Ep 1: A Place of Forgiveness

So, how do we get to a place of forgiveness? How do we get to a place where we've been in situations that may have, maybe, be in resentments. Situations where we've been angry at somebody who's hurt us. And these are very old wounds. These are very old things that have happened to us from the past. It could be our parents, teachers, friends, family members. And I quite frequently encounter, uh, people wh’t know how to work with the pain they've experienced.Perhaps their parents or certain family members, they still want to have a relationship with them. They still want to auto these folks. How do they work through what they have to work through towards a place where they can then sort of seek or offer forgiveness to the people that have hurt them? And I think that this takes a lot of work, to understand what we've done to ourselves.It's a lot of what people don't see and are blind to: that we are the ones that put ourselves into harm's way. Based on childhood strategies and the way that we experience our upbringing and things that have happened to us can cause us a lot of hurt. Because of how the people that were supposed to take care of us have treated us.So it's not so much about blaming our parents as much as it is that we had an experience that hurt deeply and when it happened, we really didn't have any outlet for that hurt to go. So what we do is we stuff it. And it's really at a much more tactical level. It's our systems or our nervous systems are reacting to something that's threatening, reacting to something that's holding us back.And that tension that's created locks us up. And that experience of being, that's sort of aroused in a way where we're freaking out, but we really have no place to go because the surroundings won't permit it. People are yelling, screaming, we get lost in it. Someone's yelling at us. So we bury what it is it's happening to us and it gets stored in the body.So this is stuff that is readily known more and more now. There are many experts that talk about this: Bessel van der Kolk, Ariel shorts, Peter Levine, a gab Mormon, Tay. These are all people that I have used to learn about these things. I also have studied with Brenda Schaffer. But the idea that this really important idea of the body and how people store pain that becomes an emotional memory and it's in the body and we don't really know what's going to trigger it. And when it will come back up, but once we're an adult, we do have to understand that what we experienced back then hasn't gone away. I was on a trip recently, and the captain of this ship that we were on said that where we were visiting, the footprints will disappear. However, the memories will endure and persevere. It's kind of the right words. And that's the way I think it is. We aren't back there anymore. We aren't back when things happened originally, when we were hurt, beat, yelled at, screamed at, accused, whatever it was.But yet here we are essentially attracting the same emotional dynamic in our life as an adult. And now it's for all intensive purposes, it's just as painful as it was back then. But now we're an adult body. So now we can do something with it. Now we can act out on it, if we're not careful and we can either stuff it until we're ready to explode or we can start taking out on others.So that's difficult to work through so that we can understand that. We then turn that on ourselves and we beat ourselves up because of the way we feel. We beat ourselves up. We sort of attack ourselves for being inadequate, being weak. And these are again, part of it. It's the meanings that we probably will place on what we're feeling.So we have an, a particular sensation. We have a particular feeling. We don't even realize it's non-verbal. And then as we grow, develop, we get to adults, we've created a particular meaning around what it is we're feeling. And then that compounds the problem. Because now we have a particular script, a particular way of talking to ourselves, thoughts, beliefs that then trigger what's in our bodies, our bodies trigger themselves to replicate or create these meanings that we have created to make sense of what's happening. And usually they're negative. And usually they're against ourselves. So to move through that requires realizing that a lot of times we start working on this and we start to realize it.The stuff hurt back then. And the people that did it, we either will say, well, they were doing the best they could, they didn't know any better. And there's a lot of truth to that yet at the same time, sometimes I wonder: people know what they're doing. People pick up on that. They knew that they're hurting someone and they keep doing it.And people that are vulnerable will be at the mercy of those people.To get beyond that -what I would call loyalty to the dysfunction of their environment that they're carrying - you have to break that and you have to get