Ask Jay: How Do I Forgive?

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For more information on Tramphya, call 1-800-526-7736, or call 1-800-526-7736. Call 1-800-526-7736 to learn more about Tramphya, or call 1-800-526-7736. him for good. I'm terrified of the unknown. My question is, how do I forgive myself for past mistakes? And how do I learn to sit with the painful uncertainty of a relationship's future without trying to control or push it away? Thank you. First of all, I'm so sorry for your loss. And on top of the loss you're dealing with, you're suffering over how you behaved in the divorce years ago and are also navigating the resurfacing of an ex. That's a lot of big feelings. It's actually just a lot in general. And it sounds like what you're trying to change are deep old habits that form to protect you, which is difficult and brave at the same time. So before anything else, I want to acknowledge you for that. Your first question was how to forgive yourself. First, I want to say that divorce rarely brings out the best in people and it usually doesn't result from things going well. I think it's possible that you had a genuine reason to be angry with your dad during that period. That's obviously not an excuse for treating him poorly and it doesn't make picking a side feel any fairer when you look back on it now. But my bet is that you were doing the best you could at a moment when everyone involved was under enormous strain. And the thing about being a child of divorce is that whether you're 8 when it happens or 28, it can feel like your foundation is splitting down the middle. So it's only natural to run to one side. Not necessarily because you like that side of you, but it's only natural to run to one side. It's only natural to run to one better. But because in your moment of panic, it looked like the safer side of the hole in the earth. And I love that you told me he was a great dad. I believe you. I hope it's not overstepping to suggest that a great dad like him probably understood that his kid wasn't going to be at their best while the family is coming apart. So let me ask you something. Would it be easier to forgive yourself if you knew he had forgiven you? Because if the answer is yes, then I wonder whether what you're holding on to is the right thing to do. Because if the answer is yes, then I wonder whether what you're holding on to isn't a belief that what you did was unforgivable. It might just be wishing you could talk to your dad. But the question you came to me with was about forgiveness. So let me answer that directly. There's a great line from the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius's diary, where he reminds himself that when he falls short of his personal standards, he shouldn't get disgusted or discouraged. Instead, he says to try again. And he specifies not to do it in a way a child gets marched back to a strict teacher. He says to try again in the way you reach for something that soothes a sore. I hope that resonates. Because you're not the kid being walked back to the teacher's desk. You're tending to something sore. So when you ask how to forgive yourself, that's my answer. Gently, softly, with time. In regards to forgiving yourself for your sins, I'd love for you to write a letter to your dad. A letter expressing everything that hasn't felt like it as a home right now. You miss him. You love him. He was a great dad. It's important to express and vocalize and put out the energy of anything that's currently still sitting inside of you. Put aside some time. Write him a letter. Feel free to read it out. And put it out into the universe. This isn't about receiving anything specific. It's not about forcing a result. It's not about control. It's about making sure that you believe you've had the opportunity to say and share everything that you possibly want. Often we think we need something to get closure. But often the real answer is we need to give something. We need to share something. We need to express something. That never got a chance to be expressed. That never had a home after that person left. So take a moment to try that. Share what you wish you said. Share what you want him to know. Share everything. No matter what it feels like. Good or bad. It's really important that you find a way to move through that. I also believe that it's great that you're trying to forgive yourself. I think a lot of us can hold on to resentment for ourselves in these moments. We can hold on to regret. But knowing that forgiving yourself will actually allow you to be a better daughter, a better sibling, a better partner, a better friend. That forgiving yourself truly, deeply will allow you to heal so that you can move forward in your life and in the other roles with the amazing energy that you have. Now your second question about sitting with uncertainty. You said you're terrified of the unknown. And based on what you've been through, it makes complete sense to me that you'd feel that way. There's a psychologist named Ronnie Janoff-Bullman whose work shows that when something sudden and traumatic happens, like losing a parent with zero warning, it can completely shatter a person's trust in the world. When life feels that unpredictable, the mind naturally looks for a way to regain a sense of control. Paradoxically, that can look like turning inward with guilt, regret, or blame. Because if we tell ourselves that we're the reason things went wrong, it gives us the illusion that we hold the steering wheel. It's an exhausting way to cope, but it can feel safer than accepting that life can just be chaotic and painful. That might be why this relationship with your ex carries so much weight right now. Reconnecting could feel a bit like a second chance, the kind of second chance you were never given with your father. There might be a part of you that feels like a second chance, but it's not. There might be a part of you that feels like if you can just handle this situation perfectly, you can protect yourself from going through another devastating loss, avoiding any more regret along the way. And every relationship is different. Obviously, only you know what the safe and appropriate dynamic is between you guys, but I know you don't want to push him away. So when you start to get afraid or anxious as you guys navigate this new chapter, maybe you can tell him that. I'm scared. That's it. See how he shows up. It might be one vulnerable step towards knowing how to do the same for him. Forgiving yourself and loosening your grip are two of the hardest things a person can practice, and you're trying to do both at the same time. So while you're practicing, I hope you can be gentle with yourself about how it goes. Take it slow. He's been in your life for a long time. It's not about missing out on an opportunity because we think we'll miss out on someone if we move too slow. The truth is you can miss out on a future with someone if you move too fast. It's okay to take things one step at a time in a way that feels slow and natural so that you can truly rebuild trust and know where you stand at every step. One step at a time. A warning before I move on. This next call is going to describe someone with addiction. Depending on where you're at, you're going to see someone with addiction. You can find resources on addiction in the description. If you or someone you know is struggling, please don't hesitate to use them. And this episode is brought to you by Mazda. 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You can fill out 37 forms about your listening history. I'll wait. Forget it. That would be ridiculous. Yeah, we all do it every time we need health care. But the new Amazon Health AI is different. It can connect your symptoms with your medical history to offer personalized care 24-7. Amazon Health AI is here. Health care just got less painful. Listen with care. My late husband of 30 years passed away on April Fool's Day. And when he passed, I learned that despite renewing our vows in twenty twenty three. that he was already in the midst of a one-and-a-half-year affair. I didn't learn about this till he died, and we found 300 videos of not just the one woman, but several others. He suffered from addiction, and we thought he had beat it years ago. Unfortunately, he relapsed and hid it very, very well. Today, I'm trying to heal, and I'm trying to figure out how to forgive myself for missing the signs, how to let go of the pain so it doesn't taint future relationships. How do we forgive those we can no longer speak to, but whose actions impact our lives in a deeply significant way? I want to be a good example for our young adult son, because I don't want this experience to hinder us from being able to love ourselves or trust others again. How do you apologize to yourself and the ghost? Wow. I mean, first, you lose your husband of 30 years, and then you learn about a whole part of his life you didn't know existed. So, off the bat, it's almost like you're grieving two people. The one you knew, and the one you didn't. And that's extremely rough. And I'm so sorry that you're going through that. I can't even begin to imagine how traumatic it's been to find 300 videos after your husband's passing. To learn about betrayal in that vivid way is heartbreaking, to say the least. You're so strong for asking these questions, for having the bravery and courage to put this out there, to actually be in a position of wanting to move on and move forward. And I want to share a few things on that. In your message, you said you're trying to figure out how to forgive yourself for missing the signs. I hope it's okay for me to suggest that maybe you don't need forgiveness for failing to see something that was being deliberately hidden from you. Concealment on that scale isn't something that slips past someone, somebody who wasn't paying attention. It takes sustained effort to keep out of you. You're not weak because you think you missed the signs. You didn't make any mistake. You trusted, you connected, you were a good partner. Everything that happened outside of that is completely out of your control, and anyone would be as surprised as you are. And that shock is what you need to allow yourself to deal with right now. You have to let yourself feel the shock, feel the stress of it, feel the pain of it, before you even begin to think about how you forgive someone who's no longer here, who can't answer your questions, who can't give you closure, who can't express to you why they did what they did, and at the scale at which they did it. Allow yourself to experience that shock, that pain, and that stress, and allow yourself to express it as well. Allow yourself to reveal it. And I imagine a lot of things are rearranging themselves in hindsight right now. But hindsight is a completely different instrument, than the one you had at the time. And please know that the burden wasn't on you to catch him cheating. The burden was on him to not cheat. You brought up the idea of the ghost in this situation, and you asked a really fundamental question. How do you forgive someone you can no longer speak to? If you feel like not being able to talk to him is the thing standing in your way, I have an interesting story for you. It's about a garden tree. It's about a garden designer in Japan named Itaru Sasaki. When his cousin passed away, Sasaki placed a disconnected phone booth in his yard that he called the wind phone. He believed that while wires couldn't transmit his words to the cousin he lost, the wind might. After a local tsunami swept through the region, tens of thousands of grieving people visited that quiet booth to speak to those they had lost. I love that story. And I feel like it's relevant right now. Because maybe the answer to your question is simpler than it looks. You want to offer forgiveness, probably some fury, maybe some love underneath, despite how hurt you are. You want to say all of this to someone who isn't here anymore. Maybe you should say it anyway. Not with the goal of him hearing it, but just with the goal to get it out. As for your fear that this will permanently ruin your ability to trust, of course, your dynamic with trust has shifted greatly. Experiencing grief, betrayal, and shock simultaneously will naturally do that to you. Which is why I want to push back on your question about how to let go of the pain. Maybe you don't have to erase what happened to experience love again. In the moments where you inevitably feel the past bubbling up, can you ask yourself, is this paranoia from past damage? Or is it proactive discernment? Holding space for that question, stops you from swinging between total suspicion and blind trust. And be direct with anyone new you bring into your life. You're allowed to say, I went through something huge, and I'm still navigating it. Anyone worthy of you will meet you where you are. Don't aim for the trust you had before. Let this change you, but choose to be an active part of that evolution. Ask the hard questions, honor what you've been through, and don't hide your truth. You want a full life on the other side of this for you and your son. And you're already doing the work to get there. Just be patient with yourself while the pieces fall into place. I know it can feel like right now that you'll never build trust again. But I want to share something with you that I hope will help. Often we think about people as people we trust or people we don't trust. And actually there are stages and levels to trust, that allow us to move at our own pace in our own time in a way that feels safe. When you first meet someone you actually start at zero trust, no trust. Some of us immediately project trust onto people, just by the way they look or what they do for work or how they speak. But the reality is you don't trust someone when you meet them. This isn't about being skeptical or cynical. It's about starting at zero. It's not about starting at minus five or minus ten, just neutral. Then you build something called transactional trust. Transactional trust is, they do what they say and they say what they do. If they say they show up at a certain time, they do that. If they say they're going to call me, they do that and I do the same. This allows us to get to a transactional space of trust where we're still measuring it. This might sound unromantic, but it's actually very helpful. The third stage is called reciprocal trust. This is when you trust someone enough that you know they'll do something back for you, but you're not counting anymore. You know you'll do things for them without having to make a note of it. Reciprocal trust means trust is flowing and we both go out of our way for each other without counting who's doing more or less. That's what we all want to get to, but sometimes we jump too far ahead. And finally, we have unconditional trust. It's like a God level trust. Maybe the trust a child has in a parent that's healthy. It's very rare and not something we should expect from humans generally, but sometimes we put that on people. So often when we've put a high deal of trust on someone. And now we're experiencing a betrayal, that's the gap that we're experiencing. You trusted this person, they've let you down and they're no longer here. That's the pain. That's the extent of the pain you're experiencing. Please don't bottle it up. Please don't feel guilty for feeling that way. And definitely don't blame yourself for this situation. I'm wishing you all the best, putting in a prayer and meditation for you and sending you lots of love as you move through this. Brought to you by Wayfair. Home should be a place that feels like a sanctuary, a space that truly reflects who you are, but it can be challenging to balance style, budget and endless options. I'm always looking for ways to improve the harmony of space at home, but it isn't easy. I want pieces that can ground me and still hold up to the test of time. 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For a long time, my mind stayed focused on what they did to me, the injustice, the anger that my life had been put on hold because of someone else's actions. But along the way, I realized I don't want this experience to define me anymore. I've started asking different questions. What didn't I do? What did I ignore? What boundaries did I fail to set? What has this pain told me about myself? I'm learning to take responsibility for my past without taking responsibility for theirs. They still do nothing. I can't control that. I can only decide who I become because of it. Some days I feel light. Some days I'm still angry. My question, Jay, is: Do we really forgive people? who change our lives in a painful way or simply learn to live. live with it until one day it no longer hurts. It sounds like your friend really hurt you and I'm so sorry for that. As a society we talk about betrayal constantly on social media but it almost always focuses on romantic relationships. We tend to treat friend drama like it's petty or minor but it really isn't. You're working hard to heal from that betrayal and I want to honor your healing process because I'm impressed. Which is why it stands out to me that you seem worried you're taking too long to get over this or that you're somehow doing it wrong. It sounds like that doubt creeps in because you have not reached the ultimate outcome you want to simply not be bothered by it anymore. But a wound that cuts this deep does not transform into a fond memory the moment you check off all the right boxes or grow from the experience even though you've done both. A psychologist named Michael McCullough studied how people navigate the aftermath of being deeply wronged. Over months and years he measured how much people wanted to avoid the person who hurt them and how much they wanted to see that person suffer. One of his findings I expected that those feelings got less extreme over time but what I didn't expect is that also at random intervals they'd suddenly resurface in full force. When you get reminded of something that felt bad it feels bad. That's normal. The fact that some days feel light and other days feel heavy is not you failing to move on. You said something so smart in your note. You're learning to take responsibility for your past without taking responsibility for the actions of the one who hurt you. You sound like someone who's looking honestly at her own patterns, the red flags you ignored, the boundaries you failed to set while refusing to let that self domination become self-blame. None of us are perfect friends and that also doesn't make us deserving of betrayal. I feel like this passage in the Analects of Confucius might sit well with you. In it someone asks Confucius about the idea of repaying an injury with kindness, presenting it as the ultimate virtuous response. But Confucius pushes back. He asks, then with what will you repay kindness? Instead he suggests that you repay injury with justice and repay kindness with kindness. Justice here does not mean getting revenge or forcing them to pay you back. To me Confucius is talking about emotional accuracy, responding to what actually happened at its true scale. You mentioned that your former friend is still stuck in the exact same place, refusing to acknowledge what happened. Meanwhile you've gained real perspective with your former friends. It might not be a dramatic movie moment, but it is an infinitely better type of justice because that growth is entirely yours. They cannot take it from you. To answer your question about whether we forgive people who hurt us or simply learn to live with it until it stops hurting, give yourself some credit. You're not passively sitting around waiting for the pain to stop. You're actively examining yourself while carrying something that still hurts. That takes incredible courage. I hope you do what feels right for you, but I hope you don't feel like you owe someone who injured you your kindness. Today's ritual is brought to you by Orin's Theory Fitness. Orin's Theory combines strength and cardio into a one-hour total body workout personalized to you with an expert coach that meets you where you are, designed to burn fat, build muscle, and help you live a longer, more vibrant life. You're first class free at Orin's Theory.com forward slash on purpose. One of the biggest misconceptions about creating lasting change is that it starts with a dramatic transformation, but in reality, our lives are shaped by the small rituals we've returned to consistently. Something as simple as setting aside one hour to move your body can completely shift the rest of your day. Movement gives us the space to process stress, improve our focus, and approach the rest of the day with greater clarity and intention. Every time you keep that commitment to your body, you're able to build confidence, resilience, and trust in yourself. Those small promises kept consistently become the foundation for meaningful and lasting change. Once again, the ritual was brought to you by Orin's Theory Fitness. Complete strength and cardio delivered in one hour, a different workout every day, and an expert coach that meets you where you are. Head to Orin's Theory.com forward slash on purpose to learn more and get your first class free. Terms and conditions apply, see webpage and studio for details. Don't let someone who betrayed you keep causing you pain because you don't want to let go of it. Often we let people define our lives based on an experience we had with them because we continue to repeat it within our minds and hearts. Forgiveness is more about you being able to move on than you being okay with what happened to you. It's more about you being able to move forward than still being angry about what you experienced. It's more about you being able to take the next step in your life rather than being weighed down by their betrayal. When you see forgiveness in that way, it becomes a friend, not something that's difficult to do. I want you to focus on yourself right now. I want you to allow yourself to move at a pace that feels comfortable to you. I want you to learn the lessons, the signs that you missed, the boundaries you didn't set, the moments you shrugged off and just let pass by so that you can set healthier boundaries moving forward, so that you can protect yourself from betrayal. And even as I say that, I realize sometimes no matter how much we protect ourselves, we can't because people can do surprising things. So all we can choose to do is recognize that there was a you before you met this person. There was a you during your friendship with this person. And there is a you after this relationship. You have existed before, during, and after, and will continue to do from every relationship you ever have. Don't forget that you exist as an entity separate of any connection or relationship and invest in that person. Thank you for trusting me. With these extremely vulnerable questions, giving grace isn't always easy, whether it's to someone else or to yourself. I hope you show a bit more grace to yourself today. I'm so grateful for every voice note you send in, and I'll be right here waiting for the next one. Thank you so much. Saying how you feel out loud is terrifying, but that's what Hinge's new free audiobook, No Ordinary Love, is all about. It's a collection of real love stories about five couples that met on Hinge. The stories are written and read by Tembi Denton-Hurst, Nicola Dinan, Curtis Garner, Raven Smith, and Rufy Thorpe. I, Hunter Harris, wrote and read the foreword. The audiobook's out now. Give it a listen. Off with the front man. Play leveled-up arcade games. Shop exclusive merch. And enjoy themed food and drinks. Beat the heat. Play, eat, and shop on repeat at Netflix House at Galleria Dallas. Bring your crew and save. Get your tickets today at netflix.com slash house. This episode is brought to you by TXU Energy. For the first time ever, Texans have an energy plan that combines free nights all year with daytime summer savings. It's called Free Nights in Cool Summer. You get free nights every night. All year long. Plus, a 25% bonus toward your daytime use all summer. It's a first-of-its-kind plan created for how Texans actually use energy. Discover how much more you could save with Free Nights in Cool Summer. TXU Energy. Energy for everything. Visit TXU.com for more information. Rep number 10004.