Part 4: Forgiving Myself? I just can’t and I shouldn’t : The role of empathy

When considering things in your past that you are having a difficult time forgiving, have you ever considered why you did what you did? For me, I came to the conclusion that I was completely lost. I lost my moral compass and at the time and I actually believed I was making the better decision. I can’t explain how this happened. My wife in her wisdom says that my brain was hijacked. I would have to add to that that so was my heart and soul. This in no way is trying to devise an excuse for my actions but just a way to say that something happened that wrongly convinced me that my decisions were the best ones for me at the time.

Some of you may have feelings that you should have done something to prevent a bad thing from happening but you didn’t.  So, you end up carrying unnecessary guilt and shame your whole life.  Many times, you may not even have an idea what you could have done differently, but you believe it is your fault anyway.  I once knew a woman who lived her entire life withdrawn, shy, and socially awkward.  After she died, her husband and I were talking and he told me that she had a completely normal childhood until age twelve.  At that time, her parents owned a small general store and one day they asked her to run an errand for them.  When she came back she found her parents dead from stab wounds following a robbery.  Something snapped in that twelve year old heart and she was never the same.  Her husband told me she blamed herself her entire life for their deaths, thinking that had she been there she could have prevented the whole thing.  A twelve year old girl!

She isn’t alone.  I’ve heard abuse victims, both child and adult, blame themselves for the abuse they suffered.  They believe that if they had only acted differently, said the right things, fought the right way, or fought back at all they could have prevented the angry attacks.  They believe it is their fault they were abused.  The toll this takes on their lives is devastating.  Let’s get something straight.  I don’t care what you said or how you said it, what you did or how you did it, you do not deserve to be abused.  Abuse is the sole problem of the abuser.  Period!

Another reason we make decisions we later regret is that we are trying to fill a void in our lives. You may have no idea at the time what that void was or even that that’s what you were doing but whatever you did brought relief from the emptiness even if only for a moment. It was only when you discovered that your decisions were not working in your life and were, in fact, becoming destructive that you realized you needed to change.   Unfortunately, often it is only through the process of realizing what doesn’t work that we inch closer to discovering what does.

Reflection on and processing of the events in our lives that we can’t seem to forgive is imperative.  Did you make poor choices to escape pain?  Are you putting unrealistic or impossible expectations on yourself thinking you could have changed the course of events that were beyond your control?  Are you allowing space in your life to understand that you are human and will make mistakes?  Do you extend the same amount of empathy to yourself that you do to others?  Can you use bad decisions to learn and grow rather than allow them to turn you bitter and angry?  Give yourself a break.  Bad decisions and poor choices are part of the journey of life.  What is important is how you deal with them.  Reflect on what life lessons you could learn if only you would release yourself from the shame in your past.

Tomorrow: Finding the silver lining

Part 3: Forgiving Myself? I just can’t and I shouldn’t : The role of spirituality

 In yesterday’s post I discussed the issues of shame and guilt and how shame can keep us from forgiving ourselves for our prior regrets. The point was made that our worthiness does not depend on things in the past that shame us, but rather on our intrinsic worth. So how do we get to the point where we no longer define ourselves by what we did or didn’t do, the job we have or don’t have, whether we are married or single, or whether we are wealthy or poor?  Keep reading.

In order for you to truly forgive the things that you hate about yourself I believe you must embrace your spirituality.   You are a spiritual being whether you realize it or not but you may not have developed this aspect of your life. One reason is that many of us have equated spirituality with the belief in a God who is out to get us. This God sits up in the clouds somewhere and looks down on us waiting for us to do something wrong so He can punish us and, ultimately, send us to eternal damnation in an ever burning fire. All that did was make us realize we could never be perfect, after trying and failing so many times, so we threw away the whole notion of a God; and, if there is one, He’s not somebody I’d want to hang out with. This belief is nothing short of a lie that is designed to keep you from connecting with your Creator.

You see, it is through God that you realize your true worth so it is imperative that your view of Him (please know I use “Him” for simplicity.  This Being is much greater than any gender identity) be accurate. God created you. He loves you. No matter what other people have tried to tell you about how His love only reaches those who attend church enough, read their Bible enough, believe the right things, or pray enough,  there is nothing you can do to earn His love and nothing you can do to shut it down. If you believe what you’ve done makes you too flawed for Him to love, it is a lie only designed to defeat you. 

Spirituality is developing a connection to this unconditionally loving God by recognizing His presence throughout your life; all day, every day. Understanding that your worth comes from God provides a rock solid foundation that is not swayed by circumstance or what people think of you or how much you believe you should achieve in different areas of your life. The fact that you were created, that you were the one sperm to out swim the millions of others to reach the egg (sorry, I couldn’t resist), makes you valuable and of great worth! This God with whom you are partnering has seen absolutely everything that everyone in the human race has done and His love still extends to all. He is not dissuaded by the things you have done. His love is much bigger than anything you could do to disrupt it. He will always believe in you and He wants to partner with you to make this world a better place and you a joyful person.  Your shame and/or faulty beliefs are what hold you back from this partnership and what must be shattered for you to emerge from your cocoon.

Please understand I am not talking about religion. I don’t care what denomination you belong to or if you even belong to one. It doesn’t matter if you go to a traditional church or not.  I am simply talking about belief in God and that he created you and that he loves you just as you are and that he wants to be your partner. I’m speaking of being able to have a relationship with this Creator rather than avoiding him, hiding from him, and being afraid of him. He is for you, not against.

Realizing that you’re worthwhile and valuable and that you have a purpose, even if you haven’t discovered it yet, is essential in helping you realize the importance of overcoming shame. Even if you’re willing to live in the pain of your shame and are afraid of what it might look like or feel like to do the work to let it go, the realization that this God who created you has something much greater and better in store for you just might be the catalyst that allows you to take those first steps to freedom. Overcoming your shame through faith finally allows you to see that you are part of a bigger story; a story much greater than past mistakes. Taking the pen and writing new chapters in this story brings joy to life, while constantly rereading those old, painful chapters only brings emotional death.  The book of your life will always contain those hurtful chapters and they are important, but those chapters do not make up the entire story unless you stop writing or keep writing different versions of the same things over and over again.

I challenge you to connect with your spirituality and partner with your Creator to write new chapters in your story.  May this story be one that represents triumph over adversity and may you embrace yourself in the same way you are seen by your Creator.

On Monday:  Finding Empathy for Yourself

Part 2: Forgiving Myself? I just can’t and I shouldn’t : The role of shame

When I think of shame I remember a time when I was 11 years old. A friend of mine told me a rumor about my fifth grade teacher and I shared it with some of my classmates. Somehow the teacher found out and thought that the best way to handle it was to try to scare me half to death, which she did. She pulled me aside and told me that she could sue me for slander and that I was in big trouble. The principal was called in and I was taken into the coat room, which was part of the classroom, and given five swats completely in earshot of the other kids. Then, as a fifth grade boy I was made to stand in front of my class and apologize for spreading these horrible rumors. I broke down and cried from the humiliation and the crying only added to the feeling that I just wanted to crawl away and die. Needless to say I could not wait for the end of my fifth grade year to get away from that teacher and start over with different classmates.

None of us want to be treated the way I was treated by that teacher. We can’t wait to escape from those people who seem to be bent on making us feel horrible about ourselves. And yet, we treat ourselves this way all the time. We beat ourselves up and tell ourselves lies about how we are so much less worthy than everyone else because we hate things in our past. Especially as a child, but even as adults, we tend to take what people say about us and to us, internalize it and believe it. We begin to think that they are right; that we are incompetent, not worthy, incapable of achieving things, a failure, and the list goes on and on. Maybe they were words spoken by a parent, a teacher, a coach, or someone who we respected and loved, but no matter who it was it cut to the core of our soul.

This internalized shame leads us to view our regretted past through very skewed lenses and we end up reinforcing those negative messages with lies we tell ourselves. For example, if I under perform for a quarter at work I see myself as incompetent. Because I believe I’m incompetent I have a much greater chance of under performing the next quarter and the next and so on. This cycle of shame absolutely has to be broken. We can no longer allow ourselves be defined by other people’s opinions of us or by the lies that we have begun to believe about ourselves because they been programmed into our hearts. The price of alienation from community, losing self-confidence, developing self-hatred, feeling stressed , living in anxiety and depression, and even experiencing physical ailments is too high to pay as we live the rest of our lives.

I do want to distinguish between guilt and shame at this point. Guilt is an emotion that serves a very positive purpose in our lives. It tells us that we need to take a look at something that we’ve done, evaluate it, figure out how we want to handle it differently in the future, and make amends with anyone that we have hurt along the way. Shame, on the other hand, personalizes what we have done. Instead of feeling like we made mistakes in our choices, we believe we are intrinsically flawed. And if we are flawed then perhaps we are bad people inside and out and unlovable. We can no longer learn from our past mistakes because we are too embarrassed and humiliated to even think about them, much less process them. So we develop all kinds of mechanisms to avoid the pain of our hurt including drinking, shopping, sports, religion, and any other way we can think of to avoid processing our past. It is so important to realize that the things we have done do not define who we are. If I made poor grades in school, I am not dumb. If I botched a project at work, I am not incompetent. The truth is that we are human and we will make mistakes and we will do things wrong and it is only by embracing that humanity part of who we are that we can be free from the shame that accompanies our mistakes.  Only then can we be authentic with the people with whom we share life.  You are valuable because of being you, nothing more and nothing less. Therefore, when you look back on your regrets please conclude that as a human it is part of the journey and commit to learning to embrace those mistakes, not because you’re proud of them, but because you realize that they were necessary for you to learn valuable lessons. After all, we typically don’t learn what we need to when everything goes right and we think we’re doing everything perfectly.

My challenge to you is to identify in your life the areas where you have experienced shame; the areas where you have decided that you are unworthy and are a bad person, and start retraining your mind to believe that those messages and lies do not define you as a person.  Lean into the pain and process the valuable lessons of your successes and failures. You are enough!  You are valuable!  You were created because you are loved wholly and unconditionally by the Creator!  Do not let yourself or anybody else rob you of this truth.

Forgiving Myself? I just can’t and I shouldn’t : The Beginning

It is impossible to go through life without doing some things about which we look back and feel regret. Whether we classify them as mistakes or bad choices or are just unhappy with the way we reacted to a situation we often have quite a bit of difficulty forgiving ourselves for what we did. It is often easier to forgive others for the mistakes that they made than it is to forgive ourselves. While we believe that God can forgive absolutely every sin that someone else commits, we often feel like He doesn’t have enough grace to extend to me because what I’ve done is so bad that it is unforgivable. We wonder how God can love us because we’ve let Him down so many times.

It’s not unusual to go to counseling in hopes that someone will help us be able to forgive someone who has wronged us in our past. We listen to the therapist and go through the steps necessary to forgive that person even though we feel like what they did was completely wrong. We begin to realize that forgiveness has nothing to do with them but everything to do with us and that becomes our motivation to forgive. We understand that we can’t move on to becoming healthy without first forgiving those who hurt us because if we don’t we end up staying stuck in our bitterness.

However, when it comes to forgiving ourselves for our pasts mistakes/sins/decisions we often don’t know how to do it or if we even deserve forgiveness. But, forgiving ourselves is just as important as forgiving others for our mental health.  Let me say it again with emphasis.  FORGIVING OURSELVES IS JUST AS IMPORTANT AS FORGIVING OTHERS.  If we fail to take this step we end up often dealing with depression, bitterness, hatred, and many other physical and mental health issues.  At the root of feeling like we don’t deserve forgiveness is shame; the feeling that I am a bad person.  The truth is that I am a very important, valuable person who has much to contribute, but in my humanness I make mistakes.  The struggle with actually believing this truth is seemingly impossible to overcome.

I acknowledge that in my own experience of counseling clients, I often tell them how important it is to forgive themselves but I seldom have explored with them how to do that. I take for granted that people can just figure it out.  However, as I was considering this topic I realized I hadn’t thought this through even as much as I believed. This series attempts to address those steps that we can take to move beyond the things in our past that are holding us back.

Over the next several days I will be posting thoughts about each step, what it means, and how to address it.  I hope you will follow the series, pass it on, share your comments, ask me your questions.  I believe this is something with which we all struggle so I do hope you will share the series on your FB pages in hopes that these words may touch the lives of people who really need healing in this area.  Topics addressed will include shame, spirituality, understanding my motivations, grieving, life lessons, reconciliation, and anything else I might think of along the way or you might prod me to explore.  Thank you for being a part of this.

Thinking of Reconciling a Relationship?

In my last post I addressed the topic of forgiveness and how necessary it is to grant it for our own emotional health and growth.  I outlined what it takes to get to the point of healthy forgiveness and how to avoid cheap forgiveness.  I also mentioned that forgiveness is not the same as reconciliation and that it is important not to confuse the two.  Unfortunately, many people journey through their lives with a cloud of guilt hanging over them because they want so badly to reconcile a broken relationship but no matter what they try it doesn’t work.  Feelings of guilt and defeat follow them wherever they go.  Or they are very angry with another person because he/she is the one refusing to reconcile.  Some even question their spirituality because of their inability to fix what is broken.  However, just like forgiveness, reconciliation cannot be rushed and requires both parties be in a certain frame of heart for it to even have a chance. The more significant the broken relationship (father, mother, son, daughter, sibling), the more pain and defeat we feel and the more difficult the relationship can be to restore.  This post is important because while it is necessary to forgive, it is not always possible or even wise to reconcile.  From a spiritual standpoint, forgiveness is a necessary step but reconciliation is not.

Reconciliation requires hard work by both people.  It cannot be accomplished because one person is trying as hard as they can to mend the relationship while the other seemingly isn’t interested or isn’t emotionally healthy enough to do what it takes on their end.  So what does it take?

1.     A willingness to acknowledge the role each person played in the severing of the emotional bond.  I realize there is not always equal participation in the hurt but it is important that both people be on the same page as to who did what.  This doesn’t take an accusatory tone or confrontation, though that may have happened in the past, but rather a voluntary acknowledgment of the role each played in the dysfunction.  For example, in an abusive situation, the abuser must be willing to take full responsibility for what he or she did, never blaming the victim, in order for reconciliation to even be a possibility.  However, the disintegration of a marriage or other significant relationship usually involves unhealthy contributions of both parties so each must be insightful and humble enough to own and openly discuss the role they played.  For reconciliation to be possible, both people must in humility own the pain for which they are responsible without blaming the other person for the role they played.  If neither party can do this or if only one of the partners can admit their part, true reconciliation is not possible and any attempt to reconcile by the will of one person is unhealthy at best and dangerous at worst.  It is also very unhealthy for one person to try and act like nothing happened just to make things better.

2.     A change in behavior over a substantial period of time.  After each person recognizes their role in the relationship breach the behavior that caused the problem must completely stop or, in some cases, significantly decrease.  A period of “painful honesty” must follow.  By that I mean, going out of the way to make sure the offended party has absolutely no reason to question or doubt.  It is not possible to know if real change has occurred without a demonstration of truth for a period of time.  For example. I worked with a couple who were separated because the wife was no longer willing to accept her husband’s flirtatious behavior with other women.  He acted this way for so long it caused her to feel very insecure and to wonder if more was going on that she didn’t know about.  After she told him he needed to move out for awhile, a very contrite husband became very apologetic and promised it would never happen again.  Though she was tempted to accept his words and immediately start fresh, she wisely was cautious about taking him back and wouldn’t do so until after she had plenty of time to see how he behaved around other women.  Her friends also provided some extra eyes when she wasn’t around just for added insurance.  His part of “painful honesty” was giving his wife access to all his passwords for email, social media, and cell phone records.  This showed her just how serious he was in his reconciliation attempt.

In some cases full reconciliation is just too risky and shouldn’t even be attempted (unsafe people who still feel dangerous physically or emotionally), but it does not have to be an all or nothing situation.  In a previous post I gave an example of a grandfather who wanted to see his granddaughter.  Many years earlier he had sexually abused a friend of the mom’s when she was in her early teens.  He never fully owned what he did nor did he want to talk about it.  Because of his attitude, even though the offense occurred some 20 years earlier, grandpa could only see his granddaughter when mom was present.  There could be no unsupervised visits.  If she saw additional signs at any time that he still was tempted inappropriately by young girls, all visits would cease.  She was able to have a relationship with her father but only with these strong boundaries in place.

3.     Both parties must want to reconcile.  There are so many cases where an injured person or the person who primarily caused the pain wants so badly to restore the relationship but for whatever reason the other party isn’t interested.  No amount of begging, cajoling, manipulating, or threatening will result in a healthy restoration.  Reconciliation will have to wait until both people are ready with the understanding that that may never happen.  In that case it is important to be able to accept that the relationship will not ever be what it once was.

4.     New rules, new dynamics.  Full reconciliation of a relationship rarely results in the relationship being a close as it once was. There is almost always a period of testing and trepidation followed by a relationship that looks and feels differently than it did before.  This is normal and hopefully can be accepted as a healthy reaction.  However, there are some instances where the  relationship after reconciliation is closer than ever before.  The work put into resolving the situation actually brings the two people more intimacy and emotional bonding. 

People are worth second chances and close relationships are valuable and worth repairing if the mutual desire is there.  Just remember, the process takes a lot of hard work and can’t be done by just one person.  If you want reconciliation while the other person does not, I suggest working on acceptance of what has happened and learning to deal with the new status of that relationship.  You can’t make someone reconcile who is not interested.   So give yourself a break from guilt and/or anger and realize that the timing for reconciliation, if it is ever to occur, is crucial and can’t be forced.  If you are ready to reconcile but the other person isn’t be patient but realize trying to move on may be your best option.  In the meantime do all you can to work through whatever role you may have played in the hurt and learn from it, regardless of what the other person does or doesn’t do.     

Authentic Forgiveness

We cannot live this life without being hurt in major and minor ways from time to time.  Whether it is being the recipient of a hurtful comment or facing the tragedy of divorce or even abuse of some kind we all eventually come face to face with the question of forgiveness and how in the world to grant it.  It is important advice that in order to move forward with life, we have to forgive.  Usually, our first inclination is to respond “No way!  They don’t deserve it.”  How do I truly forgive when I just don’t have it in my heart?  That’s why it is necessary to understand what forgiveness is, what it isn’t, and how to get to the place to truly grant it.

Simply put, forgiveness is no longer allowing myself to be defined by the person who hurt me.  That can be a complicated thing but let me give a couple of simplistic examples.  For various reasons, when I was a kid I was the victim of bullying.  What I took from that was that I am not only inferior to everyone else, but I am laughable as a human being.  Those beliefs led to depression and isolation and convictions that I wasn’t good enough to accomplish anything significant in my life.  No one would even want to be my friend and no girl would ever want to date me.  As a result I lived my life on the sidelines afraid to take risks for relationships or accomplishments.  Another common example is a parent or teacher who through one way or another gave you the message that you’re only as worthy as how good your grades were or how “perfect” you could be.  The result was that you tried to win the approval of others by sacrificing yourself in order to be “perfect”.  Life doesn’t work that way because you can’t make everyone happy and the person who is most unhappy is yourself. 

The first thing I had to do to begin healing was to recognize that the bullies were acting out of an unhealthy emotional place.  They needed to put someone down in order to feel okay about themselves.  That unhealthy place led them to treat me as they did.  I also had to realize that in my life I have also hurt people from my unhealthy places.  This took me to a place of forgiveness as I realized I have needed grace at times myself.  In the second example, the emotional abuse also came from unhealthy places that the abuser possessed.  Maybe they were abused themselves and felt powerless.  The way they dealt with it was to show power inappropriately wherever they could.  The most important thing is to recognize that THEIR STUFF IS THEIR STUFF AND I NO LONGER HAVE TO BELIEVE THE LIES I ACCEPTED ABOUT MYSELF BECAUSE OF THEIR ACTIONS.  The things they said about you and me came from scarred places in their lives and had nothing to do with the truth about you and me.  Armed with this truth, not only can I forgive them (and leave the lies they taught me behind) but I can also forgive myself since now I understand my own motivations that held me back.  I can embrace a new life based on the truth of who I am rather than the lies they spewed my way that I allowed to hold me captive.

As important as it is to know what forgiveness is it is equally important to know what it is not. 

1.     It is not “forgetting”.  “Forgive and forget” is not wise and is generally a phrase used by the offender to avoid the consequences of her offense.  For example, if someone steals from you forgiveness means you get that for some unhealthy reason they committed this act against you but it also is still appropriate to take precautions to protect your things when they are around, at least until they show you they are trustworthy again.  More significantly, when you forgive someone who abused you, please set up appropriate boundaries to keep yourself and your own children safe.

2.     It is not reconciliation.  Forgiveness does not mean the relationship returns to the way it was before.  Again, appropriate boundaries are necessary to protect your heart until (or if) trust is earned again.  Reconciliation involves hard work by both parties and is sometimes extremely difficult to achieve, whereas you can forgive independent of what the other person does.

3.     It is not condoning the behavior.  Forgiving in no way justifies or condones the behavior.  It forgives the person, not their actions.

Forgiveness must come from a healthy place.  Being able to let go of the lies learned about us at the hands of the offender(s) takes work.  Forgiving before we are ready is cheap forgiveness at best and not forgiveness at all at its worst.  It will not work.  There is a process to get to this place and it cannot be rushed.  However, we want to be sure we are moving toward this place and not away from it or remaining stagnant.  Here is the journey I believe is necessary before we can authentically forgive.

1.     Grieving.  A breach in a relationship, no matter how big or small, requires grieving.  We must acknowledge what happened and experience the emotions that came as a result.  Much has been written about grief and a Google search will tell you all you need to know about this process.  Suffice it to say that the journey can take an hour or a year depending on the nature of the offence.  The main thing is to understand that this process can’t be short cut or avoided.  We don’t like pain so doing all we can to avoid it is our default place.  Unfortunately, no amount of alcohol, sex, gambling, shopping, or any other addiction will successfully substitute for sitting in the pain and processing it.

2.     Humility.  It is important to realize that at the time the worst decisions of our lives made sense to us.  Maybe it was due to faulty information, an addiction unsuccessfully corralled, emotional instability, or all out mental illness but we have all had those times in our lives.  When all is said and done we can usually look back and understand the forces that led to the decisions we made.  As we needed grace (forgiveness) in those situations, so the current offender also needs grace and we need grace for ourselves.  It is the realization that the offender was out of control in some way for some reason.  It is out of our own humility that we find grace and can, in a healthy way, offer forgiveness.

I wish you peace on your journey and offer my help if you would like it.  For more info visit and like my FB page at www.facebook.com/donfitzsimonslcsw.  Video counseling is available.  I also welcome your questions or comments on my FB page.  Thanks for reading.

1/29/13  A Time to Wait

To be honest, waiting has never been my strong suit.  I tend to be a planner and am always looking for that next thing to do to grow this or create that and view those days where I don't do those things as wastes of time.  So there iss always a book to write or a contact to make to grow my counseling practice or a new program to develop.  Unfortunately, that approach is not working right now.

I hit a wall where I felt I had nothing to say so the writing stopped and I didn't know who else to contact so my practice stalled.  Most of all, I lost motivation.  If you read my last couple of posts you will see my struggle with this time in my life.

When I moved to Nashville I had a foolproof plan.  I was going to promote my video counseling practice until I got to know local referral sources through my volunteer work.  The problem is that my plan didn't work. Few people even wanted to give video counseling a try and you wouldn't believe how hard it has been to find places to volunteer.  Here I am over a year later pretty much in the same place I was when I arrived.

I was talking about this with Carolyn (my wife) the other day and she pointed out to me all of the changes I have travelled through in the past couple of years.  She asked me if it is possible that this time in my life is a time best served by savoring the changes and just waiting for what is next rather than try to fabricate it myself.  Immediately, a huge burden was lifted from my shoulders as I realized just as there is a time to reflect, a time to take action, etc., there is also a time to savor and to relax and to wait.  I am there.  I am resting.  I am grateful.