TRANSCRIPT
This morning, I was drinking my cup of tea, and on the tag on the tea bag, there’s always a little saying, a little spiritual saying. Sometimes I like them; this morning, I did not like the saying. It said, “Forgiveness is an act of Consciousness,” and I thought, “G, it made me want to, well, throw away the tea. Let’s put it that way, and not buy from that company anymore.” Now, why? Why would I say such a thing? Everybody loves forgiveness. It’s such a kind thing to do. It’s a mature thing to do. It’s a conscious thing to do. People from time to time tell me I need to forgive. “You need to forgive your parents,” and I don’t agree. Actually, what I have found in my life is that not forgiving my parents is the thing that saved my life. I actually have a lot of experience with forgiving my parents. I spent my childhood, my teen years forgiving my parents because I had to. It was a survival mechanism for me. They did a lot of crazy and horrible and unethical things to me, traumatizing things to me. Yet, I needed them. I was dependent on them. I was emotionally dependent on them. I was financially dependent upon them. So, I had to forgive them. I had to push away my feelings that didn’t want to forgive them, that wanted to be hurt, wanted to be angry, wanted to be upset, wanted to confront them, wanted to call them out, wanted to say, “That is not acceptable parental behavior from you.” But I couldn’t do it. And actually, I had tried. I’d long since tried, many, many times, tried to say, “Don’t do that. I don’t like that. That doesn’t make me feel good.” The response I got from my parents, both my parents, my mother and my father, over and over and over again was rejection. It was extremely painful for me. I was rejected by them again and again because they couldn’t grow, they couldn’t change, they couldn’t look at themselves. They couldn’t accept any sort of outside eye saying, “What you’re doing is not okay.” They actually pushed me to never tell anybody about what they did, and this is a big part of why I became traumatized. Because when you can’t talk about the bad things that are happening to you, when you’re not allowed to feel your own feelings, you have no choice but to push it down, to split off from yourself. And in so many different ways, I lost myself. All that pain and hurt and anguish and desperation, rage even, went way down, down deep inside of me, and it was covered over by forgiveness. I got really rewarded for my forgiveness. I remember my dad even saying, “You’re a real man, Daniel,” when I was, what, 12, 13, 14 years old? “You’re so mature.” Basically, he was saying the same message that the tea bag I had said: “You’re a very conscious person. Your forgiveness is an act of Consciousness.” And it wasn’t. My forgiveness was an act of desperation. Fast forward, I did slowly break out of my family. I still, I got far away from them geographically. I learned how to become financially independent, and I started finding in my mind, in my heart, that my feelings could come back. I could remember what had happened. I could suddenly say, “Wait, that’s not okay. I don’t just suddenly forgive them because I don’t need to anymore. I want to instead explore how I really feel and how I really felt about what happened to me for years, for decades.” And so, I started feeling my feelings. It was very scary. I will say this: this was the beginning of my healing process, and this was an act of Consciousness. I don’t like to be self-aggrandizing and say, “Oh, you’re such a brave guy, Daniel,” but it was terrifying to do this, to do this self-exploration, to feel these feelings. And for that reason, I will say it is brave. It was courageous because there was a lot of pressure on me to do the opposite. I remember again and again, with everybody in my life, talking about what I was going through, just sort of almost like an anthropologist, just describing myself and my process and saying, “This is what I am going through.” And people really criticizing me for it. The worst criticism came from within my own family, from my parents again. Now I was an adult and saying, “Wait a second, what happened really wasn’t okay. That wasn’t right what you did, Mother, Father, both of you.” By now, they were divorced, moved on to new lives, new partners. And what I found is that they became highly critical of me again. And this taught me a lot because what I learned is if, for me, Daniel, as a grown man, 25, 30 years old, by 30, I was a psychotherapist, and it was still really hard for me. I’m like, I was doing this professionally for a living, helping other people on this process. If it is this hard for me at 30 years old, now I’m 50, 51, almost 52. If it is this hard for me now, and it still is, by the way, this gave me a lot of empathy for how fundamentally impossible it was for me to feel these feelings as a child. And so, when I read a tea bag that says, “Forgiveness is an act of Consciousness,” it’s just ridiculous because as a child, it’s totally an act of survival. And nowadays in my life, because people still from time to time tell me, “Oh, you need to forgive your parents.” I mean, I see that in comments on my YouTube channel, on this channel sometimes, and people out in the world sometimes tell me, “Oh, you need to forgive your parents.” And really, now what I translate it to mean, because I understand what they’re really meaning, what they’re not saying is “forgive your parents.” What they’re saying is “dissociate.” They’re saying “split off your feelings.” They’re saying “push your feelings down, bury them, go into denial.” Even become spiritual. “Oh, it’s a spiritually positive thing. You’re a brave person to forgive.” No, no, no. You’re not a brave person to forgive. You’re a brave person not to forgive. And yet, I so rarely hear the message that I’m sharing about forgiveness. That’s probably why I’m driven to come back here and share it again. I’ve talked about forgiveness on this YouTube channel. I think the last time maybe five years ago, the first time more than ten years ago. And there really isn’t much out there about the awfulness of forgiveness, even the danger of forgiveness. What happens when people forgive? They lose themselves. They lose the part of themselves that is healing. That part disappears and goes away. Now, another one that goes hand in hand with people saying “forgiveness is an act of Consciousness,” another one is, “You have to understand why your parents did the things they did. You have to empathize with them. They did the bad things that they did for a reason. They came from difficult lives too.” Well, of course, they did. Of course, they came from rotten backgrounds. People who come from really healthy backgrounds don’t traumatize other people. People who grew up with really loving, healthy parents don’t traumatize their own children. So, of course, my parents came from rotten backgrounds. I’m full well aware of that. But in order to heal, in order to heal the traumas they inflicted on me, it does nothing for me to empathize with them. I have to empathize with me. I have to feel my own feelings, and that’s been the only thing that’s helped me grow, helped me become an independent, much, much, much more mature person. So when people say, “Oh, you need to side with your parents. You need to side with the little traumatized person inside of them who did those horrible things to you,” really what they’re saying is, “You need to sell yourself out, and you need to take the side of your traumatizer.” So my response is, “Wait a second. So if someone on the street randomly comes over, beats me up, rapes me, hurts me, cuts me up with a knife or something like that, I’m supposed to empathize with them? I’m supposed to forgive them? What about my healing process?” Now, I will say this because people also say, “You know, oh, if you don’t forgive, you’re just living in bitterness. You are a bitter person.” Well, bitterness is a stage of the healing process. It’s a very honorable, respectful stage of the healing process. Traumatized people are supposed to feel.
Bitter, maybe for a long, long time. That’s part of the healing process. Those bitter feelings need to come up. But what I found in the areas in which I have healed my traumas—I’m not fully healed, but in a lot of areas I’ve done a huge amount of healing—I’ve become much less bitter.
Have I forgiven my parents in those parts of myself? Perhaps. But the thing to me is not that it’s any act of consciousness that I’ve done; it’s just a natural byproduct of the healing process that I’m not so bitter at them for those things anymore.
Now, in the areas where I’m still unhealed—because there are still some areas going really deep into the core of my early, early childhood where I’m not healed—I think probably deep down I’m still bitter in some ways. And so I honor that, and I love that, and I love that about myself.
And to wrap all this up, I think my act of consciousness, my stand of bravery, is to say no to the people who say “forgive,” to say no to the people who say “empathize” to my parents, and to say yes to my own healing process. A painful healing process, but a healing process of progress where I have progressively come back to me. And I’ve seen the same thing in a lot of other people.