Apologies and Forgiveness

Do you have a difficult time apologizing? Is there someone you wish you could forgive?

Apologies and forgiveness are two of the pillars and cornerstones of grief recovery. And, the beautiful thing about both, is they don't require us to confront anyone, in person. And, even if the person is deceased, we are still able to process the feelings around apologies and forgiveness.

In this episode, you will learn: 

• What an apology is.
• How "forgiveness" and "condoning" differ.
• What to do if you're a victim of abuse.
• What to do if the "offender" is living?

and more...

Mentioned in the episode:

• My Book
• Grief Recovery

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If you or anyone you know is struggling with grief due to any of the 40+ losses, there are free resources available HERE.

If you'd like to share your grieving voice on the show or want to share your thoughts about an episode, please send an email to victoria@theunleashedheart.com.

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Transcript

Victoria Volk: 0:08

This is Victoria of the unleashedheart.com and you're listening to grieving voices, a podcast for hurting hearts who desire to be heard. Or anyone who wants to learn how to better support loved ones experiencing loss. As a 30 plus year griever and advanced grief recovery methods specialist, I know how badly the conversation around grief needs to change. Through this podcast, I aim to educate gravers and non gravers alike, spread hope and inspire compassion toward those hurting. Lastly, by providing my heart with yours. In this platform, grievers had the opportunity to share their wisdom and stories of loss and resiliency. How about we talk about grief, like we talked about the weather? Let's get started. Hey, hey, hey, thank you so, so much for listening today. This is already Episode 10 apologies and forgiveness. And if this is your first time listening, this is a heavy topic because for many, especially victims, forgiveness can be very difficult. And also apologies too because when you're a victim, what do you need to apologize for? Right? So I'll be talking more about that in this episode. But first, just a little recap of the past 10 weeks, that's been quite the experience. When I first launched this podcast, I had several episodes in the bank, I think like four or five. But as life happens, things kind of take over and time becomes a little bit more precious. And it can be difficult for me some weeks to get this content out. But it's so so important to me that I share this knowledge with you the things that I've learned about grief. Because I was stuck for so long, and for so many years in my grief. And it is all of this misinformation and the things that we grew up believing and thinking about grief and how to process it and how to address it and how to help others through it. That has just created a lot of misinformation a lot of added on suffering, really, because it's not addressed effectively. We're not taught how to effectively process what it is we're feeling. And a huge component of the work that I do in grief recovery is about apologies and forgiveness. And initially this week was going to be about intangible losses, which are the kind of loss that it's not the death of a loved one or divorce or it's like the secondary losses, it's those things that not specific to a person, although it can be a ripple loss due to the loss of a loved one. So for example, let's say you get a divorce Well, it's the loss of maybe the life that you had, the home that you had, the support the financial support that you had, there's a lot of other loss that happens in divorce and death of a spouse or death of a loved one, things like that. In the case of being a victim or being victimized, we can have a loss of trust, a loss of self worth, loss of faith. That's a big one. So that's initially what I was going to talk about. But there was a conversation with some girlfriends recently and it kind of sparked this. I got a little revved up about it actually, in talking about, we often talk about the story of what it is that happened to us. And which is easy to do, right? Someone asks, you tell the story, but rarely do people ask how it made you feel. And if someone were to ask you well, how did that make you feel? That's probably when you would get the emotions coming up for you. That's when you might realize, maybe I haven't processed everything fully. Maybe there's more to dig into here. Maybe there's something residual that still lying dormant. Things can provoke us. That might happen and provoke us and cause us to reflect on a certain time in the past or when we are victimized or experienced trauma. And that's an indicator, if especially if you have a physical response to that it's that muscle memory. But there's emotion tied to that, right? There's going to be emotional residual residue that it makes sense, emotional residue. I'll say that emotional residue from that experience, unless we've learned how to effectively process it and take an actual action with the apologies and forgiveness that I'm going to talk about today. So when we apologize, we're actually apologizing for anything that we did or did not do that may have hurt someone else. So let's say when we steal something from someone else, we apologize. This was for something that we did. When we don't do something we promise we would we apologize for something we did not do. When it comes to apologies, the focus is on ourselves and how we perceive our own actions or inactions. Grief recovery helps you to work through the apologies like these, for a relationship in which you are incomplete. And the beautiful thing about it is that you don't have to apologize in person. In fact, some should remain private and indirect. For example, if you cause someone physical harm or emotional damage, what if they don't accept your apology? You haven't helped the relationship, there aren't any mended fences and what more likely the person may not accept it. And that's where forgiveness is often intertwined with apologies in this manner. The other person hasn't worked through forgiveness and they likely wouldn't accept an apology. That's why it's so important that we work through and process apologies and forgiveness, for the most part privately. Now, I'm not saying never apologize when you know you're in the wrong, just don't hang your hat on it being accepted and acknowledged that it's not their responsibility to absolve you of your feelings. And this is where we must forgive ourselves, which is also an inside job. So what if, though you are a victim, whether you survived a physical assault, or emotional psychological abuse, many people develop lifelong relationships with their pain and act like victims. I personally experienced this. And that's why I have a whole chapter devoted to victim mindset in my book, this became one of the biggest veils of my potential in my life. And what do I mean by that the biggest veil? Because I like to think of grief as a veil, a veil that covers our eyes to ourselves and how we see ourselves and how we see the world. So when things didn't go right in my life, or someone let me down, or took advantage of me in various ways. Yet again, I didn't see that my default and my automatic response to my life circumstances was to slip into being the victim. Being a child that is physically and emotionally taken advantage of lays the foundation of a learned behavior, to be in survival mode, fearful of the future, an inability to live in the present, and a skewed sense of what nurturing love and compassion really look like. Therefore, victims have a really hard time apologizing. How and Why would I need to apologize to the person who molested me as a child? How and Why would I need to apologize to the person who sexually assaulted me? These are big questions and not easy ones to process. However, I have learned that even the slightest transgression should be given a voice. We humans have a desire to be right. And it's this need to be right rather than happy that causes us additional suffering. We can be right or we can be happy. And often the hardest apology to give is the one that needs to be given. You may be wondering then if I apologize, isn't that absolving someone of their responsibility and what happened? No, it is merely owning your role in the relationship, not necessarily the incident. But no matter how slight it is, it's important to give it a voice. To really move beyond the emotional suffering of being a victim. Forgiveness becomes our friend. Forgiveness is giving up the hope of a different or better yesterday. And being a victim, forgiveness does not equal condoning. These two terms are misunderstood in our society and that the belief is that if we forgive, we are condoning the behavior. Webster's dictionary though defines forgive as to cease to feel resentment against an offender. Whereas condone means to treat as trivial, harmless, or of no importance. If these two words meant the same thing, we would never be able to forgive. This implies we're trivializing horrible events. And as a victim, you would never do that. However, if we talk about forgiveness, now that's on the path to healing. When we get stuck on the story of past traumatic or victimizing events, it limits us and restricts our ability to participate fully in our life. And I can personally attest to this, especially once I had my three kids for sure. Forgiveness is the completion of the pain. The opposite is the retention of the resentment. When we forgive, we are acquiring our own sense of well being. Forgiveness is an action, it's not a feeling. And you cannot feel forgiveness until you do it. Action first, feeling follows. Forgiveness is giving up the resentment you hold against another person. So what if the other person you need to forgive is living? That's another beautiful thing about grief recovery. You do this privately without ever saying one word to the other person. We never want to forgive someone directly to their face. Because again, what if the person on the receiving end didn't realize or believe that they did anything wrong? You're your back in emotional jail, and the other person's defenses go way up. Finally, what about asking for forgiveness? When you do this, it's manipulating you are asking someone to do something you need to do for yourself. If you are asking for forgiveness, what you're really needing and trying to do is apologize. Don't ask for forgiveness instead make an apology. And through grief recovery, you can address apologies and forgiveness and so much more for any relationship to someone living or deceased. Through taking empowering action for your well being. Well, there you have the information I needed to share today on apologies and forgiveness. And I really feel like I've kind of flew through it. But take your time, listen through it again if you need to, and reflect on your life on where it is that you need to apologize or forgive where you're waiting for an apology that you may never get and forgiving that person for the apology, you will never receive. Resentment is a poison that we take hoping the other person dies. And the apologies and the forgiveness components were probably the most significant portions of the grief recovery method for me personally, because I was a victim of sexual assault, sexual abuse. And there was a lot that I needed to process through too many relationships with people living in my life that required me to wrap my head around and really fully embrace forgiveness and apologies and not for the other person, but rather for myself for me for my well being So this is very empowering work. And if you want to learn more I encourage you to reach out if you have a question about apologies or forgiveness, don't hesitate to email me victoria@theunleashedheart.com or you can DM me, I'm on Facebook, I'm Victoria The Unleashed Heart and in Instagram@theunleashedheart messaged me there, wherever you feel comfortable to reach out. If this was helpful to you, if you found this informative, if it resonated with you, I would love love, love for you to share it with someone who needs to hear this message today. If you also found it helpful, I would love a review, five star if it was five stars for you. But if you really learn something share that feedback. I would love to hear what it is that you took away from this episode today. Either privately or leave the review on iTunes, if you will, that helps me to know what content what I'm sharing is helpful. If it's resonating. I would like to know what it is you're wondering about when it comes to grief. What what it is you're needing right now. I just know that there's so much going on in our world today. And I just want you to know that there's hope. There's hope. Because we have the power within us to process and work through to heal. We have that you have that within you. So thank you so much for listening today. I will see you next week. Hopefully, back here. I'm not sure I think you know I have it written down that I was going to talk about fear next week. But I'm gonna see where we're at leads where the week takes me because this week wasn't going to be like I said about apologies and forgiveness. But yeah, and likewise, if you have an idea for the podcast, please share it. So thank you so much. Have a beautiful day. Much love. From my heart to yours. Thank you for listening. If you liked this episode, please share it because sharing is caring. And until next time, give and share compassion by being a heart with yours. And if you're hurting know that what you're feeling is normal and natural. Much love my friend.