Connor Beaton explains that forgiveness — of others and ourselves — happens by moving closer to the pain tied to past actions rather than avoiding it. He argues that self-shaming and verbal self-abuse perpetuate harmful patterns (e.g., pornography use, drinking, contacting inappropriate people) and that allowing oneself to feel grief, shame, and guilt deeply enables integration and release.
Forgiveness happens when we move closer to the pain of what has happened in the first place.
If I could distill everything down there, forgiveness happens when we move closer to the pain of what's happened in the first place. So when we look at things like infidelities, when we look at failures, when we look at treating other people in ways that we don't like, when we look at treating ourselves in ways that we don't like, when we failed ourselves, maybe we've set a goal to not look at porn, but we have fallen back on that. Maybe we've set an agreement to not drink and we've fallen back on that.
When those things have happened, we naturally move towards a place of shaming ourselves, of sort of verbally abusing ourselves internally, of getting down on ourselves, being harsh with ourselves, whatever the case may be. And that exact thing is the thing that causes us to move back towards those self abusive patterns of watching the porn, of going towards the drinking, of texting the people that we know shouldn't be in contact with. And so how we start to forgive ourselves and how we start to forgive others is by allowing ourselves and giving ourselves permission to move closer towards the pain of the thing that we've done. So if we've done something wrong, rather than avoiding the feeling, the sadness, the grief, the shame, the guilt of the thing that we did, we actually need to allow ourselves to feel those things more deeply. Because it's in moving into that experience that we can let them go, because we'll integrate them, we'll let them dissipate. But if we are constantly trying to distract ourselves from the experience, from the emotion that's tied to our negative action, we'll never be released from it, ever. We'll just never be released from it. That emotion will be shackled to us and we'll be constantly trying to run away from it, constantly trying to escape it. So forgiveness happens at the intersection, and this is my personal belief, forgiveness happens at the intersection of feeling so deeply into what we have done that we understand it in its depth. Not in a way where we use that understanding.
Not in a way where we weaponize the that understanding against ourselves to hurt ourselves more. But in a way where we can release ourselves from our actions, in a way where we can understand the things that we've done so that we can find a sense of I understand the pain that I cause other people, and I understand the pain that I cause myself, and I understand it in such a way that I've allowed myself to feel it and experience it and integrate it. And when I do that, the lesson becomes known to me, and I can. And it starts to be released automatically. Right? We often want to look for the thing that we can let go of, and the letting go happens in the tuning into the experience more deeply. I think that this is a really valuable lesson, because as we enter into 2020, I want to remind all of you that that growth and expansion and success and fulfillment is almost impossible to have. It's almost impossible to attain if we are caught shaming ourselves for who we are or what we've done. It's so fucking hard. And it's a reminder that the shame that we carry for our actions is the thing that needs to be dealt with first. Because if we're not doing that, if we're not committed to that wholeheartedly, then all we're doing is putting band aids over bullet hole wounds.
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