1. What is wrong with this person or circumstance?
2. What caused him/her to become this way?
3. How can his/her problem be fixed?
Since none of these questions are applicable to Radical Forgiveness, how can Radical Forgiveness become a therapeutic modality? The answer lies in the way it worked for Jill.
You might recall that in the beginning of the story with Jill, I acted out of an implicit agreement with her that she really did have a problem, that Jeff was the basic cause of it, and that the only way to react to it was by trying to find a solution. For quite some time I went down this traditional road with her. Only when I thought the time was right did I suggest a different (Radical Forgiveness) approach.
At that point, I had to make it very clear to her that I was shifting the conversation in an entirely different direction and using an alternate set of assumptions. More particularly, I was shifting to a new set of questions. These were:
1. What is perfect about what is occurring for her?
2. How is this perfection being revealed?
3. How can she shift her viewpoint in order to accept that there might be a certain perfection in her situation?
I can assure you that Jill’s original perception of the situation with Jeff, and of all prior situations with her previous husband, certainly did not agree with with the idea of everything being perfect. Indeed, she felt that what had occurred was self-evidently wrong or bad. Most people would have agreed with her.
But, as we saw, the healing occurred for her only when she realized that, in fact, there was no right or wrong in any of the situations, that she was clearly not being victimized by anyone, and that, far from being her enemy, Jeff was her healing angel. She slowly began to see how at every moment divine guidance was helping her to heal an earlier misperception and a related false belief system that for years had prevented her from expressing her true self. Each situation, including what was happening with Jeff, was, on that basis, a gift of grace.
This actually makes RFT less a therapy and more a process of education. The therapist—or coach, as I prefer to call him or her—acts not so much out of a desire to fix someone as to enlighten him or her. Radical Forgiveness is a spiritual philosophy that has practical application to people’s lives insofar as it gives them a spiritual perspective which they can apply, in the manner of self-help, to whatever problem or situation they are dealing with.
The divine plan is not fixed. At any point in the unfolding of one’s plan, one always has choice. Radical Forgiveness helps people to shift their viewpoint and make new choices based on their insights.
Jill’s story demonstrates how difficult it can be to make that shift in perception. Even with fairly obvious clues, it took a lot of discussion and processing of emotional pain before she became open to understanding a different interpretation. This was especially true of her former husband’s infidelity.
Imagine how tough it might be to sell the idea of Radical Forgiveness to a Holocaust victim or someone who has just been raped or otherwise violently abused. Indeed, much of RFT’s preliminary work involves creating a willingness to even look at the possibility of there being perfection in what happened. Even then, depending on the circumstances, developing such a receptivity can take time and almost always requires a great deal of emotional release work first. It is, nevertheless, possible. I can say this because I have seen people with horrendous stories make tremendous shifts in very short periods of time.
Yet it remains possible that some people may never get to the point where they become receptive; they simply may never get beyond their feelings of victimhood. On the other hand, those who do find themselves able to see, even for a moment, the perfection in their situation are empowered to release their feelings of victimhood and to become free. Jill was one of those.
Therein lies the power of this work, for, as we shall see in later chapters, releasing victimhood provides the key to health, personal power, and spiritual evolution. We have been addicted to the victim archetype for eons, and as we move into the Aquarian Age (the next two-thousand-year period of spiritual evolution), we must answer the call to let go of the past, release the victim archetype, and be more aware of life occurring in the moment.
There are some prerequisites, however, for doing so. First, the receptivity that Radical Forgiveness ultimately depends upon requires us to be open to seeing things from a spiritual standpoint. It references no particular religion and excludes none, but it does require at least a belief in a Higher Power or Higher Intelligence and the idea of a spiritual reality beyond our own physical world. A strictly atheistic viewpoint will not allow Radical Forgiveness to occur, nor RFT to work. We shall see that to make Radical Forgiveness a reality in our lives, we need to be comfortable with the idea that we can walk in both worlds simultaneously.
Having said that, Radical Forgiveness can be explained in nonthreatening terms and in such language as to honor all people’s religious beliefs. It can be explained in ways that provide a fit with any existing belief system, thus allowing people to listen with comfort. Besides that, a substantial part of Radical Forgiveness Therapy does not depend upon mystical or esoteric ideas for its validity. Repression, denial, and projection all are concepts firmly rooted in psychological theory, and can be explained fully in scientific terms.
Mixing traditional therapy with RFT will not work. I cannot stress this enough. The questions and the assumptions underlying the two forms are just too different. Any therapist who adds RFT to his or her tool kit must first be aware of the distinctions between RFT and traditional therapy and be able to clearly differentiate them to a client, and, second, must work hard to keep them separated.
In the main, Radical Forgiveness Therapy is for people who are not in the least mentally sick—just needing some help in dealing with the issues of daily life. However, if a person has profound issues and deeply repressed pain with complex defense mechanisms in place, he or she may be referred to a qualified psychotherapist with a thorough understanding of how to apply RFT beneficially.
The technology of Radical Forgiveness is deceptively simple and yet amazingly effective as therapy for the soul—for individuals, groups, races, even countries. For example, I have held workshops for Jews and other persecuted people who hold the pain of their race or group, and I have witnessed amazing shifts in their consciousness. They have been able to let go of the collective pain, and in so doing, I believe, help heal the collective consciousness of that group going back many generations.
6
The Mechanisms of the Ego
In matters of a spiritual nature, it is seldom long before the conversation turns to the ego. Radical Forgiveness is no exception, since the ego does seem to play a central role. So, what constitutes the ego and what role does it play in Radical Forgiveness? I think there are at least two ways of answering this question. The first casts the ego as our enemy, while the second sees it as our friend.
The ego-as-enemy viewpoint makes the ego responsible for keeping us separated from Source out of self-interest for its own survival. Consequently, the ego is our spiritual enemy and we are at war with it. Many spiritual disciplines take this as their central idea and demand that the ego must be dropped or transcended as a prerequisite for spiritual growth. The ego-as-friend model, in contrast, sees the ego as being the part of our own soul that acts as our loving guide for our human experience.
I prefer to think that there is truth in both of these ideas even though, at first blush, they seem to be incompatible. Let me explain each in turn as I have come to understand them for myself, so you can make up your own mind.
1. THE EGO AS THE ENEMY
In this model, the ego is said to exist as a deeply held set of beliefs about who we are in relationship to Spirit, having been formed when we experimented with the thought of separation from the Divine Source. In fact, we could say that the ego is the belief that separation actually occurred.
At the moment of separation, so
the story goes, the ego caused us to believe that God became very angry about our experiment. This immediately created enormous guilt within us. The ego then elaborated on its story by telling us that God would get even and punish us severely for our great sin. So great were the guilt and terror created in us by the belief that this story was true that we had no choice but to repress these emotions deep in our unconscious minds. This spared us from conscious awareness of them.
This tactic worked quite well, yet we retained a great fear that the feelings might rise again. To remedy this problem, the ego developed a new belief—that the guilt lay with someone else rather than within ourselves. In other words, we began projecting our guilt onto other people so we could be rid of it entirely. Others became our scapegoats. Then, to ensure that the guilt stayed with them, we became angry with them and continuously attacked them. (For more detailed information on denial and projection, see Chapter 7.) (FIGURE 5)
FIGURE 5: The Structure of the Ego
Herein lies the origin of the victim archetype and the human race’s continual need to attack and to defend against one another. After attacking the people onto whom we project our guilt, we fear they will attack us in return. So we create strong defenses to protect ourselves and what we see as our complete innocence. At some level we know we are guilty, so the more we defend against the attack, the more we reinforce our guilt. Thus we must constantly find people to hate, to criticize, to judge, to attack, and to make wrong simply so that we can feel better about ourselves. This dynamic constantly reinforces the ego’s belief system, and in this manner, the ego ensures its own survival.
Using this behavior pattern as a reference, we can see why, throughout history, human beings have had such a high investment in their anger and such a great need to break the world into victims and persecutors, villains and heroes, victors and vanquished, winners and losers.
Furthermore, the perception we have of a we/they world reflects our own internal split between the ego on the one hand—which is the belief in separation, fear, punishment, and death—and Spirit on the other, which is the knowledge of love and eternal life. We project this division onto the physical world by always seeing the enemy as “out there” rather than within ourselves.
Although all belief systems quickly become resistant to change, the ego is no ordinary belief system in this regard. It is extremely resistant. It holds incredible power in our unconscious mind and carries an enormous bloc of votes when it comes to making decisions about who we think we are. This belief system is so very powerful that it appears to be an entity in its own right—and we have named it the ego.
We have become trapped in the belief in separation to such a degree that it has become our reality. We have been living the myth of separation for eons, making real the idea that we chose separation by naming it Original Sin. In actuality, no separation ever occurred. We are as much a part of God as we always were. We are spiritual beings having a human experience, remember? Consequently, there is no such thing as Original Sin in this sense.
Jesus purportedly gave us this revelation—the truth about our illusion—in A Course in Miracles, a three-volume work by Jesus channeled through a lady named Helen Schucman, the purpose of which was to show us the error of the ego’s way and to teach us that the way home to God is through forgiveness. (Interestingly, Helen was a very reluctant channel and never believed a word of what she channeled.) Contrary to some prevailing Christian theology, many biblical scholars find these very same ideas expressed in the Bible.
Anyway, contrary to what the ego would have us believe, the truth is that we actually come to the physical plane with God’s blessing and His unconditional love. God always will honor our free will and our choices at the highest level and will offer no divine intervention—unless asked.
Fortunately, Radical Forgiveness provides the perfect tool for asking for such assistance because, in the process, you demonstrate to God that you have seen beyond the ego and glimpsed the truth that only love is real and that we are all one with God, including those who seemed at first to be our enemy.
2. THE EGO AS LOVING GUIDE
This other, friendlier way of looking at the ego—which I find equally tenable and, to be truthful, more attractive—holds that, far from being our enemy, the ego is a part of our soul that acts as our guide in the World of Humanity. Its role is to provide opportunities in our lifetime that will fully test our ability to fulfill the mission we carefully planned before we incarnated, the primary purpose of which was to experience a certain agreed-upon amount of separation. When we have reached the degree of separation we signed up for, the process of awakening can begin. That’s when we are likely to find Radical Forgiveness.
(By the way, I am certain in my own mind that simply by virtue of your having picked up this book and gotten this far into it without throwing it at the wall, you have arrived at the awakening point or are some distance beyond it. This doesn’t mean that you are fully awake all the time—very few people are—but that you are at least beginning to see what’s real and remembering the truth.)
(For a full and detailed explanation of this whole idea of our volunteering to experience the pain of separation—and then, when we have reached the amount we contracted to have, beginning the awakening process—see my book Getting to Heaven on a Harley.)
The only value in having the human experience is precisely to live through such things as the ego provides: belief in duality, separateness, pain and suffering, guilt and fear. Our ego gives us the opportunity to embody these feelings by creating experiences like abandonment, betrayal, abuse, rejection, divorce, physical illness, disability, and so on. (FIGURE 6)
FIGURE 6: The Soul’s Journey
Our ego, then, in this model, is the guide that will take us on all these exciting journeys into separation, pain, and discomfort. It does so not out of malice or for the sake of its own survival, as many spiritual teachers maintain, but because it loves us and knows that we need these experiences for our spiritual growth.
The Higher Self is our other guide, who waits patiently while we journey into illusion with the ego until we are ready to awaken. It is through the gentle whispers of the Higher Self that we wake up, bit by bit, until we finally remember who we are. It is often at this point in our lives that we shift our direction and focus less on material things and become more interested in being of service.
I invite you to consider both definitions to be true at the same time. My sense is that the first one is true in terms of explaining our initial descent into physical form and how we came to see that event (falsely) in retrospect, but that the second is grounded in a deeper truth—namely, that we need the ego to help us to fulfill our mission.
Maybe they are two different things; I don’t know. It really doesn’t matter. Each definition helps me to make sense of this human experience in terms of spiritual truth, and I trust they will do the same for you.
7
Hideouts and Scapegoats
Understanding the role the twin psychological ego-defense mechanisms of repression and projection play in how we heal relationships is essential to the concept of Radical Forgiveness. A closer inspection of the mechanisms of each might be helpful.
Operating together, repression and projection wreak havoc upon our relationships and our lives. Together they create and maintain the victim archetype. Understanding how they work enables us to counteract the ego’s use of them to keep us separated from each other and from God.
REPRESSION
Operating as a normal psychological defense mechanism, repression occurs when feelings like terror, guilt, or rage become so overwhelming that the mind simply blocks them entirely from conscious awareness. This makes repression a powerful mental safety device, for without this blocking mechanism we could easily go mad. It works so effectively that absolutely no memory of the feelings, or the event which precipitated them, remains. It can be completely blocked from conscious awareness for days, weeks, or years—sometimes even for t
he rest of the lifetime.
Suppression
Repression should not be confused with this other similar but less severe defense mechanism. Suppression occurs when we consciously refuse to acknowledge emotions we do not want to feel or express. Though we know they are there, we try to push, or stuff, them away and refuse to deal with them. But their continued denial for long periods of time may lead to a numbness equivalent to their becoming repressed.
Repressed Guilt and Shame
Guilt and shame are not the same. We feel guilt when we feel we have done wrong. Shame takes us to a much deeper level of guilt where we have a sense of actually being wrong. With shame, the ego makes us feel inherently wrong at the very core of our being—a feeling that most reliably separates us from everyone and everything. Such shame can be so strong that we have no choice but to repress it: we absolutely could not handle it otherwise.
Shame Blocks Energy
Young children can be easily shamed, say, when they wet themselves, get an erection, show anger, act shy, and so on. While these may be natural occurrences, the children nevertheless feel shame, and the cumulative effects of this feeling can become overwhelming. Consequently, they repress their shame, but it remains in the unconscious mind as well as in the body. It becomes locked into their system at the cellular level and creates an energy block in the body. If left unresolved for too long, this block gives rise to either mental/emotional problems, physical problems, or both. Repressed emotion is now recognized by many researchers to be one of the principal causes of cancer.
Repressed Feelings
A large trauma, such as the death of a parent, can cause a child to repress emotion. Likewise, something as seemingly insignificant as a casual critical remark interpreted as meaningful, or an event incorrectly assumed to be the child’s fault, can cause emotions to be repressed. For example, children nearly always interpret a divorce as their fault. Research suggests that children remember conversations their parents had while they were still in the womb, so a discussion about an unwanted pregnancy before birth can lead to a child’s feeling unwanted and afraid of being abandoned. Such feelings would be repressed even at such an early time in the child’s life.
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