Dignity, Forgiveness, & the Alternatives to Forgiveness

In this episode of the Dignity Lab, Jennifer Griggs explores the concept of dignity in the context of forgiveness and its alternatives. She discusses how understanding dignity can aid in healing from past hurts, emphasizing the importance of validating one's own experiences and recognizing the elements of dignity that may have been violated. She also covers the ways in which taking accountability can, if applicable, can further healing.

Takeaways

• Dignity is your inherent worth or value.
• Understanding dignity aids in healing even if forgiveness does not appeal.
• Dignity is vulnerable to harm and trauma.
• Naming dignity elements helps validate personal pain.
• Validating experiences confirms their authenticity.
• Accountability is a key element of dignity.
• Recognizing personal agency can empower healing.
• Accountability helps make sense of personal hurt.

Exploring what it means to live and lead with dignity at work, in our families, in our communities, and in the world. What is dignity? How can we honor the dignity of others? And how can we repair and reclaim our dignity after harm? Tune in to hear stories about violations of dignity and ways in which we heal, forgive, and make choices about how we show up in a chaotic and fractured world. Hosted by physician and coach Jennifer Griggs.

For more information on the podcast, please visit www.thedignitylab.com.
For more information on podcast host Dr. Jennifer Griggs, please visit https://jennifergriggs.com/.
For additional free resources, including the periodic table of dignity elements, please visit https://jennifergriggs.com/resources/.

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Transcript

This is The Dignity Lab, a podcast that seeks to define dignity, its violations, and its reclamation. No matter who you are, no matter what you’ve done, no matter what’s happened to you, you can reclaim your dignity.

Hosted by physician, narrative medicine practitioner, and leadership coach, Dr. Jennifer Griggs.

This season focuses on healing from past hurts through forgiveness and its alternatives.

Today’s episode is a dose of dignity, a solo, bite-sized episode that focuses on living and leading with dignity.

Hello and welcome to the Dignity Lab and to the special season on forgiveness and its alternatives. What is dignity and what does it have to do with forgiveness? What role does dignity play in healing without having to forgive? 

In this episode, I'll be talking about dignity specifically in the context of forgiveness and the alternatives forgiveness. In this episode, I'll be talking about dignity specifically in the context of forgiveness and the alternatives to forgiveness as you heal from things that have happened to you. 

For me, understanding dignity was the key to understanding forgiveness. If you've already listened to previous episodes of our podcast, you may recall that dignity is your inherent worth or value. Unlike respect, which has to be earned, dignity is your birthright. Our dignity is essential. Nelson Mandela wrote, no power on this earth can destroy the thirst for human dignity. As essential as dignity is, however, it's also vulnerable to harm. Whether these harms are small bruises or deep trauma.

We are wired to detect these violations of our dignity. When someone violates our dignity, we have responses in our bodies and in our emotions, which in turn are felt. When someone violates our dignity, we have responses in our body that can get converted to emotions and then feelings. And we also may have certain things we do, like avoid conflict or lashing out at the person who hurt us. Understanding the elements of dignity and naming the elements of dignity that were affected is powerful. And it gives us words to explain why we were, and perhaps still are, hurt. 

The first reason for me that understanding dignity can be so helpful in the forgiveness and healing process is that it helps us understand why we've been hurt. It can help us validate our own experience and our own suffering.

Here are the elements of dignity as identified by Dr. Donna Hicks. Acceptance of identity, inclusion, safety, understanding, recognition, acknowledgement, being given the benefit of the doubt, fairness, accountability, and autonomy. If you want to learn more about these elements, we invite you to listen to our interview with Dr. Hicks from season one, or to the short episode from season four titled, Start Here, Dignity from Definition to Reclamation. 

It's possible that you have had your pain validated with great skill and compassion, or if you're like most of us, you've received all kinds of other responses, things like You need to move on, or They didn't mean to, or, or at least you have fill in the blank or At least you have [fill in the blank]. Truth be told, most of us don't know how to validate other people's pain because first, we haven't had our own pain validated. Second, we're so uncomfortable seeing others in pain that we find it hard to sit with them in their suffering. And third, we may have never learned how to validate another person's experience with pain.

As an aside, this wouldn't be the Dignity Lab and I wouldn't be your host if I didn't describe the origin and meaning of the word validate. Validate comes from the past participle of the medieval Latin word validis, meaning strong, effective, and powerful. When first used in English in the 1600s, to validate meant to make something legally valid. Today, validate is used more often to mean to confirm the authenticity or correctness of something. If you have your experience validated, it means you've been confirmed that this was an authentic real experience. The responses that you may have heard or perhaps even said to another person actually undermine the truth of experience if they're not a validation of that experience.

What if you could validate your own experience? If you could name your hurt and which elements of dignity were violated? Naming the aspects of dignity that have been stomped on is a good first step to validating your own pain, your own experience and its impact on you and your life and the first step towards healing. Here's what it might look like. You can say to yourself and for yourself, of course that hurt, my identity wasn't accepted, or I was excluded, or I felt unsafe, or No one took accountability for what happened, or My autonomy was violated. It's no wonder I'm hurting. I wasn't given the benefit of the doubt. Basically, you can be on call for yourself when you need to be reminded of the ways your dignity was violated on the path to validation.

In my own experience, I found that by developing the vocabulary, first becoming deeply familiar with the very notion of dignity, and then understanding the elements of dignity that were violated, I was able to make sense of why what happened to me had the effect of being punched in the gut and making me feel so hurt and so betrayed. There was something so clarifying about being able to name exactly what elements were violated. I had clarity that allowed me to make sense of my own visceral reaction. We are unlikely to know why people do the things they do, but at least we can understand why it hurts. And in my experience of working with people who have been deeply hurt, this is an important first step towards healing, whether through forgiveness or not.

The second reason that understanding dignity is so important in healing is further down the walk towards healing. Recall that accountability is one of the elements of dignity. It's one that I group under the “justice” umbrella. At some point, you may be able to lean into your own accountability for at least part of what happened. 

I have to stop here. Please understand that this is not an invitation to blame or shame yourself. This is not to say it was your fault or you caused your own suffering. In addition, you may have done absolutely nothing to contribute to what happened. But it is often the case that we did have some agency in the situation leading up to the harm, some need we were trying to meet, whether skillfully or not. 

And furthermore, this is also not to say in any way that what the other person or other people did is okay. But the shift that happens when we can soften ourselves to seeing our role in a situation can help us feel less like a powerless victim. I made the best, you made the best choice you could in that moment, but you did make a choice. In our hurt and our anger and our suffering, it's easy to forget that. 

For me, when I was able to step back and look at my role, a mistake I made with no ill intent, things started to make a tiny bit more sense. And I felt I had more control over how to move forward. There were some steps in the dance that I had taken part in. 

Finally, understanding dignity and the ways we reclaim our dignity opens a door to healing without forgiveness if forgiveness isn't your thing. When we reclaim our dignity, we move from a state of done to me, that is, they did this to me, to choosing how to move forward. Focusing on our choices going forward after harm can help us shed the harm, leaving it behind like a skin we've outgrown, emerging into a response rather than a reaction. We can rewrite our story from being the object of the story to being the subject of the story.

We can, after all, control only how we respond. We cannot, however much we would wish to, change the past. If we live in reaction to the harm, we remain chained to the perpetrator and to our story of hurt, betrayal, resentment being less than. And if we can, if we can focus on our chosen way of living, loving, and growing, we can reclaim our dignity. The entire second season of the Dignity Lab is about ways we reclaim our dignity after harm, and we'd invite you to listen or re-listen to that season now.

How about you? In what ways can naming the elements of dignity help you make sense of why you're hurting? If you know someone who's hurting, can you see the elements that were violated? Once you practice a little bit, you may start to see the world and its conflicts through the lens of dignity. 

And what about accountability? In what ways does recognizing your part however small, however well-intentioned, help you make sense of what happened to you. If you played no role in the big hurt that brought you to your podcast. If you played absolutely no role in the big hurt that brought you to this podcast, what about some of the smaller things that have happened in your life?

How can the idea of reclaiming your worth, your value, no matter who you are, no matter what you've done, no matter what's happened to you, help you heal even without forgiveness?

If you know someone who's hurting and might benefit from this episode, would you consider sharing it with them? And if this was helpful to you, please rate and review us. Thank you as always for listening and we'll see you next time.

This has been The Dignity Lab with Dr. Jennifer Griggs.

If you have experienced a dignity violation or have a dignity dilemma and want to be a guest on our show, contact us through our website, www.thedignitylab.com. Guests may remain anonymous. 

And If you’re a leader wanting to up level your leadership with a small community of like-minded people, visit our website thedignitylab.com to learn more about the Dignity Lab (yes, the same name), our group program for leaders.

Our website and the show notes have downloadable resources that you can access from anywhere.

More information about any of our guests can be found in show notes for that episode. 

This season of The Dignity Lab is produced by me, Vanessa Aron. Pete Carty is our audio engineer and sound designer. Chase Miller composed our theme music.

This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional advice, diagnosis, or treatment. The content discussed is intended to explore and raise awareness about dignity. Sensitive topics may be discussed that could evoke strong emotions; discretion is advised, and listeners are encouraged to engage with the material with empathy."

Remember, “...be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the Universe, no less than the trees and the stars.”