How to Forgive

After years of discussing hurt and forgiveness, some things have come into focus. There are four elements necessary for healthy forgiveness:

1. Express the Emotion - Whatever the crime/injustice/violation/slight, the forgiver needs to fully express how it made him feel. Anger, sadness and fear are common responses. By the way, it is ideal if the victim is able to express her emotions to her perpetrator, but not essential.

2. Rebuild Security - In order to forgive, the forgiver needs to feel a reasonable amount of assurance that the violation won't recur. Let's say you step on my toe. In order for me to rebuild security, I'm going to need some verbal commitment from you that you'll try not to step on my toe again, or I need to decide to keep my feet away from yours, etc. Some mechanism needs to be in place to let me know I'm safe again.

3. Understand - The forgiver needs to develop some framework to understand why the violation happened in the first place. Why was my toe stepped on? We're on a crowded train? You're a clumsy dancer? You hate me? Oh, you're drunk, I understand. The brain will search for this reason and can't stop (or forgive) until it has one.

4. Let Go - This is making a conscious decision to drop the grudge and resentment. It's the hardest step for most people. Holding a grudge is a powerful thing - you can get someone to suck up to you for years by lording his misbehavior over him. Letting go means stepping down from the nobility of victimhood, becoming an equal again, and promising not to point back to her infraction every time you're losing an argument. Letting go is not forgetting - most of us can't choose what we remember. It's choosing to return to a place of equal power.

Research shows forgiveness greatly benefits the physical health of the forgiver. Seems that holding a grudge is bad for you.

Feelings 101

It's typical for therapists to ask about feelings. It's also typical for clients to dislike being asked. The truth is, many problems can't be resolved with a shift in thoughts and behaviors alone. Most of the time in order to grow we have to work through feelings.

While it's hip to talk about feelings in our Oprah society, we're not all good at it. A common trick is share a thought masquerading as a feeling. Starting a sentence with "I feel...." doesn't mean you're experiencing or communicating your feelings. I see people do this all the time. Take this couple:

Spouse 1: "I feel that you broke the garbage disposal."

Spouse 2: "I feel like you didn't look at it closely because you don't care."

Spouse 1: "Well, I'm just telling you how I feel."

Not feelings. In fact, any time "I feel..." is followed by "that" or "you" or "like", we're not talking about emotions. Most of the time, those are thoughts, beliefs, or judgements. No, you don't feel that NASA should pursue a mission to Mars. You believe it. It's your opinion. It's a thought, not a feeling.

Feelings can be broken down to some combination or degree of sad, mad, glad or afraid (some experts might also throw in shock, love and/or envy). That's it. Degrees of sad might range from bummed out to devastated, while anger might range from annoyed to enraged. Sometimes feelings combine, creating frustration (sad + mad), bittersweet (sad + glad), etc.

And what makes these feelings, rather than thoughts? Feelings can be felt, actually physically experienced. It might take a little practice, but a simple way to get in touch with real feelings is to become aware of the physical sensations you have in your body. When people experience emotion, their body tends to feel a certain way, unique for everyone. When people are sad they may feel a weight in the chest and shoulders. People feeling angry might report an expansive, explosive sensation in their chest and arms. Fear tends to be a weight in the stomach. Joy is often a light, energized feeling throughout the body. But again, it can be different for anybody.

How Do You Feel?

As I said last month, two questions help jump-start any stalled therapy session. I've convinced you to talk about what you want. Now, I embrace the cliche and ask you to talk about your feelings.

Why? Getting in touch with emotion helps inform decision making, resolve issues from the past, and increase self-awareness.

When we make important decisions, we use both our brain and our gut. Think about your decision to take a job, move into a new place, enter a relationship with someone - you probably used both logic and emotion to make those decisions. The absence of either could cause problems.

By the way, in our world logic tends to be valued more highly than emotion, making people reluctant to admit that emotion plays an important role in decision making. Rather than just admit that feelings were a factor in a decision, we tend to go overboard with rationalization ("sure, it's nice that it's a convertible, but I chose it because it gets 3 more MPG!").

Sometimes people are so overwhelmed by emotion that they can't deal with it all at once. The tragedy of abuse, loss, rejection, abandonment, or other forms of pain can just be too much. So they feel what they can at the time and store away the rest for later. Some would call this "sweeping it under the rug," others would term this repression. As much as we might like, these unexpressed emotions don't just go away - they stay within our psyche and body until we let them out. I know, it's starting to sound a little new-agey, but there is truth here. People can hold on to unexpressed emotion for years, decades, even the rest of their lives. Problem is, the body wasn't meant to hold on to that kind of pain for too long - it can start to break down. Still, many people choose the slow burn of repression over the sharp pain of letting emotion out.

Part of your identity lies in how you emotionally respond to the world around you. Your feelings determine facets of your personality, your relationship style, your opinions, and how you view yourself. When clients tell me they don't really know who they are or what they want, I direct them toward their feelings. Along with your thoughts and experiences, your feelings determine your deepest sense of self.

Research has shown that men and women experience emotion equally, but women tend to express while men repress. No big shocker there. In the next blog I'll give a quick lesson in getting in touch with emotion.

What Do You Want?

When you're stuck in a therapy session, unsure of what to talk about, you can always fall back on two questions: "what do I want?" and "how do I feel?" These usually provide plenty of discussion material, primarily because they're so difficult to answer. Let's start with "what do I want?"

It's challenging to answer because 1. people tend to be out of touch with themselves, and 2. different parts of us want different things.

Most of the time, we're out of touch with our wants, our feelings, even our needs. We get so wrapped up in the details of our day that we ignore our need for connection and rest, eat when we're not hungry, work a job we don't enjoy, pass by the gym, the church and the park, and fail to nurture our most important relationships. We ignore these wants and needs because we're beholden to our To Do lists and cell phones. Or maybe it's others we're beholden to. I know many people who are intensely aware of the wants, feelings, and needs of those around them, but oblivious to their own. For people in this category, answering "what do I want?" means putting aside lists, details, obligations and masks in order to reacquaint with ones self. It might take practice, and therapy is a good place to practice.

Others experience a conflict of wants. You want the chocolate cake but you also want to lose weight. You want a job that pays more money, but you'd also like to work less. You'd like to work on your relationship, but you also want to avoid arguments. These conflicting wants come from different parts of yourself. The demon on one shoulder says eat the cake, the angel on the other says hit the gym, for example. We all have different parts that want different things, the challenge is determining which ones we'll listen to, or if we'll compromise. Some people are able to develop a competent system for resolving these internal conflicts, sort of like having a moderator inside to determine a winner or strike a deal. Again, great material for a therapy session.

Present?

Are you being present in your therapy session? More than physically attending the session, are you showing up mentally and emotionally?


Exploring the past, visualizing the future and talking about situations outside therapy is some of the most important work of therapy. But so is the present. Many therapists call this focusing on the "here and now": the thoughts and feelings that are taking place within you and between you and your therapist at a given moment.


It can be pretty intense. Maybe something the therapist just said made you angry or suddenly you feel sad for no apparent reason. Perhaps you feel confused or have an odd thought that you wouldn't mention in regular social situations. Bringing that material "into the room" (more jargon, I know) and talking about it while you're feeling it can be incredibly enlightening and productive. Examining a feeling in the moment can uncover meaning you'd never get to by looking at it later. But it's also vulnerable and intimate - which is why many people would rather talk about what happened 20 years ago or the jerk who sits in the next cubicle at work.


So here's a challenge. When you're sitting in your next session ask yourself: "What am I feeling here with the therapist, right now?" Then take it a step further and talk about it.

Poetry About the Process

Something different here today. A poem written by an anonymous therapy client (reprinted with permission, of course). Enjoy, and feel free to share your thoughts:

Who

Sit and talk
About fears, ideas, dreams, and memories
About pain, pride, grief, and regret
Open the safe and let the hobgoblins out
Trusting, cautiously, that they will be tamed
By you

Recline and discuss
All the plans, blockades, piecemeal parts, young and old
All the people, places, times, and events
The bricks that form the house I have become
Tell me if this structure is sound
I never knew

Relax and divulge
What I’m feeling, wanting, ashamed of, and needing
What I can do, cannot, want to, and won’t
The map has lines, each country has borders
No matter how much, how many
Or how few

Nest and ponder
How I got here, where I’m going, what I’m for, why I am
How I choose, relate, sabotage, and hide
In search of a compass, you show me I have one
Telling me, without speaking, exactly
What to do

Engage
With the process, moment, relationship, and emotion
With the words, the looks, the tone, and the person
This unit congeals, realizing its purpose
What I am, how I am, where I am
And who

"I just wanna be"

Name that movie.

Let's take this therapy discussion to a philosophical level. First, we need to define a couple terms:

Interpersonal: of or pertaining to the relations between persons.

Intrapersonal: existing or occurring within the individual self or mind.

Therapy is both an interpersonal and intrapersonal process. So far, most of this blog has been about the interpersonal facets of therapy: how the empowered client prepares for and communicates with the therapist. But the intrapersonal process of therapy deserves equal time, if not more.

Being in therapy is more than filling an hour each with week with an appointment. It is a personal choice to enter into a season of introspection, vulnerability, and openness to change. A season where you spend time looking at yourself - why you do what you do, think what you think, feel what you feel, and are who you are. It's important to be aware of this - therapy is all 168 hours of the week, not just the one or two you spend in session. The more you allow yourself to engage in this intrapersonal process, the more you'll understand about yourself. And the more you understand yourself, the better able you will be to make decisions, relate to others, change the things you can and accept the things you can't.

"So what can I do to understand myself?" you may ask. Our culture loves to have things to do: Depressed? Follow these 5 steps. Bad relationship? Complete this homework. But rather than check off boxes on a list, your time is better spent getting used to being with yourself. How does one do this? I cringe at the idea of telling someone how to "do" being. But I'll give it a crack.

First, stop doing the things that distract you from yourself. Turn off the tv, ipod, cell phone and internet, forget about the dishes and laundry for a minute, sit down and be quiet. It's amazing how difficult this can be.

Next, try to quiet your mind. People often find that a few minutes of silence results in an anxious recital of regrets or things to do. Promise yourself you'll take time to think about those items later, and go back to the quiet.

Finally, ask yourself how you feel. Then let yourself feel it. You're being.

That's all Crash Davis wanted.