Dear Harry,
I can’t even begin to thank you for the Forgiveness Option mini-course. Using it, I was able to dismantle a lifelong creation that had its roots in an event that happened over 40 years ago.
When I was four I witnessed my father accidentally hitting my mother with his car while I was sitting with him in the front seat. I never thought this had any real impact on me and recalled little of it except for one very clear memory of something that happened after the accident. My mother was hospitalized for months, and one evening post-dinner I was crying for her. My father began yelling at me, telling me she would never come home until I stopped being bad and stopped crying. I cried more, and he yelled more. I was bad, and it was my fault she wasn’t coming home. I can still feel the sensation of the fabric of the couch against my face where I lay crying and eventually fell asleep.
A few weeks ago I felt completely overwhelmed by feelings of being controlled by others. I was angry and willful and defiant about everything in my life and could only trace it to a feeling that everyone was trying to control me. In near desperation I called Audrey for help, and she suggested I do the Forgiveness Option. I included the incident with my father on the Burdens of Life chart and then did Releasing Fixed Attention on it. I’d played the scenario over and over in my mind so many times in the last 40 years I didn’t believe there was anything there I hadn’t already understood. Quite suddenly, however, I blurted out, “It wasn’t my fault,” and the tears began. Everything, everything in my life came undone. In an instant nothing in my life was as I “knew” it to be. A hardness and a rage that had simmered unattended for more than 40 years dissipated—just like that.
For most of my life I felt that whatever anyone said to me was really being said in a heartless attempt to make me bad and wrong, to blame me for things they’d done but wouldn’t take ownership for. This was always followed by feelings of justified, yet suppressed rage. I’d been walking around for 40 years being angry at everyone. Using the tools, I discovered the primary that created this strange victim/victimizer game I’d been playing: “It’s not my fault; it’s YOUR fault!” No secondary. Since I didn’t have the voice as a four-year-old to defend myself against my father’s tirade, I have been defending myself against everyone with my own behind the scenes, justified tirades ever since.
But now I could forgive him. For the anger. For the accident. And I could even forgive my mother for being away for months—a huge transgression in the mind of a child. The guilt and anguish and fear and pain they both must have experienced had never registered with me, but I was finally able to extend myself beyond my own experience of this event and see that everyone had suffered.
When I started the program I thought I was working only on a present time creation, but what I was actually doing was starting to untangle something huge that had been with me nearly my whole life. Everything I experience now seems so completely different, and I realize I’m no longer viewing my life through the fog of justified blame, resentment, and anger I had created to protect myself. I can’t really express my gratitude, but offer my thanks nonetheless. Thank you for teaching me how to forgive.
Much love,
Philip Steinbacher
Philip Steinbacher is an Avatar Master/Wizard from Hawaii.
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