How To Forgive An Abusive Father

How the hell do you forgive somebody like that? And I know that that's a really big open ended, almost unanswerable question, but I'm going to throw it out there anyway to kind of get a sense of some of the things that you've had to do in order to find a sense of forgiveness towards him.

I think that you've hit upon a piece that has been crucial to my learning to forgive. And that was understanding, because.

The empathy, you know, walking and trying to figure out, put, putting, taking off your shoes and putting on their shoes, trying to figure out what was it like to be a gay man who. People were just completely horrified by homosexuality in the, you know, 40s, 50s, 60s, still today in Georgia, I think in a lot of places.

And what was it like to be brilliant and.

Be this trained doctor and to know these things and yet to continue to his lifestyle was. He would go to these gay bars in Atlanta. That's when the baths first started. He would go pick up men downtown in his big Cadillac with a big gun in his glove compartment. I think I'm now convinced that he murdered numerous people, in particular these precious gay boys that were at these bars that were, had been pushed out of their homes. No one, no one was tracking them. No one knew. And he knew he could get away with it. How do you forgive? How do I. How did I move toward forgiveness? I can say my first thing. I remember I found this letter when he killed himself that I had written, I forgive you. And I was like, okay, well, that was a start. But to me it's all energy. Like that was just like, oh, that's, you know, the first thing. But then there's these pieces where you go, you know, okay, that happened. And unforgiveness harms me. It perpetuates the trauma. It keeps my liver not functioning right. It keeps me blaming and angry and rageful and no, thanks, I'm not interested in that. So how do I release that crap so that I can function and be the person I want to be? And that's why I think forgiveness is important, because I can go, okay.

These things happened and he, my dad was sick, he was mentally ill, he was a drug addict. Again, it doesn't excuse any of it, but it starts to bring me to a place of like.

Okay, I'm getting over that. And I'm. He's got, he's got to work out his own stuff with his soul. I'm. I'm going to be working on me. And I think one of the greatest. This is another thing I. I've learned. But when. When I hold on to. To unforgiveness or blame or anger, it's like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. And that's not the way it works. So I have to be responsible for me. And it starts with, you know, going back and unwinding all those tapes where he just, you know, told me all this crazy stuff and going, wait a minute, that's not true. What do I think? What do I believe? What do I feel? What do I mean? He told me, I mean, literally how to think, how to feel, how to, you know, don't cry, that you're not supposed to believe, that you're supposed to, you know, every single part of my life was infected. And so I've done a lot of going, oh, that. Wait, I. I don't believe that. I don't think that.

And that's really important. Feeling sorry for myself. People say, oh, you're not supposed to feel sorry for yourself. You know, pull yourself up by the boobstraps and get on. My personal opinion is sit down and wallow in the damn mud and feel sorry for yourself a little bit. Because especially if you've been told you're not supposed to feel, you're not supposed to do all this stuff, figure out how you feel. And if that means, you know, wallowing in it for a while, wallow in it. I hope that people get back up again. Like, you know, life is so awesome. Get up and go enjoy it. But for a while, sit down and just cry your damn eyes out. Really feel it. And I think that's how I've moved.

A lot took place, a lot of the different areas of forgiveness.