This blog entry is about the book Radical Forgiveness by Colin Tipping. I think it’s a life-changing book, and I suggest that before you read this entry, you read the last one where I began writing about it. Tipping began Radical Forgiveness by telling the story of how he was able to help his sister Jill forgive her husband Jeff for spending all of his time with his daughter Larraine, which made Jill feel abandoned. As Colin introduced Jill to the process of Radical Forgiveness, she came to realize that one of her core negative beliefs—“I am not enough” (272)–which was running her life wasn’t true. Because of this, Jill became a different person. Tipping says that “forgiveness is a shift in energy,” (161), and Jill’s energy shifted. Her energy is no longer stuck.
After his experience with Jill, Tipping realized “that the process [he had used to help Jill see her reality differently} could be used as a form of help quite different from traditional psychotherapy and relationship counseling. “(3) So, he began to do Radical Forgiveness Therapy (79))Tipping tells us that RFT is less a therapy and more of a process of education.” (82) He also created “The Radial Forgiveness Worksheet” (257), which people could do on their own without going to a therapist. You can find this worksheet in his book and on his website “radicalforgiveness.com” The Radical Forgiveness process that Tipping created has five stages. Because Tipping created this five-stage process, he isn’t just writing about how important it is that we forgive. He is giving us a process for doing it. This is part of the reason that I think this book is life-changing.
The first stage in the Radical Forgiveness process is “telling the story” of what has upset you. You need to “tell your story as if you were telling someone else what happened or is happening, and tell it “totally from your victim standpoint.” (262) Write about the person or object upsetting you in the third person.
Jeff is abandoning me by focusing all his attention and love on his daughter Larraine—completely ignoring me… (263) Really confront the person. Instead of telling it to a person, you can also write it on the worksheet. Tipping says, “the story is where the pain resides.” (245)
The second stage is “feeling the feelings.” (224) Tipping says that “It is only when we give ourselves the permission to access our pain that our healing begins.” (224) Often, we don’t want to deal with the difficult feelings that arise, so we suppress them. Tipping says that “the power to heal is in the feelings—not in talking or thinking, not in affirmations, and not even in meditation if it involves shutting out feelings.” (239) If we don’t feel our feelings, our energy will get stuck. In order to heal, we have to free the stuck energy of held emotions by allowing them to move freely through the body as we tell our story. (241–242)
After you really feel your feelings, you are ready for third stage, which is to “collapse the story.” (226) This step, in which you list your interpretations of the event, is to recognize that most of the pain and suffering we are experiencing is the result of having magnified the situation in our mind and having then added a tremendous amount of meaning and interpretation to the facts of what actually happened. So, try to list every interpretation—everything that isn’t a fact- that you have added to your victim story. In Jill’s case, for example, the only part of her story that was a fact was that Jeff was spending all of his time consoling Larraine. Jill interpreted this to mean that Larraine was more important to Jeff than she was. And from there, she added that he didn’t love her, and then further that she was “not enough.”
In order to go to the next stage, I need to begin to share with you what Tipping believes is going on spiritually when we have these upsetting situations that he says are “essential to our growth.” In fact, Tipping says that “Radical Forgiveness is a spiritual philosophy that has practical application to people’s lives insofar as it gives them a spiritual perspective which they can apply, in the manner of self-help, to whatever problem or situation they are dealing with.” (82) In my next entry, I will tell you what Tipping says is going on spiritually.
