Hey everybody.
Today I want to talk with you about forgiveness and acceptance.
And why those two things are so vitally important for our recovery.
So like I said,
Today I want to talk about forgiveness and acceptance.
And why that's so important in recovery.
I know I have talked about forgiveness before.
But I have never talked about it and how it relates to our own recovery.
This could be recovery from depression, anxiety, an eating disorder, self harm.
It could be recovery from alcoholism or substance abuse.
Really anything we are going through.
Even just learning to live life.
Forgiveness and acceptance play a key role.
Now the main reason for that is because when we hold on to past hurts,
Okay so something's happened to us.
And we hold on to that past hurt.
And we ruminate on it.
And we think through everything they said.
And everything they did that really hurt our feelings.
And we re-injure ourselves over and over.
And often those of us who tend to hold on to things for a really long time,
May have had a past where we were kind of abused or neglected.
And so through that time we learned a lot about how to hurt us.
But we never learned how to take care of us.
And forgiveness is a way to take care of yourself.
It really doesn't have as much to do with the other person as we think.
It's not 'forgive and forget'.
It's 'forgive and live'.
Because if we keep holding on to things,
We give the offender more power.
For an example, lets say that we had an alcoholic father who beat us.
And abused us.
Now if we still ruminate on it.
And we still feel really hurt and really angry.
So livid all of the time because of it.
That person, the abuser still has power over us.
We're still allowing the abuser to abuse us currently.
I know it sounds crazy.
But if you think about it, it makes sense. Right.
We're still being hurt by it.
We're still upset by it.
We still can't do certain things because of it.
And so the sooner we let go.
The sooner we allow ourselves to live.
Okay.
Don't think 'forgive and forget'.
Think 'forgive and live'.
Now ideally we want the offender to work really hard to earn our forgiveness.
However, as I've said before,
We can never control what other people do.
As much as we'd like to think we do.
We don't have any control over it.
We only have control over ourselves.
And we don't want our own forgiveness and our own ability to live a joyful life.
To be dependent on someone else's actions.
Or anything that they may say to us.
We don't want to depend on that.
We can only depend on ourselves.
Am I right?
Now I made some notes,
I want to make sure I don't forget anything.
The most important thing to remember about forgiveness.
And true honest forgiveness.
Is that it takes a lot of time.
This isn't something that can happen really quick.
We don't want it to be kind of a superficial forgiveness.
We're looking for true forgiveness.
And so we may have to take time looking objectively at what happened,
And the scenario that played out.
Look at the roles that we may have played in it.
Or other scenarios may have played in it.
Other people involved or certain situation.
A high stress environment.
We want to take it all in to be able to look at it objectively.
Because only then can we ascertain,
What portion of it is part of us. And part our fault.
We can acknowledge that we had our own part in it.
And we may not have.
This is just all hypothetical.
We just want to make sure that we know our role,
Other people's role and overall what was going on.
So that we can get a full picture of what happened.
So that we can process through the situation and let the forgiveness begin.
Now the interesting thing to remember is that,
Forgiveness and anger can happen at the same time.
They can coexist.
Just because we forgive someone,
Doesn't mean that we can't still be angry at them about hurting us.
Or about doing that thing that, you know, made us lose our job.
Or whatever it is.
We can be angry and forgive.
Forgiveness really is us letting go of the thought that our past could have been different.
That a situation may never have happened.
It's holding on to that belief that:
'I just wish this would have never happened, I wish that you know I could go back'.
Holding on to that is what keeps us where we are.
It stops us from moving forward.
And that is really why forgiveness and acceptance are so important in our recovery.
Because if we stay were we are,
We're never going to get to our goal.
We're never going to overcome what we are going through.
And that's the whole reason that we're working on ourselves.
Am I right?
And forgiveness and acceptance, like I said,
It's going to take some time.
It's something that I want you all to begin thinking about.
Looking in to.
Recognizing situations that you may still be holding on to,
And hurting yourself over and over again.
It's a process that we're going to start together.
Today.
And keep checking back.
Keep working with me.
As we work towards a healthy mind, and a healthy body.
[Bottom left video]
And I want you to recognize that those are your choices.
That's why we are going to start listening to our inner self.
We're going to start doing all of these things so that we can take responsibility.
When you choose not to.....
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