“I’m trying a new style of forgiveness”

Last Wednesday I interviewed Dr Fred Luskin for the Become your own Superhero podcast.

Subscribe here if you haven’t already, as this is some powerful content.

A fascinating and utterly helpful conversation with a man who suffered for years before finding a solution for himself and in turn, us.

Dr Fred is the author of “Forgive for Good – The proven prescription for health and happiness” and the founder of the Forgiveness Project at Stanford University. To say he knows a thing or two about forgiveness is an understatement.

I’ll let you read his book or watch the podcast to get the nuts and bolts down, but what I’ll share today I reckon is quite interesting.

Forgiveness is never about absolving the offending parties of their wrongdoing. It never was.

That’s the first point.

After following Luskin’s forgiveness formula, some crazy acts of forgiveness have since occurred in the twenty years since writing the book.

Mothers have forgiven drunk drivers that ran over and killed their children, Northern Ireland’s protestants & Catholics alike have forgiven military members who blew to smithereens their family and friends during times of war and even a Holocaust survivor hugged and forgave the commander of the death camp.

Astonishing stuff when you think about it, but some things are just not forgivable, right?

Wrong.

The whole point of forgiveness is simply this.

If you have been victimised, forgiveness is there to free YOURSELF, so that you may move on with your life.

Nothing else about it really.

Holding a grudge only takes space up in our heads, triggers a stress response and causes physical harm to our bodies if left unresolved.

On the flip side, when we inevitably say or do something bad towards someone else, we need a way of moving forward.

I said some truly horrendous stuff to my father in the heat of a fight recently and in preparation for the interview with Dr Fred (which is why I reached out to him in the first place), I decided it was appropriate to send my dear old dad an apology message.

It read…

“Hey Dad, Just wanted to apologise for my harsh words towards you last month. No one deserves to be spoken to like that. Not that it’s any excuse, but I’m still working through some things of my own. You don’t need to respond or do anything.
Just wanted to get it off my chest”.

Now I’m quick to point out that me sending this doesn’t change what I did or the effect it had on my dad at the time, but it does change one thing.

Me.

It immediately helped my own situation.

If heaven forbid my Pop passed away, at least I’d know that the last thing I said to him wasn’t something terrible that I may regret until my own death.

So, back to my new style of forgiveness.

I want to try something here and I’d love to hear your own thoughts on this and forgiveness in general.

I’m going to start forgiving the people that deliberately misled the public about the following topics.

Diet, nutrition, climate change, vaccines, meat, carbon, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, BLM, Gender Pronouns, Universal Basic Income, Glyphosate, fluoride, Sugar, Gender pay gaps, LGBTQ, Lockdowns, Masks, Seed oils, Epstein, Cosby, vegans, Karen, cow farts, Bill Gates, MeToo, COVID19 and fake meat.

My thinking is that by forgiving these perpetrators, I can just get on with changing the world by leading by example, using the power of truth and staying committed to my goal of becoming the world’s most positively known motivational speaker.

And for that….I don’t apologise.