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Is painful, hurtful "crap" from your past sabotaging your present happiness?
Do you need a way to clear out the negative crap, goop and garbage the offender left with you when they contaminated your space?
If so, you're in the right place because we can help!

The Awesome Power of Forgiveness

Forgiveness. Who needs it?

We all need to forgive and to be forgiven. There is amazing healing power in the act of forgiveness!

When I begin working with a new client in the Break Free Coaching Program I often find that they are harboring old feelings of hurt, anger, pain, sadness, shame, or resentment. They may have forgotten about the actual hurtful events, but held onto the hurtful feelings because they had no idea “how” to process and let them go. Unfortunately, many were told to “stop whining”, “grow up”, “get over it” or something equally as unhelpful – or they were encouraged to act as if everything was OK when it wasn’t.

Ignoring any painful emotion does not help it to go away. When ignored, negative painful feelings will simmer and fester and will always find ways to express and manifest themselves into self-sabotage behaviors.

• Procrastination

• Self-doubt

• Loss of self-confidence

• Overeating

• Compulsive behaviors

• Self-destructive behaviors

• Breaking promises and

• Messing up good relationships, are just the start of a very long list.

I have worked with an array of people whose differences include race, culture, family values and more. In each case the person I was coaching had their own unique story about the pain and hurts they carried around with them on a day-to-day basis, but the consequences were always the same; self-sabotage behavior!

I have worked with people who were physically and emotionally abused during their childhood, and harbored their deep feelings of pain and resentment toward their offender only to have those smoldering feelings turn inward against themselves. I have worked with people who grew up in environments of constant bickering, fighting and inconsistent love and nurturing – causing them a great deal of confusion and painful feelings when faced with their own troubled relationships. And I have worked with people who were raised in middle-class mainstream “normal” families yet they had no inner processes for being nurturing and supportive toward themselves. They were raised with “good old fashion values”, which actually meant that they were punished when they did something wrong as a means toward making them “do better next time”.

The Tools for Creating REAL and LASTING Change...

The purpose of this Forgiveness Manual and Journal is to help you find and resolve inner negative feelings that you may be harboring and using as weapons for sabotaging your own efforts to be successful.

According to David Barrett et al, editors of the "World Christian Encyclopedia: A comparative survey of churches and religions - AD 30 to 2200," there are 19 major world religions which are subdivided into a total of 270 large religious groups, and many smaller ones. According to this source, over 75% of the world’s population is a member of the religions of Christianity, Islam or Hinduism, with the remaining population being members of other religions including Judaism and Buddhism.

While I have not read the teachings of all 19 major religions of the world, I am familiar enough with the teachings of the top 5 to know that one thing stands out as a major common denominator; each one teaches about the value of forgiveness!

Many years ago when I first began my own journey of Breaking Free from Self-Sabotage Behaviors I was open to trying just about anything that might relieve my inner self-induced torture. One evening I was attending a course called Whole Life, when the leader of the course said something that reminded me of the teachings of Jesus in the Christian bible.

Having grown up in a traditional Christian home, I recalled that in the book of Matthew, there is a parable of an unforgiving servant who asked Jesus how many times he should forgive a person for sinning against him. Jesus’ response was to tell the servant to forgive seventy times seven. (I am paraphrasing of course.)

Upon recalling this teaching, I thought to myself, “Wow, that’s 490 times! I wonder if I can forgive 490 times!”  So I created a journal, much like the one offered here, that provided me with 7 lines of forgiveness for each page, with 70 pages (to equal 490 opportunities to forgive) and I began my journey of forgiveness.

The journey of forgiveness turned out to be one of the single most significantly healing things I have ever done!

Over the years I have shared the Forgiveness Manual and Journal with many people and I have seen the awesome power of forgiving and letting go of old painful feelings.

I have seen people who had great difficulty maintaining healthy relationships transform themselves into nurturing, joyful people that are a pleasure to be with and I have seen people who were frozen in time from the pain and fear of a past traumatic experience transform themselves into confident, happy people who were able to get on with the business of living!

Forgiveness is very personal. Each person has to do their own work; however, the Forgiveness Manual and Journal provides you with a good, solid process that will help you through your forgiveness work.

If you are doing forgiveness work related to something that feels like an “unforgivable” crime or action someone forced on you, please KNOW that forgiveness is NOT about condoning, excusing or justifying the bad behaviors of your tormentor. I once coached a woman who was sexually abused by her father when she was a child. She struggled with the idea of forgiving him because she was afraid that she would be saying that it was OK that he did that to her. Forgiveness work is for YOU…not THEM. Forgiveness is about clearing out the negative crap, goop and garbage the offender left behind when they contaminated your space. 

As for my own forgiveness work, I kept my Forgiveness Manual and Journal beside my bed and I tried to write in it every night. Most of the time I was forgiving the people I had spent years feeling angry and resentful towards, while other times I spent my time forgiving myself for all the things I had done to punish and torture myself. I allowed myself to write whatever I was feeling; if I was angry I let the anger spew out onto the page, if I was sad I let the sadness flow onto the page.

I wrote most every night – some nights were tougher than others – and I only had one rule for myself; I would always complete the page I was on before stopping for the night. Sometimes I would get stuck in the middle of a page and because of my rule, I would typically think of something else to forgive that would lead to my writing several more pages of even deeper forgiveness items.

Slowly I began to see subtle changes in the way I felt about other people and the way I felt about myself. I felt somehow lighter and happier, and I could tell that people seemed to be more relaxed around me. It felt good! I began feeling more and more joyful! I could see that in changing myself on the inside, it changed what I attracted in my outer life. When I forgave and released my inner anger, I stopped attracting angry people into my life. When I forgave myself for being unsupportive and abusive to myself, I stopped attracting unsupportive and abusive people into my life. Then…just when I thought I had seen the best of it, I began to have other people treating me like a role model and asking me how to start their own journey of forgiveness. It was nothing short of amazing!

It is many years later now, and with the value of hindsight, I can tell you that doing the forgiveness work created a true magnitude of positive changes in both my inner world and my outer world. So I offer this Forgiveness Manual and Journal to you in hopes that it helps you as much as it helped me!

It is my most sincere desire that this Forgiveness Manual and Journal helps you to find and resolve any inner negative feelings about yourself and/or others that you may be harboring and using as weapons for sabotaging your efforts to be successful.

In case you’re wondering, I never got to 490. I was probably about half way there when all my inner anger, resentment and sadness just lifted away! I still use my Forgiveness Manual and Journal for “spot cleaning”, so I keep it in a safe place so I’ll know where it is when I need it.

No matter what brought you to your own journey of forgiveness, one thing I can promise you is this; doing the forgiveness work will improve your life in unbelievable and wonderful ways!

Are you ready to forgive 490 times?

I hope you find joy and happiness on your journey!

Troyann

LifeWorks Training & Development