Reclaiming Your Dignity: No Forgiveness Required

This episode explores what it means to reclaim your dignity after harm—without requiring forgiveness, apology, or explanation. Jennifer shares her own profound shift in thinking about healing after harm.

Healing comes from reclaiming your role as the subject of your story, rather than remaining the object of what was done to you. Reclaiming dignity means remembering your worth, releasing unhelpful patterns, and choosing how you want to move forward, independent of others’ actions.

The core message: your dignity is unearned and non-negotiable. Healing begins when you stop waiting for others to repair what was broken and instead choose to lead your life from your own worth, values, and agency.

Takeaways

•  Dignity is inherent—it doesn’t need to be earned. 
•  Healing doesn’t require forgiveness or apology. 
•  Looking to others to affirm your worth keeps you stuck. 
•  Common reactions (blame, gossip, victimhood) block healing. 
•  Staying in the victim role limits growth. 
•  Shift from “this happened to me” → “what do I choose next?” 
•  This doesn’t excuse harm or abandon justice. 
•  Letting go of others’ limitations creates freedom. 
•  Lead from your true self—calm, clear, compassionate. 
•  Reclaiming dignity = choosing your next chapter.

Resources

• Christian Cooper, Better Living through Birding

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 this special season on healing from past hurt through forgiveness and its alternatives. In this episode, I’ll be talking about ways you can reclaim your dignity even if forgiveness is not palatable or possible right now.

It is no secret that I came to this work through my own hurt, through my own experience of harm. What I haven’t shared until now is the profound shift I experienced in my thinking after years of sitting with pain. I used to think that I could not heal without an apology, without accountability, without an explanation for why people did the things they did. I used to think that my healing was dependent on the actions of another person.

But that is not how it works. In this episode I’ll explain the shift that can actually lead to your healing, to your reclaiming your dignity.

The word reclaim comes from the Old French word meaning “to call back your hawk.” I love this word for healing after harm because it reminds us that we can call back our dignity, remembering that we are worthy and choosing how to act, how to proceed, as a person of worth and value. Reclaiming your dignity means remembering your worth, your value that was always yours but perhaps has been forgotten or has, to extend the metaphor, flown off beyond the trees, over the mountains. Even if our hawk has left us, she is still ours!

How do we go about calling her back, reclaiming our dignity? The first thing is to remind yourself that you have worth and value. No matter what has happened to you, no matter how others treated you, no matter what you’ve done, you are a person of worth. You were once a baby with value. You still have that same value. Believing this can be really hard for some people and not everyone is happy to hear this! Some people are so accustomed to feeling the opposite–that they are not worthy–that they need to hustle for, accomplish, produce, and earn their worth. It may actually be uncomfortable to own your worth as part of who you are and uncomfortable to shift to knowing, deeply, your own worth. It’s also possible that you’ve become accustomed to asking people to affirm your worth. 

If you position yourself as someone without worth, you may have successfully recruited others in your life who will persistently confirm that you are worthy. You may even have a relationship where that’s the entire dynamic. Here’s the thing, though, if you’re used to having other people affirm your worth for you. What happens when they’re having a bad day? Or they’re just not up to the task at a particular moment? This is an invitation to change that dance. I want to invite you to just take it as a given. Just accept it. Don’t argue with it or turn yourself inside out. You have worth. You just do. This is non-negotiable. Dignity is your unearned worth. Knowing this in your bones is the first step to healing after harm. And I know this is not a one-and-done…it can take time to learn and relearn this.

The second thing is to stop doing some of the things we naturally do after we’re hurt. Things like lashing out at the people who hurt us, often in ways we’ll later regret. It includes covering up our own mistakes. It includes righteous indignation (my personal favorite), which can feel so good in the moment but will actually block us from healing. It includes gossiping. It includes avoiding feedback, blaming others, or being a martyr. These are all natural reactions to being hurt. Most important, it includes sitting and stewing in your identity as a victim, often by telling your story of being harmed. 

Once you recognize the ways you’re tempted to act, your own go-to strategies, you can make a clear decision to change from these strategies to something else. This is easy to say and much much harder to do. I know, believe me I know. With deep compassion for yourself, make a commitment just for today to stop falling into your old patterns. 

The third and probably most important thing is to move from things having been done to you, that is, making yourself the object of other people’s actions or stories, to becoming the subject of your story, a story in which you choose what’s next, a story in which you make a commitment to the way it is you want your story to go. Something really bad happened to you. Your dignity was violated. Someone was careless or cruel or both. What happened was not right.

If you’ve been following along this season, you have learned the value of naming the elements of dignity that were violated. You have learned the value of writing your story out in a new way, of decreasing the heat in your story. You have learned about the importance of naming your emotions and feelings. Of naming your needs. Of growing positive emotions. If you haven’t already listened to the previous episodes in this season, I’d encourage you to do that before you start the work in this episode. 

What we’re talking about today is not easy. This work takes honest reflection about the strategies you’ve used to this point to be free of your hurt. What has been working? What hasn’t been working? It requires that you make a choice, that you make a pledge to yourself to shift yourself from the position of victim to the position of creator. You have the opportunity now, today, to turn the page from this most painful chapter of your life into the next part of your story.

Hey, I spent years sitting in the role of victim. I’ve spent countless hours talking about what they (the people who hurt me) had done to me. I told probably dozens of people what had happened to me but felt worse each time I did so. I became physically ill, I was unable to sleep, waking up all night, having flashbacks. I lost my liveliness, my joy. I am sure I was tiresome, even insufferable, to listen to. I was full of righteous indignation, which looks like this: “I would never have done that.” I fantasized that the people who hurt me would apologize, and I think I was waiting for that apology to heal.

The people who loved me were powerless to help me get unstuck. What helped me get unstuck was to realize that the people who hurt me were not going to apologize, that they were not going to come to me and offer great wisdom and heartfelt apologies, that they could not make things better. Only I could make the shift from being a victim to being a creator. 

There is status in being a victim. We gain sympathy and often care when we’re a victim. This can make it particularly hard to let go of this role. But we were not made to be victims. Being a victim leads us to live what Gareth Higgins calls a “diminished life.” We become and stay small, subject to the behaviors of others, to apologies that will likely never come. Whether these others are our parents, our colleagues, or a system like a workplace, giving up our role as creator, as author of our own life, puts others in a position that it’s likely they’ve not earned. 

Now if you haven’t had the opportunity to name what was wrong, to tell your story to someone who can validate your pain, if you haven’t named your emotions or developed a reservoir of positive emotions, it is possible that it’s too soon to shift from “done to me” to “I do.”

But when you’re ready, this shift allows us to move from being reactive to events to being responsive. The word respond comes from the Old French word “to pledge.” What pledge can you make right now? 

In Season 2 of The Dignity Lab, Sejal Shah talked about how telling her story in a widely read essay helped her become the subject of her story after having her dignity violated at work. Gisèle Pelicot, the French woman, now an icon, brutalized by her husband and others in her community, recently published her book A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides in which she claimed the position of subject, she told her story, shared her experiences, her life story, her choice to be identified by name in court in front of hundreds of people and the press. She reclaimed her dignity after unimaginable trauma. The birder Christian Cooper, who had the police called on him while birding in Central Park by a white woman whose dog was off leash, wrote a bestselling book on birding and has a Wikipedia page! Talk about becoming the subject of his story. Being the subject of our own story allows us to confront our own shame after hurt in a way that allows us to reclaim the narrative and thus our own dignity.  

Here’s an analogy that’s been helpful for others and perhaps will be for you too. Imagine reading a book in which something happens to the main character–as it does in nearly all good stories. It would be very odd if the character were to forget what had happened, if the character were to carry on unchanged. You might wonder if you’re reading the wrong book. You might wonder if another random story was cut and pasted into the one you were in the middle of. Because of course the character will be affected by the event. But if there were no movement beyond that event, if the character stayed in a play of hurt, despondency, and trauma, wouldn’t you wish for them to make a move? Yes, they will be changed, affected by what happened. And then what? How does the character move through the world after a loss, after harm, after trauma? What does she do to reclaim the position of subject in the story, rather than to remain in the position of someone to whom something was done?

Note that making this shift does not require that you let people off the hook or abandon your pursuit of justice. It does not invalidate that what happened was wrong and hurtful. It does not ask that you forget what happened. And it certainly does not require that you reconcile with the person or people who hurt you.

Rather, it does require acknowledging, and sometimes even accepting, that something bad happened and that, despite this, you don’t have to stay chained to the people who hurt you. It’s a move towards freedom from those people and that painful part of your life. It’s saying that you no longer will be defined by the harm done to you. It’s accepting the limitations of others, their lack of skill in meeting their own needs, the limitations of a system that doesn’t hold people accountable in the ways we would wish and then making a commitment to being the kind of person you want to be moving forward. It’s making a choice to lead from your true self, being calm, clear, curious, compassionate, confident, courageous, connected, and creative.

What about you? What about now? What would it make possible for you to reclaim your dignity, to call back your hawk? To accept that you have worth, to shift from your current strategies, those things we do when our dignity is violated, into reclaiming the subject position in your story?

If you’re listening and realizing you’ve been living as the object in everyone else’s story—waiting for an apology, an explanation, or a moment of justice before you’re allowed to move—this may be your turning point.​

If this feels like too much to do alone, I now have a few openings for people who feel a wholehearted yes to becoming the subject of their own story—not for staying in “maybe later.’”

If you’re ready to call back your hawk, you can go to www.jennifergriggs.com to schedule your consultation. We’ll look clearly at what has happened to you, what it has cost, and what your next chapter could be. If it’s right to work together, we’ll begin; if not, you will still leave with more clarity, more language, and more permission to stop abandoning yourself.

In the meantime, thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next week for our final episode this season on what’s next after doing this work. We’ll cover releasing a relationship versus reconciling with the person or people who hurt you and what to do if you’re still stuck. See you then.

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.”