Forgiving The Narcissist

It is always difficult to forgive someone who has wounded us so deeply. It feels as if we are giving something to someone who has already taken so much from us but when we shift our perspective of what forgiveness actually is, we open ourselves up to the possibility of accessing tremendous healing power. In this episode, let's talk a little bit more about how we can get you unstuck so you can manifest the life you truly deserve.

Transcript

Welcome to the Breakdown to Breakthrough podcast.

My name is Lisa A.

Romano.

I am a life coach,

Bestselling author,

YouTube vlogger,

Meditation teacher,

And expert in the field of codependency and narcissistic abuse.

I am a believer in the power of an organized mind.

My aim is to help people learn what it means to live above the veil of consciousness rather than living a reactive life.

May your heart feel blessed,

Your mind feel expanded,

And your spirit find hope as you spend time with me here at the Breakdown to Breakthrough podcast.

So today we're going to be talking about forgiveness and what I would like to present is this idea of forgiveness being an energy versus an act.

And so when we think about forgiveness,

So oftentimes the human mind goes,

Oh I have to give this person something now,

This person who hurt me,

This person who abused me,

This person who abandoned me,

You know,

This person who destroyed my life,

This person who cheated on me,

This person who smeared my name.

You know,

So oftentimes when we think about forgiveness it's like we're giving something away.

And I think,

You know,

If we look at it in terms of energy,

You know,

Here we have a situation in which we feel like someone has taken so much from us and now we're asking ourselves or someone,

A therapist or a family member or even the person who's wounded us,

They're asking us to forgive them,

Which in terms of energy it feels like I have to give you something and you have already taken something from me.

So it's like double dipping.

You already took from me,

Whether it's trust,

But if you think about trust,

Think of it as energy.

You ruined my faith in you.

Think of faith as energy,

Right?

And so I had this faith in you and you took this away from me.

If you've suffered a smear campaign or humiliation or abandonment,

It's the sense that something was taken away from you or you were denied.

So there's some lack there.

And then when we think about forgiveness,

Now it's like,

How am I supposed to muster up giving you energy when you've taken so much from me or when the actions that you have taken or the inactions,

We also have to understand that abuse can be by omission.

So I neglect my child or I neglect my spouse or I ignore that my spouse is wounded or I ignore that there's a need in the house.

I'm ignoring it.

My children need to have to go to the doctor and I ignore it.

They have pain in their teeth and I ignore it.

They're wounded when they come home from school and I ignore it.

They have lice and I ignore it.

They have emotional needs,

Psychological needs,

And I'm ignoring it.

I'm too self-absorbed to pay attention.

That's abuse by omission.

Or when you have a parent that is abusing one child by commission,

Which is obvious abuse,

And the other parent is ignoring that the abuse is taking place.

So there's abuse by commission and there's abuse by omission.

And so when we're in the experience of feeling wounded,

We feel like so much has been taken from us or you have now added perhaps more insults to injury,

Right?

So now I'm already hurt.

Now you hurt me more.

But if we think about forgiveness as an energy and we think about our wounds as energy,

We think about our experiences,

Expand your mind.

Don't think about life through a very limited lens and understand that everything is energy.

And if you can start allowing yourself and your mind to think about your life and even your experiences in terms of energy,

I think it's going to be a lot easier for you to understand the concept of forgiveness and what it can do for you.

So what I like to do is I like to ask my clients to figure out where they're stuck,

Right?

And we are stuck when we're attached.

So think about stuck,

I'm attached.

So when we're thinking about evolving the soul,

How do we get unstuck so that we can evolve our soul?

And we have to think about energy.

So I'm stuck,

Right?

So there's this invisible tack that is keeping my butt tacked to this experience with this other person that wounded me.

I want out of that experience.

When I was going through my divorce with my ex-husband,

You know,

He wanted to fight,

He was stuck.

He wanted to keep me there fighting him.

He was stuck and he wanted a partner to box with.

And for many years,

I was a willing participant.

He said something nasty to me,

I said something nasty to him,

He tried to hurt me,

I tried to hurt him more,

Right?

And it was just ugly.

And three children were watching this unfold,

Which is something that I carry with me and I try to undo every day and I do what I can.

I don't want to get attached to guilt and attached to shame.

I want to reconcile that and move forward.

And so I had to forgive myself.

So but when I understood that forgiveness was a matter of the heart and that it was a releasing of energy,

It became almost like Neosporin on this battered wound.

Like,

Oh,

I can offer forgiveness from the heart space while still remembering in the mind space or the mental space,

What took place.

So I can forgive my ex-husband and what took place,

Which was not his fault entirely.

We were both below the veil of consciousness,

Both codependent,

Both unaware,

Both wounded from childhood,

Both ignorant as to how we were mirrors of one another,

How I wanted him to take care of my needs and he wanted me to take care of his needs.

And after 12 years of that,

Neither one of us feeling fulfilled,

We took it out on each other.

I wanted to change,

He didn't.

And so this is my chance now in life to free myself from the attachments that I had to him that I once believed in.

And so what I've learned to do over the years is I've learned to forgive from the heart space.

So it's not something,

It's not coming from a place of lack anymore.

And it's not an act,

It's literally an energy.

When I think I have to forgive someone who wounded me,

It feels like an act.

It feels like there's energy involved in the giving,

Like I'm giving away energy.

And instead,

When I say,

No,

I'm choosing to open my heart and to forgive the things that I cannot control,

Right?

It's a releasing rather than a giving.

It's like you're just opening the door because your heart wants to forgive.

It's the mind,

It's the attachments that's not allowing your heart to forgive.

And yet your heart doesn't want to live in animosity.

It doesn't want to live in conflict.

It wants to love.

It wants to be free.

Your heart wants to give and give some more.

Your heart understands that when I give,

I receive.

So when you give,

But we have to understand also that we're conscious human beings.

We have a personality,

An id,

An ego,

A super ego.

That's us on the personality realm.

And then we have the mind,

Which is both conscious and unconscious at the same time.

Then we have memory,

Which is a byproduct of the amygdala,

The hippocampus,

And the neocortex.

They all play a part in recalling memory.

And so my mind is going to remember when you said this or you did that.

When I think of you,

When I call you into my consciousness,

All of these things,

My personality,

The id,

My ego,

You wounded me,

I have to protect my little id,

My memories are going to get activated.

All of these levels within me,

My hormonal system is going to respond to a memory.

It's going to become activated.

And that's why to heal and evolve your soul,

You have to rise above all these automatic and default settings in order to really evolve your soul and to evolve consciously.

All of this lower stuff,

This lower consciousness stuff is going to take place.

That's not your fault.

Your brain is like a cell phone.

It came with certain prefactory settings.

What we're trying to do is become the programmer of our mind.

And that can only be,

That can only take place through self-awareness,

Self-exploration,

And yes,

Self-forgiveness,

Because when you are stuck berating yourself,

You're not in the seat of the observer.

And only when you are able to move into the seat of the observer,

Can you program your mind effectively.

If you think about a cell phone,

And it'd be really wild if a cell phone could program itself,

Right?

But what we have now is we have engineers and programmers programming the phone to do certain things.

When you pick up your phone and you download an app,

It's the observer in you detached from the phone,

Separate from the phone,

That is able to identify,

Wow,

I'd like that app.

You know what?

I don't like that app anymore.

Let me remove that from the system.

And if we can become that objective about the mind,

You know what?

Holding onto this anger is,

It's a faulty app.

I understand why I use this app for so long,

But I'd like to evolve my soul,

Please.

And how can I do that?

Oh,

So if I install this healing app or this forgiving app,

And I release the energy from my heart space,

Then I can be free.

And so what I'm hoping that you're hearing in this short podcast is that the power to release is within you.

You cannot do it from a lower level of consciousness.

You cannot do it from the perspective of ego.

You have to rise above the perspective of ego.

You have to use this as a free will zone,

People.

I don't know what it's like on another planet somewhere in another galaxy or star system,

But on planet Earth,

You have a choice.

You can either play with these ideas or not.

You can hold onto anger or play with the idea of releasing it or not.

And just a caveat,

I think anger is very valid.

And sometimes we need to stay in anger.

I know I needed to,

Because there were points in my life where I was so expended of energy that I felt like a gangrenous toe.

There was nothing left to give.

And if you came near me and wanted me to give you something,

I was going to bite your hand off because there was nothing left.

I was exhausted.

I played by all the rules.

I tried to play nice.

I tried to be forgiving.

I toned myself down.

I denied myself.

I didn't take care of myself.

I took care of everyone else but myself.

You know,

I played the martyr like my mother did.

I stuffed my feelings.

I took care of people that would never have taken care of me.

I didn't rock the boat.

I watched people have fun.

I never knew how to have fun.

You know,

I did everything that I was downloaded to believe was the right thing to do by watching my mother.

And all it did was get me sicker and sicker and sicker until I realized that the problem was my programming.

My brain was downloaded with the codependency app,

With the inability to with the low self-awareness app,

Right,

With the unconsciousness app,

With the adult child of alcoholic app.

So I was downloaded with all this information and it was up to me to rise above it and to sit in the seat of the observer.

But before you can sit in the seat of the observer,

You've got to carve that seat out.

This is an incredible journey.

This is why I put out so much content because I hope to leave behind and to continue to create a library of information that people can tap into at various stages of their recovery because you will hear things at different stages of your recovery that you didn't hear before.

And revisiting information is very,

Very helpful.

So the caveat about being angry is if you're at a point in your life where you're done,

You are in pure survival mode,

Right?

You've been abused by a narcissistic spouse,

They're withholding money,

They're smearing your name,

They refuse to pay the mortgage,

They control all the money.

That's what happened in my situation.

You have no access to funds,

No access to credit cards,

No access to cash.

You're down to your last box of macaroni cheese in the house and you're angry,

That's okay because that anger is going to allow you to do things that you might not have otherwise been able to do if you weren't angry,

Like get an order of protection,

Like go to an attorney,

Like set some boundaries.

So anger is not the enemy.

There is a time for anger.

And as you stay on the healing path and you learn more and more and more,

You'll know when it's your time to release anger.

You'll feel it.

You'll be sick and tired of being stuck and you'll want more.

And so if you're listening to this podcast,

It's not an accident.

And I just hope that the information that I've provided allows you to see forgiveness,

Not as an act,

Not as something that you do,

Not as something that you have to give somebody,

Somebody that took from you.

Forgiveness is the releasing of a forceful healing energy source that is already pre-built into the prefactory settings of your heart space.

You have the ability to knock on the door and the door will open and what will come out is healing,

Forgiving energy.

So you forgive what you can't control.

You forgive what has been.

This is an act of the heart through free will.

And the mind says,

Yes,

Heart,

You can release the forgiving energy.

I'm not going to forget what so-and-so did.

And not for anything.

It's impossible to forget.

Your mind remembers everything,

But you don't have to keep yourself apart from the powerful healing energy of forgiveness.

And so I hope that this podcast has inspired you to evolve your soul more than and beyond any idea you ever thought possible.

And please know that you matter.

We are bathing in a field of electrical soup.

The quantum field is alive with magnificent energies and we are all connected.

And when you heal,

You must know that that healing energy that you experience,

The tingling,

The acknowledgement,

The tears,

The feeling of lightness,

You release that energy out into the quantum field through your aura and into the matrix.

And you share that healing energy with all of that,

All of us and all of that other energy that the rest of the world is bathing in.

So never think or if and when you ever find yourself thinking that you don't matter,

Know that you do.

Namaste dear ones.

Until next time.

Bye for now.

Reviews

Thank you, Lisa, for this insightful talk. Dealing with a narcissistic father has been a lifelong struggle.

Awesome. Thank you 🙏🏻

It’s a relief to feel seen and advised

Thank you

Makes me aware of the boundaries that were violated

Your content was literally the only one that kept coming up in all my searches. Thank you for creating it, I really needed to hear this to stop resisting forgiveness.

This could not be more perfect for me today Lisa - thank you.

Thank you for a really sane perspective of forgiveness 🙏🏼🌟👍🏼

Fantastic! I never thought of forgiveness in this way. Thank you, this is so helpful. Namaste.

Really love the approach, direct and easy to understand! Thank you!

So enlightening and comforting at a time so needed ♥️

I found you on YouTube months ago and it led me to this app. I’ve been meditating daily now for four months now. You share so much valuable information and have truly changed my life. Thank you 🙏

Brilliant concept of forgiveness as an energy rather than an act. Very helpful, thank you

Thank you for your insight. What a new perspective. Very positive.

Thank you so much for this mediation. I have been angry destructively for so long because the abuse I went through with my parents and this really helped me understand what forgiveness really is.

A brilliant articulation of Forgiveness.

I needed to hear this today!
thankyou Lisa🙂

Lisa Romano is one of the most brilliant psychologists I have ever heard. She articulates difficult concepts in understandable words. In this one, I particularly liked the likening of our being to a cell phone with pre-loaded apps. Those apps are the conditioning of our upbringing which may or may not be useful.

A HUGE THANKS!!!

I should listen to this everyday until I believe it and can do it even though I thought I had already done it! I get it.... it seems to never end and it rears it’s ugly head just when you think your work is done. It’s never done or that’s how it seems to me. 😟