Character Development: Forgiveness And Affirmations

In a world that often focuses so much on what we lack,

It's easy to overlook the incredible internal strengths that each of us possess.

Grounded in ancient philosophy and modern science,

This series invites you to reconnect with the innate strengths that make you who you are,

Promoting balance and harmony in everyday life.

Whether you're looking to boost your confidence,

Overcome negative self-talk,

Deepen your relationships,

Or simply invite a greater sense of well-being,

My hope is that this series offers a practical and uplifting path to personal growth.

Alright,

Hello my loves,

And welcome back to our Character Strengths Affirmation Series.

Each episode we explore one of the 24 character strengths identified by positive psychology,

All of which fall under the virtues of courage,

Humanity,

Wisdom,

Justice,

Temperance,

Or transcendence.

These strengths and virtues are universal,

And they form the foundation of our highest selves.

We are continuing our journey through the virtue of temperance,

Which is the family of strengths that help us regulate our emotions,

Manage impulses,

And act in alignment with our deeper values.

Temperance includes the strengths of prudence,

Forgiveness,

Humility,

And self-regulation.

And y'all,

It's time.

Today we are diving into the strength of forgiveness.

So what I like to do with a lot of these strengths,

If you haven't noticed,

Is I like to define them first by saying what they're not.

I think that I'm just preparing myself for people to be like immediately defensive because I get that.

So let me just say that forgiveness is often misunderstood.

It's not about forgetting or excusing or pretending that harm didn't happen.

It's not about forced reconciliation.

And it's not about bypassing anger or grief,

Which is to say,

And I'll talk about this a little bit later,

Probably a lot of it.

But it's not about intellectualizing our way to a state of forgiving someone like forgiveness is an embodied state and we have to honor the process that it takes to get there.

Forgiveness is the strength that allows us to release resentment and move forward with integrity without denying our pain and without sacrificing our boundaries.

The Values in Action Institute defines forgiveness as accepting others' shortcomings,

Offering second chances,

And letting go of hurt.

Perhaps more profoundly,

I really think of forgiveness as a way of reclaiming our own emotional freedom.

It's about softening our grip on bitterness.

It's about breaking cycles of reactivity.

And it's about restoring our energy to the present moment rather than tying it to something that happened in the past.

Forgiveness lives in the body as much as it lives in the mind.

We feel it as a loosening in the shoulders,

A softening in the chest,

As an exhale that says,

I don't want to carry this anymore.

And I don't have to in order to learn something.

Forgiveness is not a moment.

It's a practice.

Yeah,

Forgiveness is not a moment.

It really is a practice.

It's a return again and again to compassion,

To courage,

And to truth.

Forgiveness shows up in our lives in subtle and I would say pretty sacred ways throughout.

It could be the willingness to really take a beat before responding to someone who hurt us in some way.

Choosing understanding instead of retaliation.

Repairing after a conflict and relationship,

Being committed to this greater thing that you both want to engage in,

And not just getting caught up in our own individual stories.

It might mean softening our grip on the grudges that we have that drain us.

Sometimes it's just about allowing somebody else to be imperfect without defining them by their mistakes.

Forgiveness is a very social but also a very personal trait and strength.

I think that so much of it has to have this initial understanding that,

Oh,

I'm not cooked.

As Ram Dass would say,

I'm no cooked goose or anything.

I've still got growing to do and I'm going to sign up to be in relationship with other people and be in relationship with myself.

Aware that there are going to be things that come up as a result of me not being enlightened yet.

There are still rough edges that we all have that might result in us hurting other people and our job is to forgive ourselves and take accountability and to have grace with other people knowing that we're in the soup with them.

You can call me sappy all you want,

But I really believe that forgiveness is the strength that allows for us to most meaningfully recalibrate our own hearts.

It doesn't mean that what happened in the past or maybe even what's still happening,

It doesn't mean that it's okay.

What it means is that we're no longer giving it the power to control how we show up in the world.

In its most empowered form,

Forgiveness is what frees us from the emotional residue of events that we cannot change.

It is an act of returning home to ourselves.

I want to say too that for me,

Forgiveness is very deeply tied.

My capacity for forgiveness is very deeply tied to my own sense of meaning and purpose.

True forgiveness for me comes from a place of being able to say I can understand why this harm chipped away at me and refined me and made me better or maybe how me needing to learn how to stop this harm chipped away at me and refined me and made me better in terms of the offering that I am in this world.

What I mean by that is that the things that we have to forgive and the process that we have to go through in order to forgive,

The grieving,

Like to actually grieve,

Which is the prerequisite to forgiveness.

I just want to make that very clear.

Grief is a prerequisite to forgiveness.

There's going to be anger.

There's going to be frustration.

There's going to be sadness.

There's going to be trying to make sense of why this needs to be this way.

I don't just mean forgiveness in terms of the harm that we cause ourselves or the harm that we cause or receive from other people.

It happens on all levels.

I mean,

In the work that I do,

Working in community mental health,

A lot of times it's forgiveness of systems and being so frustrated and exhausted and feeling powerlessness against systems that are broken and people and seeing the ways in which people are being harmed by these systems.

There's so much to be forgiven.

Actually,

As much suffering as there is in this world,

There's just a little bit more forgiveness that's required.

And I want people to appreciate how it's a radical thing to decide that in this one life that I've been given,

Things are going to happen that feel really unfair or unjust or just dark.

And I get to choose.

This is like Viktor Frankl stuff,

You know,

Man's Search for Meaning.

I get to choose who I want to be.

And I really believe that that is the cultivation of all these other character strengths.

It's like what motivates our desire to be good people?

Existential dread,

Challenge,

Hardship,

The valleys.

And then hopefully we can learn to be inspired by those peak moments as well and get to reap the benefits,

For example,

Of forgiveness for our relationships.

But I just had to say before I get into like the regular curriculum for this,

Like that it's very radical and it cannot be rushed.

It cannot be rushed.

I think I'm just sensitive to this one because it really hits home for me.

You know,

I know what it's like to be harmed by the people who are meant to protect you.

And I'll just say that a child will go to every extent that they can to love their parents.

And the way in which that can be such a teaching in forgiveness and the way in which you can mess it up so royally and then end up not actually helping the situation at all,

I'm just deeply familiar with.

You have to be honest about where you're at on the path.

And there are natural consequences to harming others.

And you can release anger and still integrate an understanding of how a person might behave or how or just the reality of any kind of there's just so many I'm trying to like keep it abstract because there's so many things that could be forgiven.

It's not just people.

But the strength of being able to say this is for my own heart.

I've just I just really believe in it.

Brenna Toohey,

Who is a lawyer,

But used to be a spoken word poet.

She has a really cool poem.

It's pretty short.

And it says,

When I say I forgive you know this.

That's the title.

I did not bury the hatchet.

I have the hatchet in my hands.

I am building myself a new house.

Whoo,

Bars.

Okay,

Well,

Let's dive into what this looks like in terms of overuse and underuse.

So in each episode,

I get into the importance of balance when it comes to character.

And I reference Aristotle's golden mean,

Which is the idea that virtue exists between the balance of two vices,

That of excess and that of deficiency.

When forgiveness is underused,

It can look like holding tightly to resentment or replaying past hurts until they become a part of our identity.

So it may show up as refusing second chances or cutting people off really quickly,

Taking things personally,

Defining ourselves by old wounds.

This is the sort of like,

You know,

If a story arc is ideally from like victim to victor,

Like the hero's journey,

Like where are you at in terms of your own hero's journey?

And it kind of requires that you forgive your situation and not see it requires that we don't see ourselves as a victim,

Which like,

Listen,

Y'all,

I have painted my nails black and written songs on my ukulele on my bed in dim lighting,

You know,

Like,

It's fun to be in that place.

But is there more to you than that?

You know what I'm saying?

Like,

It's like,

Yeah,

We can honor that part within ourselves.

But are there other parts that can take a different perspective at our relationships with other people and offer people grace?

You know,

Or are we staying in a sort of punitive mode long after something happened to us?

It often can look like harsh judgments or criticism of ourselves,

Oftentimes first,

And then of other people.

Sometimes withholding forgiveness can feel protective or powerful,

Especially when we've been deeply hurt.

And I want to be very clear.

Sometimes it's appropriate and honest and a natural consequence to be like,

Yeah,

I'm human.

I don't forgive you yet.

I'm still in a part of my grief stage where I'm just focused on the wrongdoing.

And I think that some things kind of require that.

I think that especially when we've been harmed,

I think that in order for us to make better decisions about what we allow into our lives in the future,

We have to go through all of this discomfort of realizing how wrong it was so that we don't let it happen again.

You know,

There's a balance between justice and forgiveness.

And I think that one requires the other.

I think it's a really lovely balance.

Now,

The challenge of too much focus on the justice without moving in the direction of forgiveness is that we start to develop resentment.

And resentment,

Man,

That's a heavy burden to carry.

Resentment turns into projection really quick,

Like resentment becomes something that clouds our vision and then makes us show up without kindness and compassion in situations that actually have nothing to do with the harm that's happening in some way.

I mean,

Think about it like when we don't forgive those in our lives and process what happened,

Then when we see traits of those people and other people,

We tend to be really reactive.

You see this a lot of times when you start a new romantic relationship,

Where if you see something come out that makes you think of this other person and you haven't processed,

You know that,

You know,

We're just two people in this world on our own paths,

Figuring it out.

And I can just honor that that's who you are right now and move forward.

If we haven't gone through our own work to get to that point,

Then we lash out inappropriately.

Or we don't and we just internalize it and we end up carrying a pain and a discomfort that was never intended to live inside of us forever.

Basically,

What I'm trying to say is that when we are not able to tend to and heal old injuries,

Our boundaries have to become rigid or reactive in order to protect ourselves.

So we might retaliate rather than communicate.

We might close ourselves off too quickly.

We may guard ourselves so tightly that we can't even connect with other people and through new relationships,

Experience healing and love.

Forgiveness is scary and hard,

Let's be honest.

But on the other side of it,

The way that we're able to walk through the world is with so much more clarity and compassion and a more integrated understanding of what this means for ourselves and for our lives moving forward.

Okay,

On the other side of the spectrum,

Forgiveness can be overused,

Offered too quickly,

Or without honoring the full truth of our own experience.

Overused forgiveness might look like excusing harmful behavior,

Minimizing our own pain,

Rushing to let it go.

Maybe we've intellectualized our way into thinking that we forgive someone,

But we've actually just bypassed our anger and other aspects of our grief,

Like sadness,

And just the idea of forgiving someone,

And therefore are staying in relationships or environments that continue to wound us because we haven't processed the natural consequences of the issue at hand.

That honestly is what I see most often in myself,

Definitely that one for me.

But also I see that one a lot clinically,

Is people want to forgive,

They want to maintain relationship with people that they care about,

But you can't self-abandon in the process.

This kind of forgiveness often arises not from compassion,

But from fear.

Fear of conflict,

Fear of abandonment,

Or fear of discomfort.

Overused forgiveness also impacts our boundaries.

We may allow repeated harm,

We may stay silent when we're hurt,

We may confuse forgiveness with permission.

Our desire for peace becomes self-erasure instead of self-respect.

I'm going to say that one more time.

Our desire for peace becomes self-erasure instead of self-respect.

Balanced forgiveness honors the wound first.

Its impact,

Its meaning,

Its truth.

Only then can we release and have it be real and have it be sustainable.

The middle ground,

The golden mean,

Is forgiveness with discernment.

Forgiveness that honors our own humanity and our boundaries.

Forgiveness that allows us to let go without letting ourselves go.

Forgiveness that acknowledges harm and chooses healing,

Not only for ourselves,

But for everyone involved.

And man,

That's radical.

That's some radical-ish right there.

And importantly,

Forgiveness includes self-forgiveness,

Which is often,

Let's be honest,

The hardest kind.

It asks us to soften the critical voice,

To allow ourselves to be learners,

To use,

In some ways,

Shame,

To be awakened by shame,

But release it.

And to offer the compassion we extend to others so easily to ourselves.

Practicing forgiveness looks like naming the hurt honestly,

Allowing anger and the other parts of grief,

Hurt,

Sadness,

All the existential components of,

Like,

Why,

And then not being able to understand why suffering happens and why it happens through others.

You know,

That's in there,

Too.

It's about allowing all of that,

The disappointment,

All of it,

To move through the body.

It looks like choosing accountability over avoidance.

Holding compassion for the imperfect humanity of ourselves and others.

Establishing boundaries that protect healing.

And let me just say,

Like,

Practically speaking,

These can change over time.

You know,

When it came to certain things in my life,

I would say,

You know,

Things where it's like,

Okay,

Now I've been traumatized.

Like,

We have to figure out a way to,

Like,

Reintegrate this relationship.

I want this relationship,

But I was traumatized in this relationship.

So,

Like,

How can I figure out a way?

And I think a lot of people listening to this know what that's like,

Like experienced real harm with someone that you still want to maintain relationship with.

Listen,

I was a family therapist.

I still work with families.

This is happening every day.

And we have to learn that,

Like,

Right now,

This is what I need our relationship to look like.

I don't know what it's going to look like a year from now.

We might be way closer.

And I'm hopeful,

But I have to honor the pacing.

Because I don't want to re-traumatize myself and then we're three steps back.

Especially if something is going on like addiction.

You know,

If you're working with forgiveness in a relationship with someone who's struggling with something that is continuing,

And you want to forgive them in order to stay in relationship with them,

We have to be very honest about where that person is out on their path so that we can protect what that relationship is by not setting ourselves up for disappointment.

It doesn't mean we don't love someone.

And it doesn't mean that we don't love ourselves.

And it's because we love them.

And it's because we love ourselves.

And it's because we're committed to this thing that is protecting who we are so that we can just generally be an offering to the world.

That we have to integrate natural consequences,

Boundaries,

Then forgiveness.

Forgiveness is not passive.

It is active.

It is intentional.

And it is courageous.

It is the process of disentangling ourselves from pain so that we can reclaim our power,

Our clarity,

And our presence.

Maybe it's because of my own relationship to forgiveness.

But I'll be honest,

These affirmations hit hard.

Forgiveness is a deeply emotional strength that is often in relationship to our deepest wounds.

Please be gentle with yourself and know that you're not alone.

We're in this together.

Before we dive into the affirmations,

We'll pause for a quick blessing.

May forgiveness open the gates of our hearts gently and in its own time.

May we honor our wounds without becoming them.

May our boundaries remain clear,

Compassionate,

And steady.

May forgiveness free us not from responsibility,

But from resentment.

And may grace meet us wherever healing is needed most.

I will read each statement twice,

Pausing in between to give you a chance to repeat them out loud to yourself.

And I do recommend saying them out loud.

The statements that are easy to embrace,

Savor them,

Appreciate them,

Stand like a mountain in their truth.

And then the statements that feel not so good,

That feel uncomfortable or foreign,

Go ahead and say them anyway.

This is where we are doing the work,

Rewiring those neural networks.

This is also where we gain insight into unhealed wounds,

Limiting beliefs,

And ingrained biases and judgments toward ourselves or toward a particular way of being.

It's great material for journaling or discussing with a counselor or trusted friend,

Maybe even someone doing the series with you.

Whether you're just waking up,

Walking your dog,

On your commute,

Or getting ready for bed,

I hope these affirmations serve your deepest,

Greatest,

Highest self.

And with that,

Let's get started.

I am capable of offering myself and others forgiveness.

I am capable of offering myself and others forgiveness.

I release what no longer serves my peace.

I release what no longer serves my peace.

I forgive myself for everything that I am and everything that I am not.

I forgive myself for everything that I am and everything that I am not.

I honor the truth of my pain without letting it define me.

I honor the truth of my pain without letting it define me.

I give myself permission to heal at my own pace.

I give myself permission to heal at my own pace.

I can hold both hurt and compassion in the same heart.

I can hold both hurt and compassion in the same heart.

Forgiving others frees me to reclaim my energy and my joy.

Forgiving others frees me to reclaim my energy and my joy.

I allow grace to meet me where guilt once lived.

I allow grace to meet me where guilt once lived.

I choose understanding over resentment.

I choose understanding over resentment.

I choose understanding over resentment.

Healthy boundaries support my healing.

Healthy boundaries support my healing.

My forgiveness makes space for freedom and renewal.

My forgiveness makes space for freedom and renewal.

My forgiveness makes space for freedom and renewal.

My forgiveness makes space for freedom and renewal.

My forgiveness makes space for freedom and renewal.

My forgiveness makes space for freedom and renewal.

My forgiveness makes space for freedom and renewal.

My forgiveness makes space for freedom and renewal.

My forgiveness makes space for freedom and renewal.

My forgiveness makes space for freedom and renewal.

My forgiveness makes space for freedom and renewal.

My forgiveness makes space for freedom and renewal.

My forgiveness makes space for freedom and renewal.

My forgiveness makes space for freedom and renewal.

My forgiveness makes space for freedom and renewal.

My forgiveness makes space for freedom and renewal.

My forgiveness makes space for freedom and renewal.

My forgiveness makes space for freedom and renewal.