Transform Yourself Through Radical Forgiveness By Tameka Lowe
After a confirmation with a friend, a woman decided to do attend a forgiveness workshop. pose. When the instructor greeted her by saying “Welcome to the Radical Forgiveness Workshop,” the woman asked “what can possibly be radical about forgiveness?” Radical forgiveness is a shift from the mindset of being a victim because of the obligation to forgive—to feeling so empowered that the person experiencing the hurt or betrayal is transformed.
According to Colin Tipping, author of Radical Forgiveness, we tend “to look at our experiences through the eyes of a victim: to judge, lay blame, accuse, and seek revenge.” When we forgive, we usually let bygones be bygones, but we still hold on to pain and suffering. As many say: “I can forgive but I won’t forget.” If we “forgive purely as an intellectual exercise, old emotions still have the potential to arise, and the feelings that we did not release from past experiences still have the ability to impact us physical- ly and spiritually. To break free from such a powerful archetype, we must replace it with something radically different—something so compelling and spiritually liberating that it magnetizes us away from victimhood.” Rad- ical forgiveness moves us “beyond the dra- ma of our lives” so that “we will understand the meaning of our suffering and be able to transform it immediately.”
Tipping urges us to fully release the experiences we must forgive through five “radical” stages.
First, we have to Tell the Story. This re- quires us to have someone willingly listen to our story. We own our story in its fullness from the point of view of being a victim.
Second, we have to Feel the Feelings. We have to feel the emotions that arise be- cause we cannot heal what we do not allow ourselves to feel. It is only when we give our- selves permission to access our pain that our healing begins. Third, we have to Collapse the Story. This is a radical step for most of us. We re- move the power of our story, the story where we played the victim. When we process our stories, we often “see that these stories are, for the most part, untrue and serve only to keep us stuck in the victim archetype.” This step empowers us to choose to stop giving our stories our “vital life force energy. Once we decide to retrieve our energy, we take back our power, and the stories wither and die.” Fourth, we Re-Frame the Story. We give up the need to figure it out and surrender to the idea that the gift is contained in the situation, whether we know it or not. “It is in that act of surrender that the real lesson of love is learned and the gift received. This is also the step of transformation, for as we begin to become open to seeing the divine perfection in what happened, our victim stories, which were once vehicles for anger, bitterness, and resentment, become transformed into stories of appreciation, gratitude, and loving accep- tance.” This empowers us to consider the possibility that everything that happens helps foster our growth.
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