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Source: Tom W. (Father) – Anger and Forgiveness – Part 2 – Date Unknown.mp3 File: tom-w-father-anger-and-forgiveness-part-2-date-unknown.mp3 Duration: 01:00:10
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Initially, forgiving is not forgetting. And that's very important to realize. It's not like we go through this process and everything is forgotten. One of the lessons that I've learned in working with recovering alcoholics is that usually when a person seeks help and maybe goes to AA meetings and works the Twelve Steps in his life, most people have given up on them. They've used up all the chips in the bank.
So what happens is people down in their hearts, they feel that the same thing is going to happen again. But you've got to remember now with this process that we've been talking about, this is a new beginning. And it's going to take time for each person in their journey to believe that it's really happening. They've got to give faith to the system, the method of working. But it's certainly much better than burying the hurts that cause so much hatred.
So this is the beginning of a recovery. Now what happens is the forgetting will turn into growth and gratitude as the people grow from this experience. But that forgetting will eventually become new growth. And that's how it changes, it transforms. But what an alternative to using something like this and working this in our lives instead of excusing or smoothing over or tolerance. None of these are forgiving.
They're just burying the reality, the truth of the issue. And you know another thing happens once we start this journey of forgiving. If we are really honest, we begin to realize that we're not as innocent as we always thought we are. That we were. It's that we feel we're the victim for so long and we fed that being the victim. And then when we start realizing and opening up a little bit, we realize our own weaknesses were involved and how much we ourselves were the problem.
And then, you know, we look over at the person that we've raged at for so long and caused us so much unpleasant feelings and we begin to see that we're not really forgiving a monster. That we're forgiving another human being just like ourselves. We relieve this tremendous amount of pressure inside and we begin to see things in perspective. And so when both people can see the weakness that's involved in humanity, the fact of our own human weakness and our own struggle and our own weakness, it sure makes forgiving so much easier.
One point that I'd like to add on this and when I made that point of being truthful about what kind of a future or what kind of a relationship is involved, very often a lot of times rage or hate can come because our perception of what we want in a relationship is too high or it's not what both people want. And so it's very, very important that if we reduce our stakes of what this relationship means to us, very often we reduce what we expect from forgiveness.
If, for example, that we are angry or that we're raged or hateful because a person doesn't love us the way we want them to love us, maybe that person hasn't chosen that relationship to be as important as we've made it in our lives. And the rage comes from the fact that we can't accept that. And so we'll never get forgiveness for the other person and the hurts they've caused us unless we reduce our expectations.
And so that's very important in terms of this whole process. We've got to know what we are committing ourselves to in the relationship. Now, I'd like to talk or mention some points on the most important person that we have to forgive, and that is ourself. You know, in life, when you talk in a 12-step recovery program of AA, they talk about making amends. The person that most of us have to make amends to the most is ourselves.
And probably the person that's the most difficult to forgive is ourselves. And so whatever I've said in terms of the victim and the perpetrator and everything else has to be seen in the context of our own ability to forgive ourselves. Now, this isn't what this series is about. It's about the issues in terms of forgiving other people. But I want to make some points in terms of forgiving ourselves because the more that we understand it inside of ourselves, the easier it makes us in dealing with other people.
But it's very important to realize the importance of forgiveness in terms of our self-esteem. But we esteem ourselves for the good person that we are. We forgive ourselves for the bad things that we do. But you see, our human weakness, and when we fail, essentially says nothing to us about what kind of a person we are,
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the esteem that we have on ourselves. But so often, emotionally, it's like when I said before about you hate the sin but love the sinner. We make that same mistake in ourselves that when we do something wrong, we hate ourselves. We can't make that distinction. But in reality, in our own reflection, that we are the person that we are trying the best we can and each of us does some bad things. But that doesn't mean that we're bad people.
But we see we feel that way, our emotions feel that way. In fact, that's what a lot of self-righteous people do is that's where the whole root of shame comes from. The whole root of shame comes from people who want to tell us because we do bad things that we're bad people. That's the root of how you communicate shame to other people, how parents make their kids feel shame. We talk about a shame-based person.
And what we mean is that's the kind of person that grows up in a family that when he does something wrong, he's made to feel that he's a bad person. The difference between shame and guilt is when I do something wrong, I feel guilty. A shameful person feels he's a mistake. And that's how basically we create shame-based people. We make them feel that when they do something wrong, they're evil. And self-righteous people, people of religion, when they're trying to condemn people, they're shame-makers.
They want people to walk with their shame. That's one of the great reasons why people have a hard time getting into their own aloneness. Developing a relationship inside is because there's so much shame inside. There's almost a hate for themselves. That's the whole root of self-hate. It comes because people are shame-based. They feel when they do something wrong that they're evil people. Now, we have to grasp that and understand that, that we esteem ourselves for the good person that we are.
We don't have to forgive our personhood. What we do is we have to forgive the bad things that we do. But doing bad things does not make us bad people. That's very important. Oftentimes, you know, we mistake the notion. We think that people who do things that are bad should feel guilty. And what I've talked about before is that you can't forgive yourself until you own your own guilt. It's like you can't ask forgiveness of someone unless you feel guilty.
That idea of repentance, self-repentance. You've got to feel your own guilt to forgive yourself. But that is not the same thing as feeling shame. See, if I feel shame, then I feel I am a mistake. I didn't do a mistake. I am a mistake. Well, I can't forgive myself for being a mistake. There's nothing I can do about it. And see, that's why we've got… Shame is never a positive, can never be used positively in our lives.
It's just like hate can't be used positively in our life. And shame leads to self-hate. But guilt is a very important part of growing in our life because that we grow from. That's what we have to forgive. That's how we grow from forgiving. So that's a very important distinction that a person has to understand for themselves and the people around them. We're doing something wrong in our relationship with ourselves and our relationship with others.
If we have a tendency to make other people feel like they're no good, there's something we're doing wrong. Now, when we forgive ourselves and we feel our own guilt, we've got to know exactly what we're forgiving in ourselves. We've got to know exactly what we should feel guilty for. And that's extremely important as we puncture through our denial system. See, that's what self-honesty is. That honesty with ourselves.
It's a healthy person who can feel their own guilt. You know, it's not something that we have to run from. It's not something that we have to be ashamed of or that we have to hide from ourselves. There are times when we should feel guilty because we do things that hurt other people. We do things that hurt ourselves and we should feel guilty. But you can't forgive yourself unless you feel that guilt.
And then you can forgive yourself and grow from it. But if you don't allow yourself to feel that guilt, you're just going to bury it inside. You're going to put it deep within in that little black book inside of yourself. Any time that you don't really forgive and grow from it, it gets buried deep inside of you and then you carry that garbage around inside. And the older you get, the more garbage that you keep inside, the more loneliness that happens.
So that's why it's crucial. It's a healthy person that can feel guilty. And so we shouldn't be afraid of that in our lives.
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And we shouldn't be afraid of other people feeling guilty. It can be a very positive force. You can't bring forgiveness until you have guilt. I want to make a distinction here. When I talk about feeling guilty inside, there's a difference between feeling guilty when I've done something wrong, whether it's intentionally or my actions were not good actions, or when I did something that hurt somebody's feelings that I didn't intend to hurt and I didn't really do anything wrong.
There's a big difference when I come home to my wife after carousing till 3 in the morning drunk than the time I come home to her that I overworked and forgot what time it was and came home late. I hurt her both cases, both times. One time I did some really wrong things and bad things and I come home feeling guilty. The other time I feel bad that I hurt her but I don't feel the same guilt that I did something to hurt her.
That's a very important distinction. And when I say of owning our own guilt, we've got to be careful that we just don't feel guilty all the time just to get over issues, just to smooth things over. It's important that we honestly face true guilt in our life. And in the same way with other people. I think it's important that we don't make people feel guilty. That's not our purpose. We don't, otherwise we get into that whole shame I talked about.
But what's important is that we share with people our hurts, how they hurt us. We trust them enough to share our hurts with them. And then it's up to them to feel their guilt and go through the process of forgiveness. But I think we're not being fair to them to grow if we don't give them the honesty about our own hurts. We trust them enough with that vulnerability inside of us. Well, we've had enough talk and now it's time to get into the hard core, blue collar, practical how to do it.
And I'm going to take different types of relationships that need healing. And the first that I want to take is the child to the parent. And why this is so important is that in many, many families, unless there has been a real good function of communication and acceptance in the family, the child grows up with a love-hate relationship with his parent. And unless the childhood issues are dealt with, we can never have an adult relationship with them.
Now, the problem is because children come into the world kind of fresh and alive and ready to be loved. The children are the victims. And what we talked about before, they are kind of conditioned and prepared and then they do what has been done to them to their own children. Now, the problem is that children, in fact, many people tell us that a child's notion of God and even our adult notion of God is a combination of our mother and father, is that we want our parents to be perfect.
We want them to be gods. And that's why it's very, very difficult to deal with this issue is to feel the hurts, feel the pain as a child, which is we can't bring a healing to this relationship until we allow ourselves to deal with the real feelings and pain that we had as children. And that's something that we very much don't want to do. It's on the top priority of our denial system. We want to believe that our parents were perfect.
And we'd rather maintain and hold on to that than really develop a relationship, an adult relationship with them. And so this is probably one of the most difficult healings that will take place in our life. I wish to share my own experience that growing up in an alcoholic home, a dysfunctional family, it took me into my 40s in my life before I started looking at my childhood issues to really see what I experienced as a child and how painful my childhood was.
There is no way I'd ever even allow myself to feel it. But there's been a tremendous difference in my own relationship with my mom and dad as adults than there was before I dealt with these issues. But I grew up in a childhood that was… But I grew up in a childhood that was, that was a terrible, terrorizing experience. I used to,
[00:15:04]
having a drinking alcoholic for a father, I never knew when he was coming home. The experience at night, I can still, when I think about it, and I see myself when I was a child tossing and turning from 9.30 at night to 5.00, 6.00 in the morning, not, waiting for that garage door to open, and waiting, always hoping that it would be the next 10 minutes or the next 15 minutes, and then looking at that clock in my room that would seem to move so slowly. That experience was horrifying. That was a terrible experience. And then the experience of when he did come home, of the fights between my mom and dad, and all the silent treatment that would exist in the house, and that, that heaviness that goes around a home in which the parents aren't talking, and how terribly, terrible I felt as a child. Driving in the car, I'll never forget, we went one time on a country road, and I don't know how my dad ever got on it, but he was, he was drinking and drunk, and we got on a fire road, and it was a dirt road, and we drove until it was dead end, and there was no, we couldn't turn around, and the cliff was a sheer cliff on the side that went down, looked like miles, and we backed down this road. That all the times that my dad drove, that he was drunk, and I was so worried in the car whether we'd get home. That tremendous fear of abandonment, that he wasn't going to come home tonight. My dad sometimes would not come home for several days. Terrible experience. The experience of my mom, and what it did to her, and how she reacted, the moods that she would go in, her mood swings, and all that. The experience, I just began to deal with that issue. It's amazing phenomenon as our family, as each of us, as we, four of us in our families, we've grown, how we each have come to grips with these in our own lives, and faced them, and how it's affected us, and how it's, it's done just the opposite of what you think. It's brought us much closer together as a family, and much closer together to our mother and father, as human beings, as persons. And so, the key thing, what you have to do, if there's going to be any healing done in this type of situation, is you've got and get in touch with your pain. Now, I have several suggestions that could help you. First of all, I'd like you to look at your life, and see what is it that gets you most upset, or most anxious. When do you seem to panic?
Or what seems to get you the most nervous, or worried? I would just, just share with you a couple of mine. I have a tremendous need to be approved by authority. I have a need to be, for the, whoever's in a position of authority, whether it be a principal of a school, or a rector in a community, whoever's my boss, to really say how good a job I'm doing, to really appreciate me. And I seem to care more about that than anybody else. In fact, I often seem to be responsible for his mood. If he's in a good mood, he's happy with me. And if he's in a bad mood, I must have done something to displease him. Well, what happens is, where did that come from? Because not everybody seems to be that way. I can be in a community of five or six other people, and the five or six other people don't seem to feel the same way I do. What's different in my case? Well, I grew up with a dad who always expected a lot out of me. He always told me how I could do it better.
My dad could never just accept me, and approve me for what I was doing, and really help me celebrate it. He'd always look for a way to make it better. He'd always be challenging me to be, to make, to even get better, to do more. I got five A's, why didn't I get six? Well, I grew up with that need, and that's what I need from the people that have replaced my father in my life. I'm seeking it because I never got it. I'm seeking that from substitute father.
Now, I had to, before I could come to grips, I never knew why I had such an emotional deal. But there must be a lot in me, a resentment of my father for not giving it to me, that I'm so eagerly seeking it. Another one that I have, that I can understand very much from my situation, I have a tremendous fear of abandonment. I just really have a terrible fear of being rejected, of losing what I have. Now, where does that come from? Everybody has
[00:20:02]
some sort of a degree of fear of losing what they treasure, what's precious to them. But to the degree that we have, it's a more or less thing. Well, I have a terrible fear of losing what I have, fear of abandonment. Well, that came from my experience of growing up in the alcoholic family, of not knowing whether I'd be abandoned or not. As it intensified, it was a childhood experience that I'm living out as an adult. There must be a lot of feeling from my father as a child when I grew up not knowing and taking it personally that he wasn't coming home to me. A lot of areas that would lead to rage, that lead to anger, that could lead to hate inside of me, and that love-hate relationship. So these are just some examples, but all of us have certain issues that in which our parent figure disappointed us, hurt us. It's the whole issue, for example, of being accepted. So much of my patterns of people-placing, balancing plates, evasiveness, hidden agendas. Where did I learn all these? I learned these growing up in my family because this is how I had to survive. Now, I think my personal belief is that I would have loved to have grown up in a home in which I was accepted for me, that I could tell the truth.
See, I don't like to lie, but I will tell you what you want to hear if it'll keep the peace. So very much, when people have, people sometimes create environments where people have to lie, because there's too much a price to pay for the truth. And so I, you know, as a child, I didn't choose the kind of home I was going in, but I didn't choose the fact that I was going to have human weaknesses. That was me, but then how they were treated and how I was punished and all that created how I respond to it. Now, I would tend to think that as a child, there must have been a lot of deep anger inside of me that I couldn't be myself. I think there must have been a lot of anger that I couldn't, that I'd have to lie or I have to be evasive or I have to people-place that I couldn't be myself. And so when I look at that, I understand where it came from. A lot of this anger, a lot of my inability to trust my father, for example, or trust my mother. You know, the reason why as an adult, when I could come home and I'd find myself saying the things that my father wanted to hear instead of who I really was. I can remember many of the years as a struggling with my vocation as a priest. And I can remember and I can remember thinking about it and I knew I was going to come home and visit my father.
And knowing that I was struggling, I didn't know whether I belonged as a priest. And I knew all my personal struggles that I was having and telling myself, I'm going to talk to my dad about him. And then getting in the house and seeing him and talking to him and telling him how wonderful everything was. How I couldn't bring myself to be honest because he so much wanted me to be his kind of priest. He so much wanted me to have it all together. He so much wanted me to have no problems. And so I grew up in this environment. It affected me and it influenced me so much, but it wasn't me. I think there's an anger on that. An anger that I had to deal with. There's also the fact there was so much that my father didn't share of himself.
I got a lot of persona of father, but I didn't get a human being flesh and blood who could grow from his weaknesses. I knew my father's successes. I knew his external behavior, but there was so much that he kept private. He was a man who wasn't able to share his feelings. He wasn't able to easily tell you he loved you. It wasn't easy for him to be affectionate. There was a lot that he held back and I'm sure there was anger because of that in my life. Now those were all the things that I had to own, that I had to admit about my childhood experience of my father.
Now I'd ask you as a way of getting in touch with this, maybe a situation that might help you, is think now if you were an observer and you were watching a family, a relationship between a mother and daughter, father and son, what do you think would be the three worst things that a parent could do in a normal relationship? What are the worst things that a parent could do to the child? Attitudes, behavior. So now why don't you write them down?
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One important thing to remember is that when I'm talking about that love-hate relationship is you can grow up, you can grow from your childhood into becoming an adult and you live in two worlds. You live in the world in which you keep that anger that's buried deep inside of you and at the same time what you do is you still are so much seeking your parent's love. So you're following through in the way that you've been conditioned to live your life and at the same time you have all that anger inside of you. So what we're going to do by detaching yourself from the parent and dealing with the the hate that's inside of you, the issues that have really caused it, is you're going to release that so that your relationship with your parents will be love. Now once you have done the detachment of your parent and you really feel the pain that you experienced in growing up, the next important thing for you to do is now to bring your parent back into your life and to really see them as a human being, as a person. For most of us a parent who was really trying to do the best that they could with all the abilities and knowledge that they had, that they didn't personally go out of their way to hurt you but they were just passing on to you the way that they learned to be a parent. That's extremely important that you give your parents the gift of being human and one of the reasons why this process is something that happens later in life is I don't think you can really do it to your parent until you begin to understand it within yourself. Until you first begin to understand and appreciate your own humanness, the fact of your own fallibility, your own weaknesses and you become comfortable with that and then you're able to give that gift to your parent and you see them as a person and not as a god figure in your life. But that's a very very important reality in dealing with it. What I'd like to talk about now is suppose you are a parent and you want to deal with your children.
You want to be able to have a reconciliation. I want to use the model of the repentance, the one that I used earlier. Now the first thing that a parent has to do is he has to try to see how his own actions had an effect and consequences on his children. He has to be able to honestly look at his own weaknesses. Now again as I talked about it before, this is extremely difficult for a parent and especially people who are older and have spent a lot of years denying, who spent a lot of years developing defense mechanisms. To really come to grips and to see how some of their behavior could have affected their own children. Now that is crucial to be able to honestly face that and to be honest about it. The second thing that's most important then is to move from perception to the pain and you see that becomes very easy if you can get beyond the first step because very often the parent was brought up the way they brought up their own children and so they can remember back to how they felt when their parent treated them that way.
So that they can remember how it felt with their own human weakness when their parents expected them to be perfect. You know I can think of the my situation in terms of the silent treatment that I've talked about before. I grew up in my family, I was a product of the silent treatment and I remember how bad it how difficult it was to live in a home when there was nobody was talking. Well when I was when I was able to break that pattern in my own life it was very important for me to feel the pain that it caused me when somebody did it to me for me to be able to change it and not do it to others. And so the parent has to go back to his own childhood and feel that pain and realize that he inflicted it upon his own children.
And when he can own it and he can feel that pain then there's a real commonness for him to go to his own children and be able to ask for forgiveness. That's a very important point. So you move from perception to the pain and then in that kind of sincerity And then, in that kind of sincerity and honesty, to ask his children for forgiveness.
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He puts himself in tremendous vulnerability to his children. He comes before and he's trusting his own humanness to their acceptance, but you know that's a tremendous gift that parents can give their kids, because he's coming to them as a human being and not as a father figure. It can open up a whole new relationship. So, instead of being the persona of parent, he can now be a person. And you know, if you're listening to this and it's making sense, but you say it sounds awful risky, that it's difficult, that that's too hard for me to do.
When you think about this, that for a man, the hardest day in a man's life is the death of his father. For a woman, it's the death of her mother. But what makes it especially hard is if at no time in their life were they able to make an interconnection. At no time were they able to be persons to one another, because now in death, it'll never happen again. But it seems that when people are able to reach a friendship, when the father is able to be a friend with his son and a mother with her daughter, it's so much easier to let them go. You figure that your journey has been completed.
And so, if you think that's a difficult motivation to go to your children, after feeling the pain that you cause, and to be able to ask for forgiveness, it's an opening of a tremendous treasure. You know, I can't think of a greater gift that a father and son or mother and daughter could have than to be able to be each other's friends, to be able to trust their weaknesses to each other, to be able to really share themselves.
That's one of the great ironies of life. You know, the first is that we are never… It's so hard to become our own best friend. It's so hard to feel our own value and our own preciousness. The irony of that, because we are so precious. The other irony that always strikes me is that in our families, when people are so close and they spent so many years and time and energy together, how difficult it is to move the relationship beyond a persona relationship, beyond a role relationship, to a real trusting, caring, loving relationship.
And so, when the father can come to his son and ask for forgiveness, there's a promise in there, a commitment to grow together, that this is just the beginning of a journey together. And I think that's a tremendous opportunity that can happen in a family. It's what our freedom can do for us if we only choose it. Now, I'd like to talk about the situation where we have a parent who has died, that we've never been able to make a reconciliation, that we have bad memories.
You know, the truth of what this happens, and I should have mentioned in the previous case, but oftentimes when that hate lives inside of us, there's hate not only for the dead parent, but there's hate for ourselves. You know, I've never met a person who hated either their mother or father who did not hate themselves. And so, that own process of healing has to happen. But you know, it comes from that tremendous need or that tremendous conflict within us that whenever anything goes wrong, whenever there's a problem, whenever there's an issue that's negative, we always, on the same hand, we always feel guilty about it and we seem to have to blame somebody at the same time. And so, if a relationship has gone bad and this anger has turned to hate, this deep hurt has turned into hate, what happens is that we feel guilty for it. We feel there was something in us that caused the parent not to like us, that somehow it was my actions or my behavior.
That's our tendency. So, while at the same time we may have this hate for a parent as part of our love, we also have it towards ourselves. But now, when a parent has died, that's sometimes even more important to go through this forgiving process. Because what happens is that because the parent has died and we weren't able to make reconciliation, that guilt from that can really be a terrible thing inside of us. Now, I go back to what I said about the living parent.
We've got to begin with all the issues that I said, that we've got to feel the pain, we've got to see our parent as human, we've got to give him, we've got to allow him to have his weaknesses and his fallibility. But the issue in terms of a dead parent is that we can never completely forgive a dead parent because there is no possibility for the reconciliation,
[00:35:01]
there's no reunion, there's no part of the parent coming and seeking forgiveness. And so what happens is very often we do this in our own hearts and we have to sometimes keep doing it. And also we have a need in the same process to keep forgiving ourselves. But we got to become aware and we got to go through that process of feeling the pain and then realizing that the parent was human, that they did their best. And I'd also stress this point, that we've got to learn from everything that happens, that nothing is wasted. And while it's terribly regrettable that we were not able to make a reconciliation with our parent while they were alive, it's important that we learn from it and we don't let it happen in the relationships that we have in our life today. You know, one of the things that I stress is when people die that we love and people are filled with grief, especially a parent. Because you know, when we grow up and from little children, we've always been able to depend upon our parents. There's always that part that they're always there. We give them, like I talk about them making them God, we give them a certain immortality. But then when they die, we come to the reality that they're not there for us anymore. And there's a, there's an emptiness inside. But you know what we do when we, the way that we transform a pain of losing somebody we love, the way that we, we carry them around with us is it creates a vacuum inside of us. But if we can grow from that pain, if we can become a better person through the pain of that, that growth that in us is what we carry around part of them the rest of our lives forever. And so if our parent died and we were not able to make reconciliation, we were not able to bring that forgiveness process to it. That can be a greater motivation and intensity that will never let it happen to us again. It can be a greater motivation in the relationships that we have today. So in a real way, our parent has given us a gift, a real growth experience in our lives. I'd now like to take the process as we talk about it in the relationship of husband and wife. I want to talk about the situation as maybe it's existed through many years of marriage. I'd like to break it into two areas. I'd like to talk about first of all, the process for something that happens, say the experience of a deep pain. And then I'm going to give, I want to talk about a marriage in which there's been accumulation of little pains that have come into a deep pain. I want to first of all talk about when one occurrence or one event can cause a deep hurt. I'm going to talk about both of them. Well, let's say for example, that there's been an affair or that there's been a terrible economic tragedy. Say for example, the man lost his job and they lost a lot of economic security or that there's been an argument over money or children or the sex life of the two, some big issue. Well, let me use just for an example of an affair because it's common today. And what happens is either the husband or the wife has an affair and the other finds out about it. What is the process of forgiving and forgetting there?
Well, let's take the situation. The wife finds out that the husband has had a relationship with another woman and she still loves him. And he says he loves her and they don't know what to do. It seems that whenever he goes out or whenever he's away a little late, she has all these fears. She constantly brings it up when they have an argument. He doesn't know, they don't know how to release it. She doesn't want to keep carrying it around and he doesn't want to keep feeling guilty. They want to move on in their journey, but they don't know what to do.
Well, let's use our model and to see what happens. Let's take first of all the wife. Now the wife, first of all, she's got to detach her husband from the experience. She's just got to deal with the pain. How did she feel when she heard about it? What were her feelings inside? Resentments and hatred and bitterness. Deeply hurt. How she felt her own pride as a woman. How she felt that she wasn't valuable anymore. All those different feelings.
Now, once she's able to do that and really feel it inside, and I mean really feel it,
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she's got to get in touch with it. She's got to allow herself to feel it, emphasizing her own feelings and not her husband. And then, now what she has to do after she is able to do that, she's got to be able to now look at her husband, not with her hate, but to look at him as a human being with weaknesses, with his desires, with the frustrations of his life. He's got to really see him as a human being.
Now she's got to hold that. That's what she's got, that's the attitude she brings to him. Now the husband, let's see what he has to do. He's first of all, he's got to admit to himself his own guilt in it. He's got to feel that. He's got to feel his own, his own human weakness. He's got to own it. He can't make excuses. He can't say she drove me to it or the pressures of the business or outside. He's got to be able to own his own guilt that he is a weak human being.
He's got to allow himself to be human. He's got to get rid of his defense mechanism. Then the next thing he's got to do is he's got to, he's got to feel the pain. He's got to feel the pain that he inflicted on his wife. You know how the best way of doing that? It's so simple. How would he have felt if she had done it to him? You know, it's an amazing phenomenon that I've, I've known men that have had affairs with their wives or had affairs with other women than their wives. And they've told me that if their wife ever did it, they go out and shoot her. And I've always looked at him and said, my God, what a double standard. But you know, it's amazing what it would do to a man. Just the bitterness, the resentments, what it would do to his pride.
And then he's got to feel those pains. And then what he's got to go and he's got to go with all that pain and all that vulnerability. And he's got to ask forgiveness of his wife, make that commitment that they have to grow together, that this is going to be a growing experience in their marriage. This is a process that each of them have to work on and do, and do that homework and have them get together without the agenda and listen to each other and just see if it works. See, that's much better. They've got to give special attention to the healing process. They can't just figure that time will heal it.
Time doesn't heal anything. If it's not paid attention to, it'll only get worse. Now, let me give an example. Let's talk about what we would say would be the, the little pains, if you want to call them that, the non-deliberate pains, but done over a long period of time, which can turn into deep hurts, which turns into hate. We talk about knowing people too well. Say, for example, that the husband is a workaholic. He works, he's constantly working. He hasn't paid enough attention to his wife or the wife is so preoccupied with their children that she hasn't given attention to her husband. Suppose the man isn't able to express his feelings or the woman becomes a constant talker. All these things that happen as people get older, this irritance that can happen that a person can almost, you know, whenever the wife or the husband does something, the wife can end up hating the job.
Or the husband can even in some ways almost hate the children because it's taken her attention away. But it's, it's this hate that builds up in, inside. I've noticed in my own parents' relationship and I've noticed in a lot of middle-aged relationships is that when the kids are gone, that oftentimes the different patterns of the husband and the different patterns of the wife, they've built up and very much they're not together. They still love each other. They're still living in their home.
They're still married, but there seems to be walls that have been built up over the years and they like being together, but they don't seem to go on vacations that much together and enjoy. They don't seem to laugh and play a lot together. There are a lot of things that their marriage could be and now that the kids are gone, it's a great opportunity to be that way. But nothing is, nothing is happening. How to change it? How to get it out of that, that lethargy?
Well, let's use our method. Let's, first of all, I'd like to do it from the woman's point of view and the man's point of view and then reverse it because as I've said before, both of them are perpetrators and victims. There's a love-hate relationship between them. So what we're doing is we're healing the hate so the love can flow. doing is we're healing the hate so the love can flow. Now let's first of all take the woman.
Okay, first of all,
[00:45:01]
she's got to detach her husband from her pain. Now, she's got to look at her pain, and I'll just use some examples. Maybe suppose now that her husband has worked hard and long and in many ways he seems to enjoy his work more than he does her. And she feels that loneliness inside of her. She feels the loneliness because he can't share his feelings. And there's bitterness inside of her. And anger. And maybe she's developed a personality that doesn't show the anger.
A personality that is very sweet, which actually irritates her husband. But she has that and she's got to get over that mask, that wall that she's put up of sweetness and really own her anger and her loneliness in the marriage. She's got to really feel it. She's got to admit it to herself. She's got to know what she's missing. Then what she's got to do, after she detaches it, she once more goes now and looks at her husband as a human being.
Trying the best he can with real weaknesses that she didn't marry a God. He's not perfect. Okay, she's got to really own that now. Now the husband, he's got to go to his own state of repentance. He's got to, first of all, in his four stages that I talked about. First of all, that tremendous honesty, he's got to get through that defense system. And hopefully through the years, to middle age, he's broken down a lot of his dishonesty with himself. He's able to be honest with himself.
There's enough pains in his life. That middle age crisis. He's willing to open up that crack a little bit. And he can look at his own weaknesses. He can be honest with the fact that he hasn't really given her the time that he'd like to. And he even looks at his own life, that he hasn't even given himself the time that he deserves in life. He looks at the fact that he hasn't expressed his feelings. He finds he gets very moody, that he mopes around the house from time to time.
How he's really left her with so much loneliness. How he's not shared a lot of his inner secrets and pains and worries with her. He's got to be really honest with that. He's able to face it. Then in the second state, he's got to be able to remember how he felt when somebody treated him that way. Maybe it might have been his own father who might have been very moody and kept things to himself. Maybe it was too busy for him.
How did he feel in the experience with his father? And then he can get really in touch with how his wife feels. And then what he has to do is he goes with that vulnerability and the wife having done her work, he goes and he asks forgiveness. And he really listens without an agenda and she listens without an agenda. And they make a commitment that they're going to grow from it. You know, you can take that and whatever the weaknesses are and use the process to do the healing with all the things I said about forgiving.
It's so important that they do the right process because you know you can want to do it, you can try to do it, but unless you know how to do it, it ain't going to happen. Let me now take it from the other point. Let's say now that the husband is going to feel the victim with the process he's got to go through. And maybe now he's got to detach, first of all, he's got to detach his pain from his wife.
And he's got to feel the pain that he has in the marriage. Maybe because of the situation in the marriage, the wife, in order to cover over her anger, has developed a very sweet personality. And so in reality, he doesn't feel comfortable around her. She's too nice. In fact, at times it may make him feel terrible because when he looks at himself, she's so good and he seems to himself to be so bad. And say he feels inside, he feels a real loneliness.
He really feels that she hasn't shared herself with him. She hasn't been present for him. Now, after he does that, he's got to detach himself. He's got to reattach himself to the wife and see her as a human being, as a person trying her best, but having the struggles of life, having all her own family issues and where she came from and trying, but not knowing how to do it. Having that openness. And then let's say the wife, going through now her stages of dealing with her own, preparing for this reunion.
She's got to, first of all, she's got to be able to honestly break through her denial system. She's got to be able to admit her own weaknesses, how she's failed to assert herself,
[00:50:01]
how she hasn't gone out and built her own personal life, how she stayed so dependent upon her husband and then was angry because he didn't fill the role. She's got to own her own weaknesses. She's got to feel them inside. She's got to perceive them and be honest about them. And then what she has to do is she's got to feel if somebody did that to her, how she'd feel. If somebody, for example, had covered up all this loneliness, all this dependency with a persona of kindness and sweetness, how she'd feel around that person.
And maybe she can look to her mother or maybe somebody in her family that did it to her and how she felt around that person, how it wasn't real and how lonely she felt in it so she can really feel how her husband feels. There's a real bonding of the two feelings. They're joined together. She knows his pain. And then she comes together and she asks forgiveness. She asks forgiveness for the pain that she's caused.
She's vulnerable to her husband. You know, that's real risky. Suppose he's to say, oh, it doesn't matter or I didn't know that or it doesn't, let's just keep, let's forget about this. We're getting too deep or any of those things that may be a threat to his own sensitivity. And then they make a commitment to grow from it. But what I want to stress in this again, I have to say it over and over again, is I'm talking about both people wanting to go through this process of healing.
It's got to be both people doing their work and coming together. To stay in the four stages of repentance, the person has to break through their denial system and be able to deal with their own human weakness. And then they've got to know how the other person feels when they perpetrate this human weakness on them. They've got to feel the other person's pain. They've got to go and seek forgiveness and make the promise that they're going to grow from it.
A commitment to change and a commitment to grow. Both people doing that. And then we have the miracle of reconciliation and reunion. You know, we talk about going to reunions and talking about reunions in our life, but in most relationships, just because of the human weakness that we have and the fact that we don't take care of it and we don't understand it, we don't know how to be creative with it.
There are certain stages in almost every relationship where there is a need for a reunion. You know, I've talked to people about reconciliation and getting together and having this reunion I'm talking about and I've had people come to me and almost in tears because they so much want a reconciliation, but the person they want to go to is so adamant in refusing to face their own weakness that there's no union possible.
That's what I want to talk about a little bit. Scott Peck in his book, The People of the Lie, describes well this type of personality. But there are some people either because they've been hurt so much in life or because they're so terribly insecure, but they are adamant in the refusal to look at their own weaknesses. That no matter what happens around them, there is no way that they can look into themselves and to see how their human weakness has caused the problem.
And so this type of person, it's impossible to have a reunion with because the only type of reunion that's ever possible is when two people in their own weakness come together in their humanity. So what happens in this type of a situation is healing is still necessary for my own good. I had a situation the other day when a person was obsessed with the pain caused by one of these people who refused to look at their weaknesses.
You know, it's an example of a person who developed a very nice, kindly exterior, very sweet person, but inside that person was a very angry and vindictive person, a person that would become obsessed with some individual and seek in cruel, vicious ways to almost destroy that person. Well, this person that the evil person was trying to destroy was obsessed with the pain and she wanted to know, how can I get rid of it?
How can I get some sort of reconciliation? And she felt all alone, she felt that there was no solution. But it was important that she get an inner healing, even if she can't bring it to the other person because this obsession against that person has been destroying her inside, is destroying her inner peace. And this is what I suggested, and it's worked in cases that I've dealt with before,
[00:55:00]
that when you really have an obsession against a person who seems to be after you, who seems to be really vindictive towards you, and you seem to be obsessed with what that person has put on you and your reaction to it, what I recommend is that you write, when you really feel it, that you write that person a letter. And you let everything that's inside of you out, no censor at all. You don't watch your spelling, your punctuation, you just let it all come out.
And you'll be amazed at all the hate, the resentments, the bitterness that you have inside of you, all the hate. You let it flow, you let it come out, you let it come out with all of its ugliness. And you write and you write until you end up on a positive note. And if you need to do that today and you feel better after it because you're resolving it instead of burying it deep inside of you, and you feel it tomorrow, write tomorrow.
And write until you get rid of the obsession. But you see what's happening, even though you can't heal the relationship, you can heal the hate within you. You owe it to yourself. That no human being should have to live with that type of hate inside because what'll happen is a cancer that'll destroy their integrity, it'll destroy their inner peace. And that's a phenomenon and I don't know why it happens with some people.
You know, all of us have trouble admitting our human weaknesses and sometimes we're better at it than others. But the person I'm talking about is a person who adamantly refuses to. That no matter what happens around them, they cannot look into themselves. And this is the type of person that causes the most evil in the world because this type of person can never get in touch with their own weaknesses.
And so what they do is they continually project it and transfer it to others. And so they're continually causing turmoil and they have no idea of where it comes from. Now, you say, okay, that I've written, I've gotten rid of my obsession but I still have to deal with the person. Well, let me go back to the model that I've been using. Once you detach the person from your hurt and when you're writing, you're dealing with your hurts, you're owning them, you're possessing them, you're working them out.
Now, go back and look at the person not as a focus of your obsession but just as a human being who has this terrible illness of being able and capable of looking at their own weaknesses, see them as they really are. And you know what happens? Is you aren't going to take it personally. You can see them for who they are and it doesn't matter who they relate to, you happen to be the person that's there.
And so what happens is you don't have to take it personally. You can let them be. See, what has happened is you've given them power over your own inner peace. You've given to this person who has this terrible disease of denial power over you. And what you have to do is you got to take that power back. And then what happens is that you can relate with that person and you can be civil with that person and that person doesn't own you.
And what a relief. What I'm talking about and this leads me to something maybe I should have mentioned earlier in this series. But you see the freedom that comes when we don't take other people's weaknesses personally. That's a tremendous liberation in our own lives because if you examine your life whether you're at work and you have a situation of a fellow worker who really gets on your nerves and every time you see him you feel this gut ache inside or it can be one of your kids or it can be a relative or it can be somebody in your close association and you find yourself giving power to other people.
That when you see them or what they do to you puts you into moods and then you take it out on other people. That's common to all of us. Just think how much power we give to other people. People and you know it's something like this suppose we had a little baby and we loved that little baby and we took care of it. Would we give that little baby to these people to take care of? It'd be the last thing we'd do because we'd say I can't trust that person or I don't think that person I don't want my children around that person and yet we give our own selves into the hands of these people.
It's an amazing what we do in our lives. In