TRANSCRIPT
I often hear people say that you need to forgive yourself. You need to forgive yourself first. Forgive yourself for your mistakes, for your bad deeds, for the harm you have caused others, the harm you may have caused yourself, for your flaws, for your inconsistencies, traumas you may have even inflicted on others. You need to forgive yourself. And I don’t agree. In fact, when I hear people describe this type of forgiveness, often I don’t even think it’s really true. I don’t even think it really exists. I don’t even know if what they’re describing is an accurate, honest phenomenon.
What I say instead is heal your traumas. Heal the wounds of your life. Heal what happened to you as a child. Heal the neglects of your childhood, the abandonments of your childhood, the rejections of your childhood. Heal the invasions of yourself from when you were little and vulnerable. Grieve those losses. Learn to love yourself. Learn to see yourself. Hold yourself. Nurture yourself. Honor all the sides of yourself. Bring up those painful feelings. Bring up that rage. Bring up that sadness. Bring up that fury. Bring up the bitterness. All of those buried feelings, the logical consequences of having been traumatized as a child. All of that stuff, that is what leads us to become harmful people as adults. That is what leads us to harm others, to traumatize others, to harm ourselves, to neglect ourselves, to neglect others, to not live up to the best of who we really are in the core of ourselves, to not live up to our obligations and responsibilities, to be unhealthy people. The kind of things that people feel they need to forgive themselves for, that’s motivated by what happened to us.
And the idea of forgiveness, why I don’t really see it as realistic, is like trying to heal the surface of the problem. Make the surface of the problem evaporate. Oh, all these bad things that you’ve done to yourself and to other people? Well, if you forgive yourself, that can all go away and you can feel good without really ever having to go in and deal with what happened. I even hear people say, “Oh, you haven’t been a good child to your parents. You need to forgive yourself for not being a good child.” And it’s like, wait a second, that’s totally backward. Your parents failed you in so many different ways, which is why you have these problems to be with. This is why I had problems in my life. My parents were so deficient. I was raised with profound deficiencies emotionally, psychologically, socially. And no surprise, I grew up to become an adult who was confused and lost and didn’t know how to love properly and didn’t know how to relate properly and harmed myself and sometimes harmed others. And it doesn’t feel good. And yet nothing I really did changed it until I got into the depths of myself, the depths of my history, and started working out the roots of the problem.
I think it’s a bit like weeding a garden. Some people say, “Oh, if you just weed all the tops of the plants off and snip them all, the weeds that you don’t want, then that’s like forgiveness. It’s all gone, and look how clean this garden plot is now.” But the roots are still there. And guess what? It grows back. And sometimes it even grows back stronger and bigger, and the roots spread. So this whole, “Oh, forgive yourself,” well, people then say, “Oh, but if you don’t forgive yourself, it’s so painful. You have to live with so much pain and so much bitterness about what you have done, and you owe it to yourself to live without that pain and bitterness.” And I say, uh-uh. Actually, that pain and that bitterness from not forgiving yourself, that’s what you need to heal.
Pain, pain is an incredible motivator. It has been in my life. It’s like the painful stuff that I’ve done to myself and others in the world has been incredibly motivating for me to look in the mirror and to say, “Why am I this way? Why did I become this person?” Having some deep gut awareness inside myself that this is not who I really am. This bad behavior, this self-neglecting or neglecting of others’ behavior, this is not the core of me. This is not the truth of who I really am. And that motivated me to start looking within, to really look at my painful, painful history. A history of being a little boy who was required as a child to think I came from a great family and a loving family and that I had loving parents and a loving mother and a loving father who cared for me and gave me their best and would fight for me, etc., etc. And to realize it was fabrications. These lies were perpetrated and perpetuated by my parents to make themselves feel good, to bolster their grandiosity, to allow themselves to not have to deal with their own painful, rejecting, traumatic history of childhood. In a way, by having children, by having me and harming me, and then lying about it, deluding themselves into thinking they were great parents, this in a way was like them forgiving themselves. I think they probably believe they had forgiven themselves.
I think of all the times, how many times, four, five, six, seven times my dad physically attacked me, shook me, slapped me around, threw me out of the house, locked me out of the house, screaming at me, said awful things while he was doing this, and then forgave himself afterward. Just somehow absolved himself of having done these things and then proceeded to forget about it and then did it again and again and again. My dad had a reflex of self-forgiveness. My mom had one too. I think a lot of people do in the world. I think this is the normal way to be, not just in our society here in America, Europe, but all over the world. People forgive themselves very, very quickly because if they didn’t forgive themselves, they would have to look down deep inside themselves. They would have to look in the mirror, and they wouldn’t like what they saw because you know what? It’s ugly. I’ve seen the ugliness in myself, and it’s not fun. It’s not a walk in the park. It’s not a relief. It’s not a relaxing Friday afternoon. It’s something that really does hurt. Yet every time I’ve done it, and I’ve done it a lot, there’s some little voice in my head that says, “You are saving your life. This is good.” And so even though it feels painful and terrible and awful and bitter, and I cry bitter tears and I feel sick and my stomach and my throat tightens up, and I just say, “Oh, I’m not the wonderful person I thought I was, and I’m not the wonderful person that I want to be.” It’s a process. And there’s another part of me that says, “This is exactly what you need to feel, exactly what you need to see about yourself in order to transform, to become a better person, to become more real and healthy and honest, to know the truth about yourself so that you don’t have to repeat it.” And that’s my experience with engaging in this process for decades.
My experience is that by not forgiving myself and letting myself off the hook and moving on and absolving myself and letting my pain go away, I’ve changed. I don’t do the things that I used to do to myself, to others. I’ve become a much better person. I’m still on the path. I’m not perfect. I’m still healing some of this deep stuff. It really, it really does go deep. It really can twist a person. But I don’t know any other way to transform at the deepest level. And so when people tell me, “You need to forgive yourself. You need to let it go and move on and absolve yourself and let the pain go,” more often than not, what I see with these people is these are people who have no clue about healing trauma. They haven’t even started the process. They’re actually using all this forgiveness and closing their eyes and looking away and dissociating to avoid the process. And I can understand why they’d want to avoid the process, ’cause it’s so painful. And there are so many consequences. For starters, you start looking deep inside. It’s like it fundamentally changes your relationship with your parents, with yourself, with your extended family, with the world, with society, with religion, with the mental health system, with this, with that, with everything, with friends. It’s like it’s a…
Confusing and alienating process to break away from the lies of the family, and the lies of the culture, and the lies of the religion, and the lies of society. But for me, it’s been the thing that gives my life value. That has taught me what love really is, what consistency really is, what nurturance really is, what having integrity really is. And it gives me the courage and the confidence to break my anonymity and come here and speak.
[Music]