We’re recording live from Solo Con 2024. All this month we are talking about forgiveness, and today we are talking about the benefits of self-forgiveness. We have two amazing people with us, Amber and Marissa. 

We have all made mistakes, every single one of us. Yet when it comes to forgiveness, it feels much easier to forgive other people than to forgive ourselves, which leaves us feeling stuck and unable to move forward in our healing. We’re going to cover this in three main points. Number one, we’re going to talk about the challenges of forgiving ourselves. Two, we’re going to talk about the four Rs of self-forgiveness. And finally, we’re going to talk about what self-forgiveness can do. 

Why do you think it is so hard to forgive ourselves?

I’ve had to have a lot of practice forgiving myself and some of our audience knows part of my story. The challenge of forgiving self, for me, was really dwelling on it. I felt so much regret. Part of my story with moments in my parenting journey—the “I’m not proud of” pages I don’t want to read aloud, the moments of anger acting out and lashing at my kids. For a lot of years, it kept me awake at night. I felt so sad and guilty and so regretful. Rumination and negative self-talk patterns were something that I continued to wrestle with, and that can become a really toxic, unhealthy downward spiral for me. It was important for me to acknowledge what had happened, to feel the sadness and the weight of it, because it then prompted me toward the path of self-forgiveness and forgiveness from my kids.

I built an identity of trying to be everything that I could be to live up to the expectations of myself. And anytime I failed anywhere, it was proof that I was never going to be all that I wanted to be. It’s this confirmation bias: If there’s something that I need to be forgiven for, it proves that the identity I built up of wanting to be somebody who was dependable, reliable, etc. was now shaken. And I had proof that I could never be. With my kids, there are things (or consequences of things) that I now see play out in the lives of my children and in unhealthy patterns and behaviors they do every day. And so I am watching them suffer the consequences for my own behavior. And it is really, really hard to look at them and forgive myself because I know they are the ones who are suffering.

I hear a lot of shame in that, and I feel it really deep to my core because I carry a lot of toxic shame. I’m hearing that we all share in this regard. What keeps me stuck is fear I’m going to make the same mistake again. It’s almost like I don’t trust myself to move forward and try again, forgive myself for what happened in the past. And it almost feels like at times, I don’t know what to do differently the next time. And so it takes a lot of intentionality for me to look at a situation and say, “Oh my gosh, I don’t want to do that again.” But there’s a fine balance of not getting stuck in that and not moving forward at all.

I’ve had a lot of time to reflect and analyze my mistakes that contributed to the demise of my marriage. And I feel like I’ve done a good job of forgiving myself in some of those areas. But what gets in the way for me now is—although I’m a different person, a more integrated person, a more mature person, more spiritually minded—the tendencies are still there. I’m a very ambitious person. I love building things. When I started my record company, it was so consuming and I threw everything I had into it—at the demise of me working on the foundation of my family. I’ve reconciled and self-forgiven and I’ve made amends. But I’ve built two other companies since then—iShine and now Solo, and I see the same tendencies. I think we can get stuck by going, “I’m still the same person and these tendencies are still there.” And so forgiving doesn’t always mean that it’s gone forever; the infraction is gone, but the tendencies are still there. And it just keeps me going, That was just a fake confession. That was a fake absolving of my old issues. And that can keep me from really stepping into self-forgiveness because I just feel like I’m repeating the same thing. It’s confirmation bias of “I am the same person. I thought I changed. I thought I was different. But I really am not.” And of course, the enemy has a heyday with that: “Yeah, you didn’t mean you were sorry because here you are doing it again.”  When we have tendencies that are built into who we are, those tendencies can come up. But hopefully now I’m able to go, “Okay, I don’t want to make the same mistake.” But I sometimes beat myself up over the tendency to step in the same direction. 

Forgiving myself didn’t mean that I don’t feel deep sadness at what had taken place. There still are feelings where I think, “Gosh, I wish I could have done that better. I wish that hadn’t happened. I wish I hadn’t done that.” That regret is still a sense of my felt experience with my kids. They’ve been gracious to forgive me but I still feel some of that pain of “Ouch, I wish I hadn’t done that.” 

We’re talking a lot about toxic shame. We’re completely aware of the wrongdoing we’ve done, and it almost haunts us daily because it’s hard to let go at times. But what about the people who are either blissfully unaware of the ways that they’ve hurt other people, whether it’s your kids, your ex, or other people in your life? You’re blissfully unaware or unwilling to look at the ways that your actions hurt other people, and that can keep us from forgiving ourselves. You’re another step backwards where you haven’t come into awareness of it (or have too much pride) and can’t step forward and allow others to forgive you and forgive yourself. 

What are the four Rs of self forgiveness?

The first one is Responsibility: I have to actually own what I’ve done. If I’m not even confessing that I messed up, I don’t know I need to start forgiving myself. If I’m not really willing to forgive myself, I may be harboring feelings against myself and what I’ve done that I’m not even acknowledging. So the first thing is to really take inventory, look objectively, ask What is it that’s probably bothering me about this situation? and start trying to own what I did, what I’ve done, what I am still doing. Where do I own those pieces? I think there’s also an important place here where I’m not taking on more than is mine. When my husband passed away, I could have very immediately said, “It’s all my fault” and gone into a very, very dangerous place. But I did not kill him, therefore, it was not my fault. Were there behaviors and unhealthy relationships that we had? Were there potentially triggers? Sure. But if I walk down that road and suddenly take responsibility for his death, I am going to end up opening a can of worms for myself that will be a lot harder to climb out of. So there’s a fine line between owning what I did do and not owning what I did not do. 

I struggle with blaming other people first. I definitely look outward before I look inward, and I’ve noticed that about myself and I try to not do that. And also, do I take on responsibility for things that don’t belong to me; I did it all throughout the marriage. I’d probably save a lot of money in counseling if I could have understood that faster. (It’s not my monkey, not my circus.) But I took a lot of responsibility for things and I would just sit there and wrestle with it, whether it was from my childhood or things that happened in the marriage. If I had just done this better, then this wouldn’t have happened. He wouldn’t have reacted that way. That sort of thing. And that’s not true. He has agency over his own choices too. And so I’ve had to learn—and am still learning how to allow people to hold their responsibility. And even if they aren’t willing to, it doesn’t mean that I have to own it. 

One verse that has really set me free is Proverbs 17:15, and it says, “Acquitting the guilty and condemning the innocent, the Lord detests them both.” And I had to look at that first for me—that I wasn’t off the hook for the things that I had done wrong. Remorse is the second R. And it’s an awareness that we’ve done something wrong that’s caused harm to ourselves or someone else. That awareness helps us know we violated our value system, a deeply-held belief about how to live and move in the world. Guilt is positive when it leads us to seek forgiveness from God, from whoever we’ve harmed, and then from ourselves. Guilt can be a really positive thing when it’s applied appropriately. But false guilt (when we take it on for someone else) is” condemning the innocent” part as well. It’s really powerful to let feelings of guilt and even shame help you notice, “I’ve done something here that I want to make right” and we can use it as a springboard for positive change.

These first two Rs, Responsibility and Remorse, play so hand-in-hand on the responsibility side, Those of us who have gone through divorce know you go through a heightened state of blame. If you’re in any kind of litigation, you are blaming, blaming, blaming; the job is to show who’s at fault. If we’re not careful, we can stay in that blame game. And that doesn’t mean that it’s not appropriate—there are things that go wrong—but it can keep us from looking inward and going, “Okay, what am I responsible for?” which leads me to the second R. Taking inventory of what I’m responsible for has to go spiritual rather than just logical. I have spent time in prayer going, “God, I need you to show me what I have done. What am I responsible for? And what do I need to be remorseful for, not only against others, but against you? What is getting in the way of me connecting with you?” When I just apply my logical brain, that’s based on my reason, and I don’t necessarily trust my reason all the time. In order to get to the place of remorse, I need to know what I am actually responsible for. It can really equip us and free us because instead of trying to put all of our energy into hiding from what we’ve done, we suddenly are free to recognize what we’ve done and feel the feelings about it. And instead of saying, “These feelings are bad, I need to just avoid them and shush them away,” those feelings may be telling us something. There is value in sitting in the midst of uncomfortable, miserable feelings that can actually help us progress on that journey, which leads us to the third R, which is Restoration. 

For me, this is about making amends. If you’ve listened to this podcast for a while, I’ve talked about how contentious the divorce was, and it was probably three or four years after the divorce was final. It was eight years of three or four times a year in court fighting custody. It was exhausting. But I couldn’t move on until I owned my stuff. I didn’t feel free to move into any other relationship. I didn’t feel free to even entertain that until I could clean this all out. And so I went through a season just kind of focusing on back to this remorse piece of “What are those things that I really need to take responsibility for?” I literally wrote them down and wrote a four-page letter to my ex. I itemized the things I felt regret, remorse, and I took responsibility: “This is what I contributed to.” Nothing about the letter was “But you did X.” The attempt for me was to make amends—not to bring us back together, but to own my trash on my side of the street. And so I wrote this letter and when there was a visitation one day, I took the letter and I gave it to her. I never heard anything back, but there was freedom in handing that letter to her.

It was an open invitation. I said, “If you want to talk about these things, I’m happy to, but I have to apologize for these things that I’ve done.” And she did not reciprocate at all, which was kind of expected. I didn’t think that she would, but there was so much freedom in working towards restoration. When you think about restoration, it’s not just about restoring a relationship between another person, it’s restoring yourself. It’s finding restoration within yourself. And I don’t know that can happen without starting with Responsibility, going into Remorse and then going into seeking Restoration. 

A big part of the restoration process for me was in communing with God and being reminded of his deep love for me. That allowed me to enter into responsibility and remorse. I don’t know I could have done that if I felt like the buck all stopped with me. I might’ve thought, “It’s over for me. I’m done. All of these mistakes against me in my account, I’m bankrupt.” And in fact, I did feel that way. But his great love for me reminded me that I could approach his throne of grace with confidence to find mercy and help in my time of need. And I needed it. It was so painful parenting alone and discovering my son’s diagnosis with autism and recognizing that his behavior hadn’t been defiance; it had been a result of his sensory issues. Part of my restoration was seeking God’s love and being reminded of his deep forgiveness and that he doesn’t treat us as our sins deserve (Psalm 103:10). “He does not repay us according to our inequities.” And part of my restoration was to the truth of God’s heart. And then from that place of deep love, being able to restore the relationship with my kids, going to them and saying, “Man, I wish I could do it differently. Will you forgive me?” and being specific about it. Part of that restoration was not glossing over it and calling it anything other than what it was. I shouldn’t have yelled, I shouldn’t have this. It’s not just saying, Hey, I know I blew it. I’m sorry.

And then part of that restoration was continuing to show them through changed behavior. I’m different now, and the reason why is because I love you and I recognize the mistakes I’ve made. Thank goodness for the grace they offered me and continue to. And for years after, I would cry sometimes and say, “Man, I’m sad about that time.” And my kids would repeatedly say, and still do, “Mom, we don’t even think about that anymore. It’s different now. You’re different now.” It was an “O, hallelujah” when my son said to me, “Mom, you’ve improved so much” because that means I needed to. But it was an ouch. And it was like, “Hallelujah.” And that was part of the restoration. 

Restoration is the catalyst for self-forgiveness in a sense. It starts with responsibility and remorse, but the action of restoration and trying to build a bridge and amends is where I started feeling like I could actually let myself go own it. I regret it and I’ve done something about it. That’s what restoration meant to me, regardless of reciprocation.

But what do you do when you’ve gotten to the point where you’ve trying to live out that restoration but they continue to punish you?

That did happen. She not only didn’t reciprocate, she just reinforced, “Yeah, you were this. You were that.” I think that’s why Responsibility and Remorse are so important. That’s the inner work of going, “Okay, I’m going to own this. I’m going to feel it.” Because when the attack comes back, you can honestly go, “not my circus, not my monkey.” I’ve done all that I can. It becomes about themselves at that point and you feel like the slate is clean. It doesn’t mean that I don’t have regrets and remorse, but I know that I’ve done all that I can. And I know that I am forgiven. Restoration is where self-forgiveness starts taking place no matter what is thrown at me. If you were saying, “Yeah, but you were this Robert,” I can say, “Yeah, I was. That’s the end of the story, and I’ve already paid the price for that. I did need to improve and I’m so thankful you gave me the opportunity and that we’re more connected now.” Labeling the truth allows a lot of freedom for genuine restoration for our souls. It kind of strips the accusing person of their power because I’ve admitted that I’ve done that. I’ve done the work to heal and restore from that. Your unwillingness to accept it doesn’t mean that in my heart, I haven’t changed. You can say the same thing you’ve been saying, but I don’t have to keep owning it because I’ve already owned it.

On the flip side of that, being the person who has poked in on that over and over, I remember early on after the divorce I wanted my ex to take responsibility. I would bring something up and say, “You did this, you did this, you did this.” And he would say, “I’m really sorry about that.” But then I didn’t really trust it, I didn’t believe him necessarily. There was a time where I mentioned it again, and he said, “I’ve already apologized for that. I’m unwilling to keep doing this. You’re not going to keep badgering me over it. I apologize. That’s it. End of discussion.” And I realized later that was me needing to deal with the hurt of that. At a certain point, I have to be willing to move on. If you are on the flip side of that, you’ve got to deal with the hurt and the disappointment and sadness and all the things that you’re struggling with so that you can release the other person and be able to come back to yourself, start back at the first R, and take responsibility for what you can take responsibility for.

This last R is Renewal. It’s that process again of self-reflection, showing yourself compassion, acknowledging what you could or couldn’t do or control, and accepting it for what it was. The renewal piece is important for me. Yes, we absolutely must learn self-compassion. That’s the only way to get to a place of self-compassion, give yourself grace and be able to give other people grace. Once you’re able to give yourself grace and show yourself that compassion, you’re able to forgive others more easily as well. So it’s almost like you can’t truly forgive other people if you haven’t learned how to forgive yourself. 

One of the signs of self-forgiveness for me came probably eight years after I was divorced. I was in a conversation. There is one thing in my life that I know I did wrong. I fell short and it had to do with my ex-wife, and it was behavior that I was deeply ashamed of. I had processed it and tried to get past it and done these steps. My wife, who I was on one of my first dates with, asked me, “Have you ever ____?” And I immediately said yes. I almost was surprised at myself for admitting an infraction so blatantly. What that says to me is that it has gone from this toxic reminder of something to information. She was asking me, “Have you ever done blank?” And I answered it as if it was like, “Have you ever had coffee?” And I don’t mean to make light of it because it was a big deal. I would usually try to hide this, especially on a first or second date; I wouldn’t go there. So when you can acknowledge things that you’ve done wrong and you’ve asked for forgiveness and you’ve forgiven yourself, when you bring that up, it’s just information. It’s no longer attached to something big and catastrophic in your mind or in your heart. I don’t mean minimizing it either. I think that was, for me, a sign that I’ve actually moved past that and forgiven. That was renewal to me. It’s a release of shame. 

The beautiful thing about Solo Parent is community where you are with other people and they get it. When you are able to verbalize it—which is what I had done, I had processed it aloud with a small group of men—other people can go, “Yeah, I’ve struggled with that too” or “I did that too.” When you bring something from the shadows into the light, that’s where healing happens. When you hide it and try to minimize it or push it down or not disclose it, that’s where the enemy has a heyday with it, and I don’t think you can move into that place of self-forgiveness. With Solo Parent, people have a safe place to unload and say, “This is my burden. This is what I’ve done” or “This is what was done to me.” There’s something about bringing things into the light that redeems almost every situation, and it’s able to move into renewal too. There was something that I dealt with several years ago, and I had several people around me who loved me really well through it. I was able to admit it. I was able to say, “Hey, here’s what happened.” I was able to gather truth from that too, especially in that idea of taking responsibility for what’s mine and what actually belongs to someone else. And having that truth spoken over me by saying, “Hey, that doesn’t belong to you. That was not you. So don’t do that to yourself.” You’re taking a very sober look at what does belong to you, but then people saying, “Well, that makes sense that you would’ve done that, reacted that way.” Or “Maybe that wasn’t a great choice, but we still love you. We’re here with you. Talk to us about that. Walk us through what that process was like.” It’s so restorative and renewing bringing that into the light. You don’t have to carry the shame of it, which is completely beautiful. 

What can self-forgiveness do for us? 

It allows us to work through the feelings of the resentment that we have for ourselves. Resentment for ourselves is real. In our research, we actually found holding onto resentment increases stress and damages our mental, emotional, and even physical wellbeing, which leads to more suffering. The more we hold onto this resentment for ourselves, the more damage we’re doing to ourselves. So it’s not just this internal problem that we’re having. It can have an effect on our bodies and our mental wellbeing, which essentially will have an effect on our kids and the people around us. It’s so important to find that freedom and truth. It brings so much healing to acknowledge what’s true and then take the steps to make it right. There’s a tremendous release of shame and the weight and burden of responsibility. Self-forgiveness also makes it easier to forgive others. I know that with my ex, although he wasn’t willing to acknowledge his part in things through our divorce, me being able to take inventory really helped me find compassion for him too. Instead of looking at the speck in someone else’s eye, I had to acknowledge the plank in my own. It can also rid us of feelings that everybody around me is constantly judging, right? Everybody sees what I did and living in that fear of them finding out. Suddenly, it’s fine. You’re moving past this. You’re growing. Yes, I’m imperfect, but I can give grace to myself and extend that to other people.

And it builds the empathy that you need for other people.Chip Dodd said if we can walk into a room and say, “Your story could be my story,” we’ve actually reached a new level of healing. And I love that. So the more I’m able to take responsibility and practice self-forgiveness, the more I can look at other people and say, “I get it, and I’m here with you.” And it doesn’t matter what they did, we can just be with each other in it and in our struggles, and we can let it stop defining who I am and where my worth comes from. 

Having gone through the process, when I think about my ex and I compare it to the freedom that I feel there is something in me that feels kind of bad she doesn’t experience the same freedomI I think if you don’t go to this place of self-forgiveness and taking responsibility you’re always going to be attached to that infraction. And I feel bad for people that don’t want to do the work of going there because I have realized it is so great walking with a light load and not having to hide.

So it does build empathy for the person that wronged me. On top of that, research shows that those who practice self-forgiveness have a more positive attitude. They have healthier relationships, a higher level of success, productivity, focus and concentration. These steps of self-forgiveness help us be a more holistic and integrated person. 

Takeaways

1. We need to understand that sometimes the hardest person to forgive is ourselves, but it’s so important. 
2. We need to take responsibility, feel remorse, make amends, and learn from our mistakes in order to move through self-forgiveness. 
3. Self-forgiveness has so many benefits for ourselves, for our relationships, for our faith, and for our worth.

How do you forgive yourself if you see some of your struggles passed on to your own children?

My kids are 19 and 22, and I recognize some of the struggles that I’ve passed on to them, and that’s a hard reckoning. My daughter recently got upset with me. She reacted in a way that I might have reacted seven or eight years ago with a lot of verbal berating. And to my regret, I heard an echo that came from long ago. Currently, I am praying through how to approach that with her and where I let her own her parts. And even in my guilt, I don’t try to overdo trying to make up with her as if I had done something wrong this time—when in reality, at 19, she is beginning to need and take greater responsibility for how she treated me. And so it’s been a delicate time of learning, but how do I forgive myself? I walk in the forgiveness that I don’t own their struggles anymore. They’re 19 and 22. It’s different when you have littles. But I still have a connection to them and a responsibility to model for them, to call them out on their behavior and to walk them through a process of grace and forgiveness and restoration and renewal just like I’ve gone through. Part of my forgiveness process with them is [figuring out] how to maintain a healthy connection and let them walk through these steps without me doing the heavy lifting for them. My old codependent self would’ve really wanted to do that and robbed them of all of those lessons. And this needs to be scaled for age, of course, but at 19 and 22, they are now responsible for the way their behavior impacts others more than ever before.

My son is 11. And right now I am seeing him struggle, or at least I see it as a struggle. Maybe he’s blissfully unaware, but he is an internal processor and I almost wonder if he’s going into that fight, flight or freeze-type response. But I’ve noticed that he can get really internal. I can tell he’s thinking a lot. He’s in his head. And I struggle with that. While I do verbally process a lot, my brain is going a hundred miles an hour at any given moment thinking about all sorts of things. And I can tell that he’s the same. And maybe he’s not thinking about anything bad because there’s a lot of times where I’ll be like, “Hey, what are you thinking about?” And he’ll tell me he’s thinking about a video game or something. I can just tell that that’s something that I’ve passed on to him and I have some shame, but mostly fear, that he’s not going to be able to talk out loud and have the language he needs. I almost wish he would show a little more emotion in that way. I wish that he would just break out and let it go, let it flow.

I also have a really open dialogue about what I’ve learned and how I can see similarities they’re doing that are similar to things that I’ve done. And telling them where that backfired or didn’t work out. It does help going, “Okay, there are reasons we make mistakes. There are lessons that we’ve learned that we can pass on” and not just trying to hide it. It helps take away some of the sting of knowing that our struggles are passed on the more we can own these things—and show our kids not only by our words but also our example of things that we’ve learned. 

How do you overcome guilt over parenting choices that you made in the trenches that you felt were solid, but now think caused your children’s current issues?

I deal with this a lot because in the trenches, I didn’t have Solo Parent. I felt very isolated. I felt very alone and I spent so much time trying to keep up appearances. I’ve talked about the difference between parenting out of fear or out of love, and I was so reactionary; I know that it caused damage and I was doing the best I could. I wanted to keep them safe. And so one of the things that I’ve had to deal with is making amends with my daughters and going, “I have some remorse. I have some regret. I came down too hard. I was over-parenting. I was over-strict.” And it’s interesting if you look at my oldest, my middle, and now my youngest. My youngest has the benefit of more of a transformed dad. And the best that I can do is take responsibility for it, confess it, and not only apologize, but try to say what you were experiencing or what you wanted to do: “I made you feel guilty about that. And those questions, those curiosities, that adventurous nature, that’s not wrong. That wasn’t wrong. It scared me as a parent.” Our kids do things that terrify us. And so I tried to squelch it and I have so much regret about stuff like that. But it’s not trying to fix it, remedy it, or excuse it. It’s stepping into it, owning it, and having honest conversations with our kids.

I bring this to God and throw myself on his mercy and leave my kids at the foot of the cross. That might sound hyper spiritual, but that is my genuine process where it’s like, “Lord, thank you that you’ve forgiven me for the mistakes I’ve made. Please make them right in my children’s lives.” I ask him, “Please redeem. Please restore. Please restore what the locusts have eaten.”

When Hunter was a baby, he was always hungry. And he would wake up early and my mom was of the school of thought that you let children cry. And I listened to her because I was a young mother and I thought that she knew best. And [later] I found in a book that when you don’t respond to a child, it can develop attachment disorder. And I don’t think Hunter has serious attachment disorders, but to this day, I have serious guilt about following her advice—I was trying to do the right thing. Now I can let the thoughts get away with me where I’m like, “I’ve totally doomed my child to a life of misery and shame, because I didn’t pick him up. I made him cry for 30 minutes before I responded to his pleas for food.” Personally, I would start reading. I do like to find information by reading, but there was a while when I was like, “I can’t read these parenting books because they tell you all the things that I can’t go back and do anymore.” So I just started throwing them out the window. I’m like, “No, I don’t need a guilt trip here.” And if I asked Hunter about it or said something to him, he’d be like, “What are you talking about?” So I just have to keep wrestling that to the ground: that he was raised by a fallible human mother who did the best she could, the best she knew how. And when she knew how and knew better, she did better. And I have to be okay falling back into the arms of a God that is good enough to father both of us through that.

I remember when Jax was little, he would throw himself on the floor and try to get a reaction out of me, and I would just step over him and keep moving on with my life. And then now I’m reading, apparently I missed an opportunity to do something different. I am becoming a firm believer that sometimes repair is more important than doing it right or getting it right all the time. In repair, you can not only reinforce the principle, but you also show humility. You also don’t shame, you lessen the load of their actions. I tend to overcompensate for the lack of parent that Jax has on the other side. And I was convicted recently that if I try to be everything to him (which I could never be anyway), that leaves zero room for God to be able to do what only he can do. I have to be very cognizant of that and release control and say, “Okay, well I can show up in the way I’ve been uniquely gifted to be his mom and then God’s going to have to clean up the rest.” 

How do I forgive myself for the emotional damage done to my children while parenting in survival mode in a toxic marriage?

I have dealt with this a lot. There was addiction and mental disorders in our house for a couple of years, maybe more, and I just let it go on. Honestly, what kept me there was I felt so much shame over the way I had lived my life that I felt like I kind of deserved to get the short end of the stick. And so I allowed behavior in our house to continue on when it really shouldn’t have. And I have a lot of regret and remorse about that. There’s no way to rewind. Some of the better lessons are taught in retrospect when you can go back and tell your kids, “You know what?

You should not allow yourself to be in a relationship that is X, Y, or Z for too long. I made the mistake of doing that. That does not mean I’m demonizing your mom; we all have problems. But you need to have good boundaries. You need to have an understanding of what codependency is and what is okay and what is not okay because we can’t rewind it.” That’s the only way that I’ve been able to move past the emotional damage that I know they saw. My girls saw a lot they didn’t need to see because of my decision to stay there. It’s a good opportunity to speak into that and say, “Look, you don’t need to stay in a situation.” One of my daughters was in a very abusive relationship a few years ago and it just went on and on and on and it was heartbreaking. And one of my daughters is in a current relationship that I’m questioning and it’s so hard to watch. But I can speak from a position of, “Okay, I know what this looks like and I know the attraction. I know why some of us want to stay in it. You see the good in somebody, but there’s also this awful underbelly to everything. And you have to be realistic. There are some things that are not going to be sustainable in a relationship and they’re not healthy and they’re damaging to you.” So I think it’s just doing our best to share what we’ve learned, to make amends, but to also say, “Hey, I’m hoping for better for you.”

I lived in my marriage in a heightened stress state. I didn’t even know, but my cortisol was always through the roof. I was always on edge, always expecting something else to happen. And it was interesting because after my husband died, I remember sitting at the kitchen table thinking, “He’s not going to walk in that door and there will be no drama tonight.” And it was just eye opening. And ever since then, as I’ve calmed down and am not looking over my shoulder for the next attack, the mother I am has completely changed. The problem with that is now that I see that there is a better way to do it. I look back at the old me that had a very short fuse with my kids and wanted my kids to toe the line and do everything just right because that control was the only control I had in my life. Now I look back and I’m like, “I’m so sorry.” I did that to my kids. My kids are 16 and 18, and I have sat them down on more than one occasion and said, “I’m sorry that you had to be raised by that version of me.” And they’ve told me, “Yeah, but you’re doing a lot better. You’re not that same mom.” My boys have both dated and I’ll sit down with them and walk through their relationships and point out some things like, “Hey, this is what’s going on over there. I want you to see it. I want you to walk through that.” Because for me, that’s one of those ways I can help restore. I can be on the front end saying, “Hey, that may be a symptom of something greater.” I can’t fix what I have done, but I can walk with you and help you and encourage you and help you see the ways my behavior may have affected you. 

What are your thoughts on paying for your adult children’s therapy because you know that you are the reason they need it?

Seems completely appropriate to me. I don’t think Jax really understands the damage being done to him in my own hurt and pain and emotional reactions. We were watching the “Tangled” movie and the mom is awful, horrible, manipulative, just all the things. And I made a comment and said, “Oh man, that mom is mean.” And he was like, “What do you mean? I think she’s really nice.” And I was like, “Oh gosh.” And it hit me like a ton of bricks that kids don’t see manipulation. Maybe they know how to manipulate, but they don’t understand what it is or see that from a toxic parent. When they’re younger, it is hard to sit in that tension of knowing they’re going to need therapy someday that maybe you’re going to need to pay for. But you’re going to have to sit in that tension and not help. They’re not going to understand yet what they’ve been through.