A short CBT-focused video by Dr. Dawn‑Elise Snipes explaining forgiveness as a deliberate choice to stop giving energy to past harms and listing practical strategies to facilitate forgiveness. The speaker outlines benefits (improved physical and mental health, relationships, productivity), emphasizes safety and realistic expectations, and offers concrete techniques: recalling the betrayal from multiple perspectives, radical acceptance, adjusting expectations, living in the "and" (holding distress while keeping a rich life), practicing on small offenses, cultivating empathy, safely sharing feelings (in person, with a higher power, or via empty-chair), and using thought-stopping.
Chapters
Welcome back to this video on forgiveness. This is another video in the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Nugget series and I'm your host, Dr. Donnelly Snipes. Remember that forgiveness does not mean that you agree with or condone the situation, but you're choosing to stop giving that person or thing your energy. The benefits of forgiveness are improved health, improved mental health, improved relationships, improved productivity. You know, holding onto resentments is exhausting. Forgiveness of other people may involve recalling the betrayal. Remember what happened and remember it from multiple perspectives. Remember the four Ps, fear, exploration. Ask yourself what will happen if I let go of this anger? Safety. It's important to develop safety before you start taking steps to forgive. It's hard to forgive if we think that it's going to make us vulnerable to harm. So it's important to make sure that you're safe. Visualize forgiveness as a gift to yourself and your significant others, the people that are important in your rich and meaningful life. Forgiveness is a gift to them because it allows you to have more energy and be more present for them instead of being focused on something that happened in the past. Examine the situation, the betrayal, and look for the positive. And that can be hard, but radically accept what happened. Maybe it taught you something about yourself. Maybe it showed you how much courage you have. Try to find the yin and the yang in the situation. Adjust your expectations of yourself and of other people. Forgiveness means accepting that people are not perfect. And sometimes we try to, we want to try to think people are perfect. And it may be important to adjust your expectations about other people's perfectionism or other people, how perfect other people are. And it's also important to adjust your expectations about how they're going to behave. You may forgive them and hope that they're going to change, but they may not. And you've got to be prepared for that and know how you're going to deal with it. Live in the and you can experience distress and have a rich and meaningful life. It's important to recognize that, you know, sometimes people aren't going to change. You can forgive them and even still keep them in your life. However, you may alter the way that they're in your life. You know, maybe this is a family member that you know, their family. You're not going to cut them off so you can live in the and recognizing that, you know, maybe they are not safe people to be around, maybe they're emotionally abusive, but you don't want to cut them off. So how can you live in the and how can you have a rich and meaningful life and not cut them off if that's what you want to do. Start by forgiving smaller things. It's easier to forgive small things like somebody forgetting to send you a card on your birthday, than something that's much larger. So start by practicing forgiveness with the smaller things. Empathize with the other person without minimizing. Try to accept that they did the best they could with the tools they had at that point in time, and that can be really hard. But it's helpful to you to try to view their actions as ill advised instead of malicious. Share your feelings with the person who offended you if it's safe. If you think it is necessary. Sometimes it's not safe or necessary. You may choose to share your feelings with your higher power if you have one, if none. Neither one of those sounds good. Empty Chair and you know we do this in counseling a lot. We have an empty chair in the corner and we tell the person to visualize whoever they want to talk to in that chair and say exactly what they need to say. Or maybe you share your feelings about the situation with somebody else, with your best friend, with a parent, and then practice thought stopping. If you've been holding on to resentment and anger for a long time at someone, then those resentments, those thoughts of resentment and anger, may continually come back and try to knock on your little cognitive door. So it's important to engage in some of those thought stopping behaviors and that we talked about in one of the other videos. I hope this gives you some tips on ways you can start forgiving others to lighten your load and free up some energy to help you continue to work towards that rich and meaningful life.
