00:00 

Hey there, this is Intentional Living with Tanya Hale and this is episode number 155, "How to Forgive Anyone." Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale and I'm your host for Intentional Living. 

00:21 

Well, hello there, my friends and welcome to the podcast today, I'm so glad to have you with me. We are talking today about how to forgive anyone, and this is tricky. Some of us hold onto this pain and this this inability to forgive and we often are like "I don't know how to get rid of it. I don't know how to forgive." We're going to talk about today how you can do that. Because sometimes forgiving others can seem so overwhelming. If you struggle with this, I promise you are not alone by any means. This is something that so many people are working on and trying to figure out. So let's talk about forgiveness. I think in church we grow up learning all about forgiveness we talk about it and we know that it means that we have to let go of what somebody has done and and that seems really nice in theory, but sometimes it's freaking hard. Would you agree? It's just challenging to move into this space and we're going to talk about why it's challenging and we're going to talk about how to start to move into that into that space. 

01:25 

So I started off by looking in two places for definitions, and what I found was really interesting. I went to Webster's dictionary first and to forgive means "to cease to feel resentment against an offender." So letting go of the feeling of resentment. And when I went to LDS Gospel Topics, it said "to pardon or excuse someone from blame for an offense or misdeed." Now this is what I thought was so fascinating, because as a coach and as I work with the thought model, I would take forgiveness and I would put forgiveness either in the feeling line, that I can feel forgiveness, or in the action line, that I choose to forgive, it is something that I do. But when I looked at those definitions, the Webster's definition came into the feeling line, "to cease to feel resentment," right? So I guess the cease would be an action, but the resentment is what it tied into, whereas the LDS definition, it moved into the action line, "to pardon or excuse someone," right? So I thought that's really fascinating because I thought, "where does this come from? Where does this feeling of resentment come from?" 

02:36 

Well, if it's a feeling, we know that our feelings are created by our thoughts. So if we want that change of heart that forgiveness creates, we have to start at the cause of the resentment, right? The reason we're having a hard time and the cause of resentment, the cause of the feeling is always going to be the thought line. So we have to learn to change our thoughts about something that someone has done or a certain circumstance that occurred, right? So this is the thing: we can't just focus on the feeling. We can't just focus on the action. We can't just say, "I forgive you," and have the feeling go away, because the thought that they did something wrong, that they should be held accountable, whatever that is, that thought is still there. So we have to go back to the thought if we are going to be able to forgive someone. When we feel like we need to forgive, we have to recognize that our current negative emotions are caused by our thoughts about someone or something in the past. We're feeling pain about something in the past. Now one thing that we do know about our past is that it doesn't change. The past is the past. We cannot go back in time and change how things happen. So we have to be able to find peace with our past at some point and that is where we find forgiveness, is in making peace with that past. So we're going to talk about that a little bit more today. 

04:13 

So when we want to really become clear about what we need to forgive and what's going on, here's some things I want you to do. First of all, I want you to really dig in and figure out what emotion are you really feeling. You may be saying "they shouldn't have done that," but let's get specific. Are you feeling angry? Are you feeling sad? Hurt? Betrayed? Ignored? Really try and dial down into the emotion that you're feeling. That's going to really help you understand more because what we need to do is figure out the feeling that we're having that's causing us to not want to forgive. And then we need to take a step back into what thoughts are creating that feeling. So again, we want to be very specific. We want to really hone in on the thought that is creating the emotion. Maybe the emotion is resentment, okay? We need to figure out what thought is creating that. So a lot of times these thoughts can be conscious, but sometimes they are unconscious thoughts that we have accepted about a person or about a situation in the past, but we are continuing to believe them today. And that is where our  struggle comes, something that happened in the past. 

05:36 

Now we may be aware of all of our thoughts, creating this resentment or anger or hurt or whatever. We may not be aware. And this is where thought downloads are really gonna help. This is where working with a coach can really help because I am trained in how to help you figure out what unconscious thoughts are creating the resistance for you in moving into a space of awareness. And awareness is the first step for figuring out how to forgive someone. If you feel completely stuck, coaching is a really fabulous option to help you figure out how to do that. Because forgiveness is all about our thoughts about the past. Thoughts of how something shouldn't have happened, how someone shouldn't have done something, something along those lines, okay? 

06:25 

But there's two things at play here that I just wanna point out quickly. One: we have to accept the past. We have to realize that no matter how much we anguish over it today, it will not change. The past will not change. It's not going to. I think somewhere in our brain, we kinda think that if we anguish enough about it, that it will change. But it doesn't. So we have to accept that first. The second thing I want you to just kinda hone in on right now is realizing that only when we accept the past can we move into a more peaceful, content place. We have to accept that the past happened the way that it did. And then we can find ourself in a space where we can start to move forward. Because not forgiving keeps us from moving forward. It keeps us from finding contentment and fulfillment and from finding peace in our life. That is the struggle of not forgiving. My not forgiving doesn't affect the other person at all. In fact, very often, they don't even know that I'm not forgiving. They don't know that I'm going through so much anguish and pain and frustration and suffering. They have no idea. I'm doing it all to myself. So forgiving is a gift that we give to ourselves. It's a blessing that we give to ourselves, we gift ourselves with. 

07:59 

So let's just throw out some examples here and kind of look at how we can work through these. So maybe, example number one, maybe you're angry with your parents for the way they raised you because you feel like they raised you with shame and fear. Maybe you're resentful with your adult child for the anguish that they caused you when they were a teenager. Example number three, maybe you're angry with yourself for choices that you made 10 years ago that have you struggling even now. Okay, so whatever you feel the circumstance may be, notice that those are circumstances... well kind of. Parents raising me with shame and fear, that's going to be a thought, right? Adult child causing anguish, again, that's a thought. But we believe these stories, right? We've created these stories, so whatever you feel the circumstance may be, a great tool to figure out what your thought is that is causing the pain is to state what was not okay, and then follow up with "because." 

09:01 

So using the examples from above, let me show you what that looks like. "It's not okay that my parents raised me with shame and fear because now I struggle with self-acceptance and self-worth." "It's not okay that my adult child caused me so much anguish when they were a teenager because it ruined the cohesiveness of our family." Again, that's a thought, right? If we want to turn that specifically into a circumstance, "it's not okay that my adult child used drugs as a teenager." We want to get into something more specific like that. Third example, "it's not okay that I got $20,000 in credit card debt 10 years ago because now I can't dig myself out of financial problems and I'm going to have to declare bankruptcy." So there's some ideas of how that works so that we can really hone in on what our thought is. 

09:57 

So here's another way that you can do it. It can also be helpful to state something specific that happened and then ask, "so what?" This is also going to help you dig in on the thought that we need to start working on, okay? So here's a couple of examples. "My brother told me I was fat when I was 16. So what? Well, so now I have body image issues." Here's another one. "My ex-husband cheated on me with a woman from his work. So what? Well, now I have trust and commitment issues." There's a third one. "My siblings didn't invite me on a vacation with them. So what? So now I feel like I don't belong and that they don't love me." Okay, so here's what all of these examples have in common. They all tell a story. We made those circumstances mean something. We turn them into a story for us. And it is so easy to think that the source of our story suffering is the circumstance, but we are wrong when we think this. We're wrong. 

11:03 

My brother telling me that I was fat is not the source of my body image issues. It's my thoughts about him telling me that I  was fat. It's my thought that "oh my gosh, maybe he's right." The ex-husband cheating on you with a woman from his work, that does not cause you your pain. It's your thought that you were treated unfairly. Your siblings not inviting you on vacation. That's a neutral circumstance. The problem with that is our thought that they did something wrong. "They should have invited me. Now I don't belong. They don't love me." This is what we're making the circumstances mean and it's these thoughts that create so much havoc in our life. It's easy to think that our suffering is caused by the circumstance, but it isn't. It's our current thoughts about the circumstance that cause our pain, that cause our suffering. The story about our past, guess what? It only exists in our memories. And here's kind of another little trippy thought. It only exists when we are currently thinking about it. 

12:22 

Now this is fascinating, because when our brain is thinking about something else, the past doesn't create us any pain. We're not feeling pain 24/7, because our brain naturally goes to other places and thinks about other things. The past only exists in our minds and in our memories. Because what if we woke up tomorrow with amnesia? Didn't remember any of it. Had no recollection of how your parents raised you. Had no recollection of the affair that your husband had. Had no recollection of how your adult child was when they were a teenager. If we woke up tomorrow with amnesia, those people and those experiences would no longer be creating pain for us. So what if we were to figure out how to clean up our thoughts about these circumstances and create thoughts that energized and invigorated us instead of draining us of energy because we are resisting forgiving? We can forgive anything we want to simply by changing the way we think about it. 

13:33 

Now, this sounds very simplistic, and it is in some ways, but it can be challenging. But rather than thinking that something shouldn't have happened, we can choose to look for the lessons and realize that maybe it should have happened. We can learn to see that they were doing the best they knew how in the situation with the tools that they had. Moving into this kind of thought work creates a space for us to make a different story. As long as we are resisting the past, and angry about the past, and holding on to the past, we will never be able to move into this space of forgiveness. We have to change our thoughts about the past. We have to stop thinking that there was something wrong about the past. Ok, so this change of thinking, it takes work, it takes persistence, it takes dedication, but let me tell you something, I promise you, it is doable. 

14:38 

And the thing is, you may think "yes, but it's not true." Who's to say it isn't true? Everything that we think is made up in our brains. I do believe for sure that God gives us inspiration of things that are true. I know that for sure, but most of the things that come into our brain, we're just making up stories. We can make up stories where we hurt and we resent and we feel anger, or we can make up stories where we are able to let go and release and open up. We get to make up our stories. Is the thought that you're thinking about this person you're struggling to forgive, is it serving you? If this thought is not serving you, let's think something different. Let's move into a space, into a place, that something is serving us. 

15:40 

Now, I can feel, even though this doesn't go out for like two weeks, I can feel your resistance. I can feel you fighting me on this, some of you. Let's talk about some of the reasons why we want to fight moving into this space. First of all, we think that forgiving someone is accepting their behavior and saying that their behavior was okay. That is not true. That is not forgiveness. Forgiveness is not saying that their behavior was okay. Okay, that's not. Second, we often attach morality to other people's behavior. Let me restate that another way: we step into judgment about their behavior. What if we just allowed their behavior to be neutral? Yee! And some of you are going, "but it wasn't neutral! Look what they did! He had an affair!" Okay, what if that's neutral? What if we can bring ourselves to a space where we go, "you know what, that will hold some consequences for them, but that is between them and God. I'm so glad I don't have to judge that. I'm so glad because I don't know everything. I don't know all the circumstances." Alright? Moving to this space where we step out of judgment. That doesn't mean that you can't say that behavior is not okay. And because of that, here's a consequence that I want to enact for our marriage or for our relationship. 

17:23 

But we have to start moving into a space where we stop judging. As long as we're in this judge-y space, we will not forgive. We can't. And we won't. Okay? But this is the thing. Their behavior does not have to hold consequences for us. We get to choose to let go, to forgive, to move on. Now this is not to say, as well, that we don't feel the consequences sometimes, okay? If your husband has an affair, yes, you will feel consequences from that, but what we try to do is to step into judgment of the consequences that they should be receiving. Now we may feel consequences for sure, but here's the deal. We are  doubling down on the pain when we don't forgive. We're doubling down on it because not only do we feel the pain of the situation, but then we don't forgive, so we feel the double pain, right? 

18:36 

So let me give you just kind of a silly example. Let's say that you tripped on a step and you don't struggle to forgive the step, right? Every time we walk outside our front door and see that step, we don't get bad feelings toward that step and we don't curse it under our breath and go, "ooh you blinkety-blink little step," right? We don't do that. We recognize that there is no morality attached to the step and us tripping on it. We don't see that that step intentionally chose to trip us. It's completely neutral for us. We can feel the consequence of sprained ankle, but we don't struggle to forgive the step because we're not judging the step. Part of this goes back to the manual that we talked about last week. We don't have a manual for the step, right? We don't have a manual. We just accept that the step is a step and it's gonna do what it does and we take the responsibility for us tripping on that, right? 

19:47 

Believing that what someone did as being not okay does not change the past. It doesn't make the other person feel anything, and the list of rights and wrongs, guess what? That is God's work. It's not ours. We struggle to forgive when we try to do God's work. God's work is to keep track of rights and wrongs. God's work is to keep track of shoulds and should nots. That's not our work. Our work is to learn to let go, to learn to create peace for ourselves. And when we don't do that, we are causing our own suffering by doubling down on the circumstance, on the pain of what that could have created. 

20:41 

Okay, so another reason that we may push against this is that we often feel we need to blame someone for our pain. Because if we can't find someone to blame, then it must mean we have to blame ourselves. Our brain wants to go into this space of making sense of all the information, which means if it feels that something has gone wrong, it has to be able to blame someone. And if we feel like we can't blame them, then it means we must have to blame ourselves. And this puts us in a bind because we may start making up things to blame on ourselves and we don't need to do this. There's nothing here that we need to do. Often circumstances occur and no one is really to blame In that sense because oftentimes humans are just acting in ways that they are unaware of. There's a big difference between taking responsibility for something and blaming ourselves and feeling guilt and shame. Just the other night I was chatting with my niece about this in the context of divorce and I was talking about things that in the last couple of months I have really come to be aware of that I was doing that were very harmful for my relationship. And I didn't recognize it at the time. I had no awareness of the concept, even at the time. And so we were talking about how in that situation, it's not necessarily a space where I need to blame myself, but I do need to take responsibility for what I didn't know. But it's not a space of blame. It's not a place of beating myself up over it, blaming myself, accusing myself, beating myself up is not going to help. It's just going to put me in a spiral of continuing to not forgive. And taking responsibility gives us space and hope to know how to move forward. Blame keeps us stuck. Responsibility helps us move forward. 

22:38 

And this connects us to the third challenge here, which is forgiving ourselves. This manual that we have for ourselves, that we should have known better, we should have done better, we start to judge ourselves. Again, this is God's space, not ours. It's a place when we judge ourselves where we start to blame ourselves rather than just take responsibility for it. All of these, we think that things did not go as they should have, that something went wrong. Notice the word "should." "Should" is a dangerous word to start playing around with. So I want you to consider that this thought that "things did not go as they should have" is 100% totally optional. Maybe they went exactly as they should have for us to learn and grow. Maybe this space of learning to forgive yourself or to forgive others is the exact lesson God needs you to learn today. Maybe that experience happened exactly as it did, so that you could learn what you're here to learn right now, how to forgive. We can learn to let go of all the pain, of being unforgiving, the pain that it creates in us when we don't forgive, by learning to reframe our thoughts, which are creating the feeling of pain, which creates the action of being unforgiving. 

24:05 

Our brain wants to create all sorts of stories to protect us. It wants to answer questions such as, who loves us, who doesn't, who hurt us, who is worthy of us, and who isn't, who is good, who is bad, who is nice, who is mean. Our primitive brain wants a complete story. It wants a beginning, a middle, and an end, and if it only has one piece of that, it is going to manufacture all the rest of the story, even though it may all be false. It wants a complete story. We have to be very cautious in paying attention to what our brain is creating. So what if we let go of feeling the need to judge all of those things, and have answers  to all of those things? What if we allowed God to have the say in all of that, and we just focused on our own thoughts, and our own feelings, and our own actions? 

25:05 

Here's the deal, my friends, when our thoughts create so much suffering by doubling down on the pain, this is 100% optional for us. We don't have to experience suffering like that. We don't have to think the thoughts that create that suffering. We get to choose what to think. I promise you, choosing to forgive others is incredibly liberating and empowering, and choosing to forgive yourselves is also amazingly liberating and empowering. The reason we feel unforgiving is because of our thoughts. And when we change our thoughts about the past, when we let go of the blame and the judgment, we can change how we feel. And when we change how we feel, we're able to move into the action of forgiving. This is how to forgive anyone. We have to figure out the thoughts or the stories that are holding you back. We need to choose to create a new story around the person and the circumstance. Choose to reframe that story in a way that serves you, in a way that lets go of the suffering, in a way that brings the peace that forgiveness brings. 

26:32 

I will tell you, this can be easy in theory, but again, it can be difficult in application, but I promise you it's completely doable.I can help you see the thoughts if you're struggling to see them on your own. This is what I'm trained to do. This is what I do as a life coach. I help you see things that you're not seeing on your own because none of us see our own stuff clearly. This is what I do. This is how I help you. I help you become aware of things that you are doing, thoughts that you are having that are holding you back. And then obviously, it is so important that we rely upon the Atonement of Jesus Christ to help us let go of things that are hurting us, let go of things that are causing us pain, let go of things that are holding us back. This is the beauty of having each other. This is the beauty of having the gospel. We can help each other to move into these better spaces. Forgiving is a beautiful process for ourselves, not for the other person. Forgiveness is a gift. It is a blessing that we gift to ourselves. And the more we do this, the more contentment and connection that we will feel in our lives. This is the beauty of growing up, moving into a space where we can start to understand this and we can start to move on this. Okay, my friends, that's going to do it for me today. Hope you have a fabulous week and I'll see you next time. Bye. 

28:17 

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure to sign up for my free "weekend win" Friday email: a short and quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week. Go to tanyahale.com to sign up and learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya.