Forgiveness Panel
The following is a transcript of the Forgiveness Panel, one of the highlights of the 2023 Couples Conference. It was edited for readability and is not meant to be shared, cited, or published.
The Erickson Foundation provides this transcript to registrants of the 2023 Couples Conference in appreciation of their attendance.
I am grateful to Ellyn Bader of the Couples Institute for initiating the panel and suggesting the faculty. - Jeffrey K. Zeig, Ph.D.
Jeff Zeig: Welcome everyone. We have a distinguished panel with Joseph Winn, Frank Anderson, and Cristine Toel.
We have brought these experts together to talk about forgiveness, an important topic that has relevance in all forms of therapy. Frank, will you please start and offer your perspectives on the topic of forgiveness.
Frank Anderson: Please forgive us for making forgiveness the last topic of this conference. However, they’ve saved the best for last because this topic of forgiveness is something that I have dove into full force in the last couple of years. And partly, of course, because this way this always goes—I have personal experience. A year ago, my main perpetrator passed way, and I had this huge life experience of forgiving someone who had hurt me. I never knew I would be able to reach the depths of forgiveness in the way that I have. So, this is near and dear to my heart. Certainly, I want to talk about it from a couples’ perspective, but also because I hold this frame of reference from the trauma perspective.
I often feel that forgiveness is pushed prematurely. With people, society, culture and religious institutions, everyone is so quick to forgive, but that has not been my personal experience. And I don’t see it being very effective with clients. It’s bypassing what ails and hurts—what’s underneath it all. My main recommendation when I’m working with clients—even if we’re talking about infidelity or any form of betrayal—is to heal first; forgive second. And oftentimes, that’s difficult for people because there’s such pressure to forgive and just move on. And if you don’t, people say, “What’s wrong with you? Don’t get stuck in the past.” I feel this way around people who try to pursue legal venues when they’ve been traumatized. I believe you should not go legal until you heal your wounds. And let’s not forgive until you heal your wounds. If you grow up in certain religions, they’re always telling you to immediately forgive because that’s what you’re supposed to do.
I encourage people to go through the therapy process of healing. Sometimes that includes healing with a partner or healing with a perpetrator. Sometimes it means doing your own work without the other person. It’s richer if you’re fortunate enough to be able to work through healing with the person who has hurt you, betrayed you, or traumatized you. But I also say that it’s possible to release and heal on your own. Of course, in the IFS world that I live in, the Self can help heal the parts that hold the trauma. There’s an internal process of healing and then we move into the forgiveness zone.
And one of the things that’s been powerful for me to see in so many of my clients is that once healing is accomplished, people will often see the vulnerability in the perpetrator. Once you’ve healed on your own, you have access in a different window into the person who has hurt you. There’s often a different view, pre-and post-healing. You may think your father was a weak person or was limited. You may think that your mother did the best she could, even though it wasn’t good enough for you.
There is a greater capacity to see the vulnerability post-healing; to see what’s underneath the person who perpetrated. That is a huge piece—waiting until after healing, if possible. People often say that forgiveness is for the other person, and I don’t buy it. Forgiveness is for the person doing the forgiving. This has been my personal experience. It’s a huge relief and release to let go of what you’re carrying around. Forgiveness is a gift that you give to yourself more than it being what you give to the other person. People believe that you need to forgive your perpetrator to be whole; that you need to forgive to be Christian, etc. For me, forgiveness is this dimension of untethering and release, and of full acceptance of what happened and who the other person is holding the complexity.
Another piece for me around true forgiveness is holding the complexity of each person. I can see the good and bad in the person who hurt me. And once we can do that, we can shift back to ourselves and see the good and bad in ourselves. I think everyone carries internalized perpetrator parts and it’s hard to embrace them when you have not been able to see the complexity of the person who has hurt you and betrayed you. Once you’ve forgiven them, once you’ve released the tethering to them, there’s this huge opportunity to look inside and to start forgiving yourself for all that you did, whether it’s stayed too long, tolerated too much, or whatever you’ve done by participating in the trauma, the abuse.
It’s a huge opportunity for healing all the way around. Desmond Tutu and his daughter wrote about forgiveness. They did this project where he brought together a lot of people who were violated through apartheid with the perpetrators. And he had them talk to each other, which was a powerful experience. He had four different stages of forgiveness, which I thought were interesting. I will just briefly name them. The reason for naming them is because they dovetail the healing process for me and trauma. The first step is telling your story. There’s a witnessing that needs to happen. It could be internal, and it could be with another person. The second step is identifying where it hurts. There going inside, and exploring what hurts—thoughts, feelings, physical sensations. There’s an internal process involved. The third step is a conscious choice and it’s a practice: “I am going to choose to do this.” It doesn’t happen without intent. There’s a conscious choice and a process involved. And then the fourth step is choosing to stay connected—to release or renew is what he talks about it. Whether you decide to renew the relationship after the betrayal has been healed and forgiveness is there, or you choose not to participate, which is powerful. For me, there’s this separate process of forgiveness, which is independent of healing.
Part of forgiveness is this capacity to choose whether you want to stay in a relationship or not. This is a choice that you make from an empowered place. The last thing I’ll say—and this is personal, and I get emotional just thinking about it—is that I was able to love my father, my main perpetrator, around his passing. And the capacity for loving a person who has hurt you was the most empowering thing I’ve experienced in my life. Because loving someone who has violated and hurt you shows the being above and beyond it all; what you did what they did. I rose above and gave back, and it was the most empowering feeling to love someone who hurt and betrayed me… that extra dimension. Not only letting go and forgiving but also giving love back. It is empowering.
Cristine Toel: I grew up in the Midwest in the 1970s and 80s, and kind of piggybacking on what you were saying Frank, I grew up in a Catholic household. One of my four siblings in the middle died of cancer. It was leukemia, and I was her donor for a bone marrow transplant that didn’t work. My parents tried to cope with alcohol. In our household there was a lot of structure around a lot of chaos, a lot of grief, and a lot of blame. I grew up with this dual force of feeling responsible that I didn’t save my sister’s life. How could I forgive myself for that? And then there is this other piece about being Catholic, and that suffering is a good, positive thing and that you should forgive easily without going through any process. It was a total denial of feelings and total inability to express feelings.
And here I am working at PCS (Psychological Counseling Services), which has an intensive program. On Tuesday nights, there’s this group called Anger and Forgiveness, which I always thought was a little strange, until I realized that we are supposed to go through the anger process, before we get to this quick forgiveness process. That opened my eyes to what I was denied in my childhood, and what I probably needed and should have gone through. And I bring that to clients because we deal a lot with betrayal, trauma, and couples coming to us in the worst of times. Especially for our betrayed partners, they’re not ready to forgive. It’s almost like a negative word. They figure, “Maybe if I forgive, that means I’m not safe anymore. Or if I forgive, this person is going to be let off the hook, or they’re going to hurt me again.” I have a client who felt powerful in not forgiving. Her spouse cheated on her when she was going through breast cancer and while she was in recovery. And she discovered it, and she ended up bringing a bouquet of flowers to the partner he was having an affair with, saying, “Oh, I just want to thank you so much for taking such good care of my husband.” This passive aggressiveness made her feel powerful. I had to work with her by saying, “In not forgiving, you might be unsafe, because I don’t know how this person is going to respond to you. I’m worried about that.”
How do we get to a place where forgiveness becomes something that you take charge of and you create choice in terms of what that’s going to mean for you, and how can you mostly take your life back through this route of forgiveness? Turning it on its head and reframing what that meaning is, like what you were saying Frank, you have a choice. Forgiving could just be I want to release this hurt and pain and resentment, get it out of my system. It could mean I want to wish you well. It could mean I want to want to wish you well out of my life, not necessarily going through a repair process. And it could mean going through a repair process. For me, it’s paying attention to all those pieces, and helping a client define their experience with forgiveness. And let’s start there, and redefine it, and what it’s going to mean for you.
For a lot of people, the hardest thing is forgiving themselves. It is almost easier to forgive the other person than to have internal peace, without any shame. It’s allowing yourself to make mistakes and to grow and heal from those mistakes.
Joseph Winn: I think it’s important for people to swim in the deep end of the shadow. One of the things that makes me nuts about psychotherapy is how much we dissect who we are. So let me talk a bit about forgiveness. What are we forgiving? What is the nature of the injury? Was it a mistake? “I am so sorry I didn’t show up for you.” “I am so sorry I wasn’t there for you.” “No, I actually wanted to rape you.” “I actually wanted to set your house on fire. And not only did I want to do that, but it gave me great pleasure.” These are actual quotes from people I’ve worked with.
We live in this bizarre, religious spiritual context in which forgiveness and suffering is almost like joining Christ on the cross. And the fact of the matter is, it’s not that easy. One of the things that has always been amazing is to say is, “Do I get to hate?” Absolutely you get to hate. And in fact, I want to help you spit polish that so that you can be the best hater. But the problem is, if that’s the place you stay, then you have continued to allow your perpetrator to live rent free in your head.
I think we need to talk about the perpetrator’s intent. Is the perpetrator still alive? Does the perpetrator still take up residence and control what you do? It’s like going to the Guggenheim Museum and looking at a painting by Salvador Dali, and years later you look at it from a different perspective. Same incident, but different view. Each one of those developmental stages requires us to revisit, not necessarily with the same intensity. But to be able to say—this is even if I work through this now—a definitive series of paragraphs, maybe even a chapter in my life that I never asked for.
And when we talk about forgiveness, it becomes a narrative for the perpetrator if they’re able to do this, and again, there are levels of perpetration. Mistake, neglect, vengeance, and for the perpetrator to be able to step into that place means they have to do a profound amount of work. “What drove that? What did I do?” Because when a victim goes and speaks to the person who has injured them—at least in the work that I do—they have been encouraged to ask difficult questions. “Did you do this out of hate?” “Did you do this to scar me?” “Did you do this because there’s unfinished business with your dad, your mom?” “Did you do this to me because you hate that I’m queer?” “Did you do this to me because you hate that I’m this way?”
It’s like when you do restorative justice… you don’t necessarily make it easy, not because you want to beat the person down, but because you want the person who engaged in the harm to own what they did, so that they can begin the process of not doing it again. The other part is: The person who’s been injured has three primary responses: I accept your apology. I reject your apology. Or I can reflect on your apology to determine if it meets the criteria that I’ve set because there may be components of your apology I need to build on. And it’s also imperative that when the person is apologizing, you’re working with them to basically say, “Is this performative so that your tears then cover you from having to walk through what you’ve done? Or are you doing this because it’s coming from your heart, and you see that betrayal and harming someone is essentially a deceit?” And if the victim rejects the apology this is where we get into the discernment of the soul. There’s an old saying in a 12-step program: You can forgive someone, but they don’t have to be in your living room. And then one of the things that we need talk about is, is the relationship over or do I need a break? Or do I need a period of discernment that allows me, the person who has been injured, to step more fully into working from this place? Have I grieved and have I been witnessed? It’s not my job to take care of you if you’ve been injured, but it is my job to consider that if I love you and I hate you simultaneously, that there’s a relationship we have to address.
Lastly—and this is runs counter to my systemic and psychodynamic training—sometimes cut-offs are the most healing things in the world. “I cannot allow you into my life because your primary relationship is with substances (is with violence, is with exploitation, etc.) and to allow you into my life puts me in the position of fucking colluding with the sickness that you’re choosing not to look at, which then puts me in the position of going further down in my own self-worth.”
So, when we talk about forgiveness, I always think, “Damn, what are we talking about?” I think what we are trying to get at though is that there’s integrity, but the amount of courage and work it takes to even frame an apology, to even frame the idea of forgiveness is in and of itself work in which we must walk very carefully, because that is sacred ground.
Frank: I want to follow up with what both of you were saying, and I love what you’re bringing in Joe, about the two sides of the story: the apology and the forgiveness. I think we can forgive without engagement with the other person, but it’s harder. And in my personal experience, I was about 85 percent good. I spent my whole life holding on to that abuse, and it was just within the last year that I was able to forgive. This is a lifetime of holding on to something. And I was able to release and forgive probably 80 percent. This was my own work and didn’t have much to do with my perpetrator. So, there’s this capacity to forgive that doesn’t include the other.
And then this dynamic that you’re talking about around apology, forgiveness, interaction, choosing to engage, choosing to not engage…I think for that to fully happen, requires both parties to see their perpetrator-ness and victim-ness. Because the person who perpetrated, from an IFS perspective, is perpetrating in the service of protection. You perpetrate because you’re protecting vulnerability inside, and oftentimes it’s unconscious. Rarely is it known; mostly it’s dissociative. And for a perpetrator to be able to do a U-turn, and actually look at their vulnerability and look at what’s within them that they have not had connection to, is powerful in this dynamic of forgiveness, because apology comes from a different place. And then on the flip side, the person who was victimized receives the apology if it’s heartfelt, if it feels connected to vulnerability. The other person can also look at what they’ve done.
The dynamic between two people is complicated. And it requires a lot from both parties, which is why it’s so difficult, and doesn’t often happen. Both parties need to be willing to look at themselves in a different way and to see the impact they’ve had on another person—the capacity to step outside yourself to see what you’ve done. And to also see the vulnerability inside that you’ve never been able to look at, but that is rooted in your protective, extreme, reactive behavior.
Cristine: A big thing that shows up in my practice a lot is that someone will be getting in touch with all the harm from childhood and then they’ll say, “I want to take this and confront that person,” and that person might be 90 years old. So, what do I do with that? It’s a conundrum. Ten years ago, the trend was yeah, go sit that person down. But I’ve also seen those sessions go wrong. The perpetrator might say, “No, that never happened. I have no idea what you’re talking about.” And it creates this re-traumatization. You can keep going at this or you can completely separate and cut off and find healing and you can begin to grow internally within yourself and get strong.
Joseph: May I jump in?
Frank: Please do because I’m seeing your facial expression. You look confused and I’m usually very clear.
Joseph: In terms of this IFS idea that we’re coming from… There is this idea that someone perpetrated from a place of their own wound…but the data doesn’t support it. This goes back to Stanford’s work on Strong at the Broken Places, the original research, where folks said, “Oh, if you were abused, you go on to abuse.” All that work was done in prisons. It wasn’t done in the general population. I am not saying that if people make mistakes, we throw them away. That’s never helpful because we need to contextualize where they come from. But if we buy into the idea that somehow your perpetration comes from a place where you were victimized, it allows you to engage in such a way as to reenact the trauma via repetitive compulsion, and that just doesn’t fly. Because if that was the case, every person who has ever been exposed to murder, domestic violence, or childhood sexual abuse, would then go on to replicate that. And one of the things that we know, particularly for survivors, is that many of these people go on to be outstanding dads and moms. But the issue is they continue to see themselves as a source of potential contagion, or as a timebomb.
I grew up in a Sicilian Puerto Rican neighborhood. So yeah, that’s why you see my facial expression like, “What the fuck are you talking about?” And I speak to you as a colleague when I say I don’t know what you’re saying. And I believe that’s what the model holds. But I think it’s so important that when we use that language, that we’re not vicariously and via intragenic injury, putting out ideas that end up harming people who have been traumatized. Now, that’s not to say that some folks who have been traumatized don’t go on to harm. That’s a different piece of work.
I just read a report that came out last year where they looked at over 1,000 articles and less than 10 were based on empirical data. The rest were just theoretical models. So, we don’t know what works. Again, I need to go back to the intersubjective, interpersonal bridging that we do with couples, and to talk about how we are going to pull this relationship out of the wreckage. And how do we offer an opportunity to heal without allowing our preferred constructs to drive how someone else conceptualizes what they should do? That was the look on my face. I’m not confused. I’m very clear.
Frank: I love and appreciate that we have different views. That’s what it’s all about.
I think there is a range of responses when you’ve been victimized: Some people become quiet, shy, and shut down. Some people become depressed. Some become substance abusers. Some become perpetrators. Let me be very clear, this is not a justification. And it’s not saying that all victims go on to perpetrate. It’s saying we have temperament, we have environment, and different people have different responses. In my family, my brother is a hunter and kills any animal he possibly can. I became a trauma specialist. There is research that shows perpetrators have a high percentage of abuse. But that doesn’t mean everyone who is abused becomes a perpetrator. We have to hold that reality and range of responses.
There is a percentage of perpetrators who have no trauma history and are not acting out their trauma. Something else is going on. There’s another dimension to perpetration that’s not based on their history. We want to hold the range and not justify. For me, it’s about crossing the bridge—the unity between perpetrator and victim, not the Us/Them mentality that we’re all living in, which makes forgiveness so much more complicated. If we can hold the range in all of us, we would have a better capacity to work through the complicated issues of forgiveness. Our culture is not good about letting people have feelings, which is a big piece of what happens in forgiveness.
Joseph: I love this. Cristine, where are you coming from?
Cristine: Love it all. I have a Sicilian background too. In some ways, life is like a screenplay. There’s this story that’s been written and how do you take the story where I was victimized and turn it into a strength story? Fred Luskin calls it the hero’s story. I call it a strength story: “I’m going to redefine myself in this screenplay, because I didn’t sign up to play that role and to have that happen to me. And so, I’m going to frame it by pulling out the strengths that I got even going through this victimization. It may be that’s made me a more resilient person, more compassionate person.”
I’m trying to help clients tell their own story, write their own script, select their own costumes, choose their own role, and take that forward into their lives. That’s an important piece.
Joseph: I think love is a tough one. You know what I mean? And that’s what this is about. I’m not going to get into my trauma history. There are ugly parts and hysterical parts. That’s one of the things about being a trauma survivor: You find the sickest humor in the absurd.
I’ve worked in prisons and with sex offenders. I remember reading James Cantor’s work and he interviewed folks who were sexually abusing children; they were rapists. They said that they had also been sexually abused. And when he said, “Alright, can we do a lie detector test?” Eighty-seven percent said no. We have to take a look at what truly is a level of brokenness that makes someone dangerous. And what is the level of injury that makes someone thoughtless? And what is a level of wounded that makes someone beautifully human with the opportunity to regain what was taken? And goddamn, do I not have the answers.
And it’s like every case that we sit with, we’re dancing with that all the time. And there are times when I’m feeling the angel and devil. “You know what? Your car needs to be blown up with you in it. That will make things wonderful.” And then the angel part is like, “Everyone has dignity.” And then the devil part says, “No. That’s bullshit.” And then the angel part says, “No, you can evolve.” And the devil says: “I’m a knuckle dragon caveman, and I think I want to eat that Brontosaurus.” This is the work of stepping into our own free association. We can allow ourselves to have the complexity of that bubbling and roiling, to even feel it inside, and to sit with this person who makes us nauseous. I think it’s about stepping into the vulnerability of doing this work.
And I think the other part that’s hard—and I will just say this in the context of trauma and why I think feeling is so important, particularly for therapists—we hear shit that we won’t share with our loved ones because the idea of them having to carry this is terrifying. If we can’t get in touch with the dangling mobiles of our own complexity and own that as a part of being beautifully human, how are we going to help people facilitate that? And that’s what I mean about the feeling piece. This idea that: “I’m a paragon of mental health because I’m a therapist.” Are you kidding me? The work around forgiveness is hard. And I think the hardest work that we have to do with the clients is helping people learn to forgive and love themselves, because it’s only from that place that you can authentically start to track if are you a danger. Or are you truly willing to walk on this journey? And man, tell me if that’s not a psychological roll of the dice.
Frank: That’s beautifully said. I’m going to get a bit spiritual here, because I think part of what we’re talking about in forgiveness is our human experience. Whatever your spiritual belief is, we embody humaneness to learn, to grow, and evolve through adversity. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have overwhelming life experience in one way or another. We’re all given our adversity. And we’re given the opportunity to either grow, repeat, or repress. And we have this opportunity to do something with it. And for me, when I wrote my book, Transcending Trauma, trauma blocking love and connection kept showing up. Love and connection heal trauma, and I feel that is our life’s journey. We are dealt with overwhelming life experiences and the more we work through it, the more we heal it. Through love and connection, we are more able to be beautiful beings with all the complexity.
There is a life evolution for all of us. Some choose to take it, and some choose not to take it. That’s part of free will. We are given these choices and opportunities. And in my experience, when you release what doesn’t belong to you, when you’re able to really let it go, you can be in the world in a different way, even with those who have hurt you, because you’re no longer affected.
I’ll say in closing that I love this panel.
Joseph: This is great.
Cristine: What I love about my job is that there’s nothing that fazes me. I can hear everything. I can hear a client say, “My mom tried to try to murder me, but I still give her money. And I need help with that.” Like what you were saying Joe, I would never want anyone else to have to carry that. I have this gift that I can carry it and I am grateful for that. I’m not saying it’s easy, or that I don’t stress myself out doing this job, but I love that I get to deal with the big traumas and do psychodrama and EMDR. All of us who get to do this work….it’s a gift.
Joseph: God’s a funny lady. That’s the big thing to keep in mind. We evolve with the people that we work with. I love that we have had this conversation. I love that we danced together. I love that it got heated. This was so nice. Thank you both. What an honor to be here with you.
Frank: I feel the same way. Jeff, are there any questions from people?
Jeff: It’s been a wonderful panel. A great ballet of similarities and differences. And I think this is one of the highlight events of the conference. I appreciate the way in which the three of you have engaged so well and been so intelligent about this topic. We have a lot of crosstalk and a lot of appreciation being sent to you from attendees and we do have some questions. Here’s one: Does self-forgiveness come first and then forgiving others?
Joseph: Self-forgiveness is the hardest thing in the world. When we look at Gershen Kaufman’s shame scripts or what Bessel van der Kolk’s says about shame, or we look at James Cantor’s work, or Project Dunkelfeld out of Germany, we have to look at what forgiveness is and a big part of that is about being able to say, “I belong in the world.” Because one of the things that happens, if someone can’t forgive themselves, they will collapse under the weight of their own discomfort at the idea of causing someone else harm. Or they will solidify their hatred into justification for resentment, which then goes on to damage them, and that becomes passed on.
The idea of self-forgiveness is about being able to say, “I’m worthy. What happened to me was not my fault. I don’t have to own it. But I also recognize that it’s going to be a scar. It’s going to be a broken bone that on cloudy days is going to ache. And I need to be able to work with that, to recognize that this is a semantic memory that I can put into language and share with others. And if I can’t forgive myself, how do you expect me to forgive you?”
In some of these more complex situations, we need to look at the person who has been perpetrated against, because they may have a history of perpetrating against the person who’s perpetrated. So, this cycle of madness must get broken somewhere. It’s never as simple as there a good guy and there’s bad guy. But if you can’t forgive yourself, which is the ultimate form of compassion—compassione, to suffer with—how do you then step into the suffering of another?
Frank: I would like to respond to that because it’s a beautiful description. And it was a great question. Here’s what I’m holding around it personally, probably more personally than with my work with my clients. But both. This is why I started out by saying healing first, forgiveness second, because the trauma that we carry blocks access to our heart, blocks access to our ability to have compassion. There is the healing; the releasing what you what doesn’t belong to you. What was done to you is a very important first step before forgiving the other occurs. And that’s where you have greater capacity to see the complexity in this person, greater capacity to see who they are, and then be able to forgive them. Then you’re able to forgive yourself more easily. This has been the process for me. After forgiving my father, I can apologize in a very different way. Because I’ve been through releasing mine, forgiving you for yours. And then my interactions in life are different because I can hold the complexity of myself much more authentically. And I can apologize, coming from a cleaner, clearer, more complex place. Forgiving the other leads to self-forgiveness in a very different way. Now, it doesn’t only have to be that way. I just like that order.
Cristine: Being raised female it was inferred that you better have compassion for everyone but yourself. And I was raised to be a caretaker, to be the giver, to be loving and kind. I thought I had compassion for myself. But I didn’t realize that I didn’t until I felt it for the first time, which was in my 40s. It’s kind of late in the game, but when you feel it, you know. You have to go through the anger. I hadn’t gone through that. I didn’t do EMDR therapy until I was 43. There are so many other good therapies, but for some reason that I connected with that, but the holdout was forgiveness and compassion for myself.
Jeff: We’re talking about convoluted processes. There’s forgiveness of another and self-forgiveness. There’s also been a justified victim and gunny sacking your resentments and not doing something that’s effective.
Joseph: I am going sound so much like a social worker, but we live in a culture that teaches us to hate. We live in a culture and a system of capitalism that ranks our worth. The minute we come into the world, we’re already being told, this is what your worth is, this is where you belong. And the inner workings of the psyche don’t develop, the intersectional experiences and realities that our families move through, class, race, culture, gender, all this stuff.
One of the things that we need to look at—and I’m sure there are underpinnings of this for all of us—is that what makes forgiveness so hard, is we that don’t have models for it. Because we live in a culture that says you can eat your way through, buy your way through, fuck your way through, buy a guru alright, and the fact of the matter is, when we start seeing that the culture is the projection of what we value, the idea that we can love and forgive at all is in and of itself a testament to what our species can be.
This goes to what you’re saying Cristine, and my heart goes out to you because I’ve heard this story from women so many times. “Joe, I got diagnosed with stage three B cancer before I realized that the reason my guts were rotting was because I never addressed what was in there.” The fact of the matter is until we start to say that our connections and the majesty and magic of what it means to be human is more important than what we buy, or how we define ourselves in these competitive ways, we’re going to have a real hard time as therapists doing this. Because what we’re going to continue to do is pump out the fucking theory of the week and model of the week and we’re just going to hear the cash registers ring up and we’ve got all these manualized treatments as actual human connection. We have to a look at the systems we’re born into. We weren’t designed to live in this level of mishegoss. And yet people are like, “Oh, it’s wonderful.” No, it’s not wonderful. Mass shootings are now recognized as the number one killer of children in this country. What’s that about!? The sociology of the psychology related to the pathology that we’re talking about must be factored in.
Jeff: This has been a tremendous panel.
Joseph: People ain’t tired now. [laughter]
Jeff: Let’s see if there’s anything else that we want to address. Can any of you talk about how you facilitated a process of forgiveness or self-forgiveness?
Frank: Joe, you mentioned the whole systemic cultural piece and how that has such a huge impact on us and our inability to forgive or get along. I have a story about this. My brother-in-law, who is not of the same political persuasion as me and who was at the Capitol on a certain day and I wasn’t, and he was very proud of that, had never in our history together hugged me. My being gay had made him very uncomfortable. So, we were in Mississippi for my brother’s stepchild’s wedding. And as we sat down for breakfast, I thought, “Oh no, here we go. He is the other side and I got nervous. And we started talking together and I mentioned that my new book had just come out. He asked, “What’s it about?” I said, “It’s about my trauma history.” And he suddenly he started telling me about his trauma history. And then I started telling him about my trauma history. We had never talked about it before, and we joined in vulnerability. It was such a powerful moment of joining the other side in the commonality that we both experienced. And when we finished the breakfast, he said, “Hey Frank, would you sign your book for me?” And he got up and hugged me, and he didn’t really want that book. And ever since that moment, we have had a different relationship. We are now connected through our vulnerability, not through our differences. That is the charge for all of us here—part of where forgiveness comes in around a step of healing.
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