I have to figure out what the hell I'm going to do to make a good life for myself and my family.

The failure to go from that deserved grieving to victim is a choice at some point to not take responsibility for charting your own ship,

For every time you feel sad,

Blaming it on the voice,

On the boss,

Every time you have a stress reaction,

Blaming it on the boss,

Those are victim behaviors.

More responsible behaviors are,

Well,

Wow,

This was a devastating experience,

I better figure out good coping strategies to help me move ahead.

So that's the key piece of moving out of victimhood.

The victim stance has health consequences.

I mean,

Whenever you remind yourself of helplessness,

Whenever you create an adrenalized response out of blame,

Both of those create physiologic responses that are not healthy.

They're not good to depress immune function from blame,

And they're not good to instigate all sorts of stress responses from antagonism.

Here are those are good qualities.

When you come to taking responsibility,

Then you create a much stronger sense of efficacy,

So you don't need blame and self-pity quite as much.

That's how that transition from victim to more survivor or hero has physical consequences as well as emotional consequences.

Yeah,

And with that,

I think in order not to fall into that victim place,

One has to come to accept their vulnerability and allow the grieving process to happen,

However long that may be,

Right?

And then with that,

You have this sense of agency,

Efficacy,

And a sense of responsibility,

Choicefulness for your own life.

But when a person starts to blame,

Criticize,

They sort of step out of that.

Well,

If I'm blaming you,

Then,

Oh,

I'm free of the responsibility.

You know,

I can't do anything.

It's you,

It's God,

It's life,

It's circumstances.

What do you think?

I mean,

This is not your expertise.

I don't know.

I'm not putting you on the spot or anything,

But I've been thinking about this topic.

You know,

Personal responsibility and victimhood a lot lately,

You know,

And what can help a person to develop that more?

Let me give you two answers to that.

One is,

Again,

There's nothing wrong with victim status for a while.

You want to be careful not to limit the human repertoire of responses.

So from what I understand,

Grievance,

Forgiveness,

Revenge,

Self-pity,

They're all wired into us.

They're all inherent in our basic humanity.

The question is,

What's the most skillful approach to be pulled out at that time?

Like what is,

Like right now,

It might be absolutely best,

Say two weeks after you find out that your ex is getting married and they had been seeing somebody all the time of your marriage.

There's nothing wrong with going home and sucking your thumb and eating some extra bon-bons and not walking out the door for a week.

I mean,

That is absolutely appropriate.

So you want to be careful not to overdo the judgment around victimhood,

But what you want to do is see what's the optimal stance for this time and this circumstance.

And I think victimhood is designed to be an immediate coping where you're not responsible and you have time to integrate experiences that are really difficult and that you give yourself space and time to do that.

There's also some value in short-term victimhood.

Let's say you've had a very conflicted relationship with parents and every year you go home over Christmas and mom treats you the same way she did for the last 30 years.

It's okay to have 15 minutes of,

Oh my God,

This will never change.

I'll never change.

She'll never change.

I'm still nine years old,

Blah,

Blah,

Blah.

But what you want to be is skillful so that you're not stuck there.

That's the crucial piece of not being stuck because when you get stuck in victimhood,

You need somebody to blame or something to blame.

And that's when forgiveness becomes really hard.

It's your fault that my life is so bad.

So if you go home to mom and she stole mom,

You can spend 15 minutes like sucking your thumb if you want,

But then you have to have the exit visa that says,

Oh yeah,

I know what that's like.

It's not bad for a few minutes,

But that's not going to get me a good mature relationship with anybody.

So that's the crucial point.

They're all wired in.

The second piece is that people need to be taught about the resilience in the human system,

Not just its ability to stay stuck.

So grievance is one of the ways that the human organism stays stuck.

Resilience is the big category of how people move on.

And what you're talking about is like integrating a kind of resilience mindset,

Which is really hard to do if you can't forgive the things that have harmed you.

Convenience is essential to any resilience experience.

Hmm.

Yeah.

So people have a hard time letting go of their stories of that stuckness because first it's comforting.

Maybe it serves them,

It served them for a long time.

And maybe they like lack of education,

As you mentioned,

They don't know how to,

What it's going to do,

But they also feel just right.

Like that,

No,

I need this person to apologize or to do something so that I can feel better.

So they sort of continue that victim stance,

Right?

But as I've heard you say,

I mean,

Forgiveness is for us.

It doesn't involve the party who hurt us.

Not necessarily.

In some cases,

Yes,

They can come and apologize and all of that.

But that's not a necessity,

Right?

You know,

You identified the key issue of being stuck,

Which is stuck in a story that won't change.

That's basically what stuck is,

Which is you have a repetitive limited story that doesn't alter.

That's what being stuck is.

So when you are unforgiving,

Your story maintains itself without any conscious deliberation anymore.

You just refer to whatever it was that harmed you as at fault.

And you're entirely critical of whatever it was or whoever it was.

So forgiveness involves a change of story.

That's it in its essence.

And it goes from a rigid,

Very limited story of,

You know,

Who did what to who,

Who's at fault.

And let me,

Let me make sure that I don't alter it because that makes me uncomfortable.

Forgiveness is a much more open story.

It,

It allows the pain to be there,

But it changes the inevitability of what life experiences.

What options are.

So when you shift from a grievance to a more forgiving story,

You don't all of a sudden forget that this person harmed you or this life event harmed you.

It's not like they go away,

But they're not stuck anymore.

So I,

You know,

I had a long time ago,

I had a cousin who would tell me that,

Or tell everybody that I think their third grade teacher,

Like ruin their love of reading because of how critical this teacher was.

And I remember hearing that in like high school,

Even in thinking,

Well,

That's a long time to do that,

But that story limits the capacity to become a better reader,

A healthier story,

Which is forgiving is,

You know,

I had a third grade teacher who didn't,

Had to teach me and was very critical of me.

And for years,

I let that define me.

And now,

You know,

I'm not,

I'm not defining myself anymore.

And I don't need to hold on to bitterness to them because that's long into the past,

But it,

But it doesn't erase.

It just stops that event from dominating the present.

Yeah.

Is that true that,

I think I've heard you say that when you work with people,

You don't want to hear their stories at all.

It's not even important to hear who did what,

When,

How,

Right?

I found that very interesting because everybody,

I mean,

There is no hierarchy in suffering or in trauma,

Right?

Like people want to compare always that they're,

How much the degree in which they struggle,

But they always want,

Oh,

You don't know my mother-in-law,

Or you don't know my mom,

Or you don't know my parents,

Or you don't know what happened to me and all of that.

But so.

.

.

Let me,

Let me,

Let me clarify a little.

Okay.

When I do forgiveness classes,

Like people are coming to learn about forgiveness,

I do not have any interest in people's stories because the story doesn't matter.

If I'm seeing a couple or I'm seeing an individual,

Of course I hear their story at first because I have to know one whether,

You know,

It makes sense for them to forgive them or something else might be going on,

Or if maybe they need other kinds of therapy besides forgiveness.

But what,

What I do is even after hearing their story,

What I try to focus them on is more about adaptive coping with the event than assigning blame or avoiding like confronting things.

So my primary interest is in coping that,

So I might,

I might deal with somebody by saying,

You know,

By at some point saying,

I know what your story is.

I know what happened.

It's not as important now as working with what do you do about it?

So when I don't know somebody or I don't have any clarity about what they want,

Then of course you have to hear the story.

What I don't want then and what I don't encourage is that quality of blame.

Like I will look at that quality of blame very quickly and say,

You know,

I see two problems.

One is this event that happened,

But two,

You're blaming that event for your life now.

And I'd rather focus on that piece,

But it's not,

I can't,

I can't just have people come in to see me who don't know who I am and not have some sense of what their life experiences.

What are at the core of forgiveness?

What are the qualities,

The important qualities of forgiveness?

I think there are three,

But the overarching underpinning of forgiveness is people get a moment's insight that their way of handling this is harming them more than what happened.

There's some experience that people have when they go literally,

Oh shit,

My reaction is killing me.

It doesn't happen always.

It may not even happen to a majority of people,

But that's usually what motivates people to be interested in forgiveness is some experience in that.

And I can tell you a personal story around that.

When I was first harmed by a friend and had no idea how to cope with it,

I remember writing a letter and I wrote that letter to,

And I got back the response and the response was so bad that my blood pressure,

I could feel myself like heading towards a stroke,

Like I'm exaggerating,

But I could feel such contempt growing in me.

And I said to myself,

Like,

I don't want anybody to have this much power over my blood pressure again.

I didn't know what to do about it,

But that insight was there.

And at some inchoate sense,

That insight gets people to be interested in at least moving ahead.

The qualities that make forgiveness blossom are,

There are three that I have seen.

One is when you start seeing that you have some control or responsibility for how you feel,

Then very quickly people start counting their blessings a little bit.

Like they go,

Oh wow.

Okay.

So I don't have to make what happened to me the end of my life.

I can be happy for the fact that I have a child or I have a home or I have food on the table or I'm healthy,

But I I've never seen forgiveness blossom in people who don't have some sense of gratitude because those people are too busy with their grudges and they're what they don't have.

So gratitude,

Some capacity for it is a key underpinning of it.

Second is some degree of compassion is recognizing that one's suffering is not alone,

That everywhere you look there's suffering and that what you're dealing with is the piece of suffering that landed on your plate and that what you're part of the human experience of learning to deal with suffering and loss.

And I haven't,

I haven't really seen much forgiveness without a little of that going on.

Like,

Oh wait,

I'm not the only person who's experienced this.

Wait,

This happened 500 years ago and 50 years ago.

It's something human to deal with.

The third piece is that it's like a self-regulation experience,

Which is,

You know,

I have to calm down.

Like I have to take a deep breath,

Look out the window,

Go for a walk.

I have to do something to take responsibility for my experience.

Now,

Those are the three qualities that I have seen propel people to the,

Let's say next level of personal work,

Which is to forgive.

So in other words,

If somebody starts to develop a gratitude practice or be more aware and cultivate that as a skill and become more compassionate,

Which is also skill,

Right?

We can cultivate that,

Become more compassionate and open our heart and develop a sense of safety within us in the world,

Which is,

You know,

Tumultuous and not safe,

But we can cultivate that sense of safe within ourselves.

And,

And I've seen,

You know,

A lot of YouTube talks that you do,

You guide people through deep relaxation,

Belly breathing,

And I'll link in the show notes to a few of your talks that I enjoy for people to become more familiar with your work and perhaps do those meditations and things like that.

This is very,

Very powerful,

You know,

Especially the gratitude piece is so powerful for me personally.

Let me even say that for people stuck on an inability to forgive any of those three simple practices done,

Not even necessarily for the goal of forgiving,

Just to be a little more grateful after an injury or a loss,

Just to be a little more compassionate,

Just to quiet oneself,

Will have positive effect.

And they are good for almost anyone to practice.

Forgiveness is a more like graduate program that it integrates all of those kinds of things into something that is more challenging for people to do.

So it's one thing to experience compassion.

It's another thing to use that compassion to release your bitterness.

It's one thing to experience gratitude and then to use that gratefulness of what life has given you to release your bitterness.

The thing that I have started to talk more about of late,

Which only came to me about two years ago,

Is that when we don't forgive after a modest amount of grieving,

For really painful things,

They have said that even healthy grieving,

Like for like the loss of a spouse or real difficult things,

Healthy grieving can take six months to two years.

For less critical things like a job loss,

It might take a month or two.

For somebody who's late to dinner,

It might take a moment or two.

I mean,

There's always a moment.

But what I've seen is when people do not make that transition from grief to some degree of letting go,

They're actually doing an algorithm on their whole life.

They're not just evaluating their partner or their parents or even their cultural wounding.

They're actually evaluating their whole life and they're saying,

Have I received enough bounty and goodness and love and blessing from my actual life to be able to not need bitterness about this experience?

It's a real question inside.

And for people who answer no,

Well,

Then there's an investigation,

Which is,

Is that true that you really have had such an awful life or is it that you haven't noticed the goodness around you?

And my experience is that people don't notice enough the goodness around them,

In part because they carry so many grievances that keep them from noticing.

Wow,

This is so powerful.

This deeply resonates with me and it's very,

Very,

Very powerful.

So the forgiveness project,

How old is it now?

And do you still carry this forgiveness project?

Yeah.

Yeah,

We,

In the last year or two,

We've made three visits to the country of Columbia to help them set up a museum exhibit on forgiveness,

To do public talks,

To create a video and training forgiveness in Spanish.

Right now we're just starting an outreach to different places now that everything's on Zoom,

But we have a film that we show by a friend of mine.

And then we have a discussion and a little bit of training.

We try to do this in 90 minutes as an introduction to the power of forgiveness.

And we've had a discussion with the office of the Afghanistan ambassador to the United States,

And we're probably going to do some of this in South Africa and then with Columbia,

Just an outreach on the value,

The importance and the necessity of forgiving in places that have had like cultural and political issues,

Not just interpersonal issues.

That's fascinating.

What are kinds of stuff that,

I mean,

You say in your talks that 95% of the time it's like everyday ordinary stuff that people have a hard time forgiving.

Is that right?

Yeah.

But let me,

If you're looking for me to kind of give you a quick,

Not just summary,

But a way maybe to have a takeaway for your audience.

The most important thing that I've uncovered through our work about forgiveness is that it's a teachable and learnable skill.

That is the most important result of our work.

That you don't have to have deep religious anything you can,

The wounds don't have to be enormous,

But that you can learn and be taught how to forgive.

That's the crucial takeaway.

The second is with forgiveness,

Start with things that are small,

Practice small.

Practice with the door dash that brings the wrong food,

Not with somebody who harmed your daughter.

Start small,

Practice small.

And the other piece is practice close to home.

So probably the most important way that you could begin to forgive would be to take an issue that you have with a significant other or a child or a parent or best friend where the relationship really matters and practice letting that negativity in you go towards this person who matters to you.

That's the most crucial way for forgiveness.

And rehearse,

You know,

When you're sitting there by yourself instead of rehearsing a grievance of,

You know,

Why didn't my partner take out the garbage,

Rehearse,

Well my partner didn't take out the garbage,

But right here and now I'm practicing not letting that affect my love for them in the slightest.

So that's the takeaway that I try to leave people with.

You can teach yourself this,

You can do it through self-help,

Practice small,

Practice with people that matter to you and rehearse.

Give yourself guided practice inside of you so that you learn to access this in yourself.

And how does one know that they have done the forgiving?

How do you know when you have forgiven someone or something?

It's very easy.

I mean it's not easy to do but it's easy to know that either you get really tired of your story or grievance so you don't want to tell it anymore.

That's one sign that,

Oh my god,

I've told now 78 people what a bum this person was.

I don't need that story anymore.

And the corollary is when you talk about your life you no longer get so stressed.

So I had a very difficult experience with one ex-partner and for a while I gave myself real permission to bitch and moan.

I gave myself about six months and then at the end of six months I stopped it because I knew it was important to do both.

And then after a while I recognized I never wanted to say a bad thing about them.

It was not needed but it was my words that were my signal not what they had done.

It was entirely inside of me.

How about self-forgiveness?

What can you say about self-forgiveness?

It's a good idea because you want to limit or minimize self-attack which is not healthy but mostly it follows along with other forgiveness.

The difference is in self-forgiveness you want to calm down,

You want to take responsibility to not get so upset with yourself after a period of getting upset with yourself so you could learn from it.

But you also want to be very aware of the necessity of making amends and apologies that when you have harmed somebody else part of the process is to sincerely say you're sorry,

Do what you can to make it right and if you notice an issue in yourself that's not good you need to make efforts to change it.

Self-forgiveness involves usually behavioral change or behavioral expressions.

It's not sufficient to just say oh I let myself off the hook because at the basis of self-forgiveness is a true apology which involves my recognizing that my behavior directly caused injury to somebody else.

I make that link.

I apologize for both.

I vow not to do it again and I offer either amends or some indication that I'm taking steps not to do it again.

It's a very mature deep quality of owning one's mistakes,

Doing what one can to make it right and then releasing it.

How has this work changed you?

You know by working with people and doing this project in what ways have you changed as an individual if you have?

More than I can even acknowledge because it forced me to become more responsible for the words that come out of my mouth and it's an ongoing process.

The bottom line is I realized that it no longer worked quite so well for me to blame the past or other people for my own say cruelty or lack of either mindfulness or goodwill.

That broke down.

The second piece was understanding that some degree of bitterness,

Negativity,

Bitching,

Moaning are useful in response to her injury.

They need to be limited in time but they're useful so I'm more comfortable giving myself permission to do both.

And lastly the work itself has deepened my compassion because I have simply seen so much suffering that it's it.

You know I have no words for the amount of difficult experiences that I've listened or seen people go through.

And it's just to conclude is there one example that you can offer of someone who has forgiven something very very atrocious or horrific or very difficult?

I mean I have multiple but the first one is probably the one that I'm kind of most proud of.

This was a long time ago and a woman came into I think she took two sets of classes.

I may have done an advanced class back then and I didn't get to know her until after but she came into these classes and I met her for lunch I don't know maybe two months later and she told me that when she came into the class she was in chronic pain from a motorcycle accident that she had experienced because she had her ex had been going through a very difficult divorce experience and they were really very very nasty.

I can't remember that but it was really toxic divorce and she was riding with him on his motorcycle and they were fighting and arguing and it was just an ugly period of time and they were they were winding through the hills here when he lost control of the motorcycle and crashed it and she ended up with some kind of chronic pain I think in her lower back and pelvis and he ended up with brain damage from this accident and for months months months months she blamed him you know that it was his fault and his bad driving and everything and he had all these horrible consequences from this accident and after taking the forgiveness class class is she started to reflect on well it wasn't just his fault I mean we co-created the marriage and we co-created the the divorce and I was arguing with him and you know it wasn't so simple and so she started to open her heart back up and you know re regain her sense of openness and they she still divorced him I mean they they did not stay together but she healed enough so that she ended up helping him in his care from the motorcycle accident after you know when he came back from the hospital he had a long rehab and she volunteered to be part of his care and that hit me as wow this this forgiveness stuff has incredible potential to heal people if they're ready for it yeah and then it's such a powerful reminder that we have the capacity right it's it's in our in us it just we need to dig deep and open our hearts you know we're wired for this stuff right the compassion the love we can we have the potential to give it to others to ourselves and make life more peaceful and beautiful and you know we all have a short period on this earth you know it's it's it's not a wise idea just to wallow in our pain and blame others and increase our suffering and you know I will say two things and then I do need to get off one is you're so right about that we have just a short time here and as I've aged and I've seen how like sad it is for people to go through lives bitter because it is short and we don't know literally how short it is and the second one is just what we try to do with our forgiveness project was make this a simple secular training secular simple so we could go anywhere the book I wrote Forgive For Good is an incredibly simple self-help book about this I mean if we try to demystify this process yeah and that's what I love about your work about your book about your teachings thank you so much from the bottom of my heart I'm so deeply grateful for your time for your presence for your generosity you know much health good luck success and a big warm hug to you through this virtual medium thank you again well and thank you for having me on your show that concludes today's conversation my dear listener and I hope you enjoyed it I would love to know what your takeaways are from this rich conversation I would also love to hear your forgiveness story if you have one you can send me a note to the email info at authentic parenting.

Com you can call the number 732-763-2576 and leave a voicemail and for international listeners you can use the free speak pipe tool on the contact page of my website authenticparenting.

Com forward slash contact to access the full show notes for this episode visit authenticparenting.

Com forward slash 269 until next week connect to the present moment to yourself and your children I am Anna Siwold thank you so much for listening.

Reviews

This is amazing! So helpful! Thank you!

Fantastic talk on forgiveness. How to do it, when it’s time and that it’s okay to bitch for a while.