EP #13 Forgiveness, Victim Mentality, and Taking Your Power Back

What if the thing keeping you stuck isn’t what happened to you — but the power you’re still giving it?

In this episode, Kindyl gets real about forgiveness, victim mentality, emotional power, and personal responsibility. This is not about pretending the past didn’t happen. It’s not about saying what happened was okay. It’s about understanding how unresolved pain, withheld forgiveness, and staying emotionally tied to the people or situations that hurt you can keep you trapped in the same patterns for years.

If you’ve ever felt like your past still has a grip on your emotions, your decisions, your relationships, or your ability to move forward, this episode will challenge you to look at forgiveness in a completely different way.

Inside this episode:

• Why withholding forgiveness keeps you in victim mode
• The biggest misconception people have about forgiveness
• How unforgiveness affects your emotional state, choices, and future
• Why closure from the other person usually does not heal the pain
• The difference between blame and responsibility
• How taking your power back changes the direction of your life
• Why forgiveness is not weakness, approval, or forgetting
• What it really means to stop letting the past decide who you become
  
  

This episode is for anyone who is ready to stop carrying pain that no longer belongs to them, release the emotional weight of the past, and step into a more empowered future.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Change doesn't start with what you do. Change starts with who you are. I'm your host, Kendall Keaton, and this is the identity advantage. All right, so I'm gonna give you fair warning that today's episode might step on some nerves. I honestly, it's been something I've kind of avoided talking about, but I'm tired of skirting certain issues. So if you don't have your big girl panties on or your big boy pants on, whatever version that works for you, just go ahead and put them on now. Because I'm going to tell you something today that you might not like. Some of you might be totally fine hearing it, but I guarantee you it's going to trigger some of you. I'm not saying any of this to shame you. I'm saying it because somebody has to love you enough to tell you the truth. I had somebody in my life who was willing to tell me the hard things when I did not want to hear them. I did not like it at the time, but I'm telling you, I might not be here had she not told me to straighten up. So I'm gonna love you enough today to tell you some of the hard shit. We're gonna talk about two things today are gonna come up. Forgiveness is gonna come up, and victim mentality is going to come up. If you have not forgiven the anyone, if you are withholding forgiveness at all, even in the smallest portion, if you have not forgiven the people or the situations that have hurt you, you are still living in victim mode. Now, I want you to hear me out before you just turn me out or turn me off. I want you to hear me out. Because I'm not, we've all gone through shit. I am not coming to you from somebody who has not had some massive things in my past to forgive. Today's not the day I'm sharing those, but I just want you to know that this does not come from an empty place. I have had some big T trauma. I don't care if you've had big T trauma, if you've had little T trauma, if you've had a whole bunch of little T traumas that just added up all up on top of each other. Any sort of trauma can affect anyone in any certain way and can be detrimental. But this is not an empty message from someone who's not had to go through it. I just want you to know that. I want you to try to bring to mind, if you don't already, if this didn't, if this triggered you, you already have somebody. Guarantee you have somebody or something. If you are even a little bit triggered by this. So I want you to bring that person or that situation, whatever it is, I want you to take a moment and bring that top of mind. The misconception that people have around forgiveness, and the reason that people don't want to forgive is that, and I thought this for so long, is that if I forgive, it will make this person think that it was okay. If I forgive, it lets them off the hook. If I forgive, it allows them to move on to their life. And why do they get to why do they deserve that? Why should they get to move on with their life pain free and leave me to deal with all this shit? Why should I forgive them and let them off the hook? This is why we hold on to forgiveness. This is why we deny it, is because we think we're punishing the other person. And I'm here to tell you you are not. The person who withholds the forgiveness is just as emotionally distraught as the person you're not forgiving, if not more. Some of you don't even speak to this person anymore. They're not even in your life. They might not even know that you haven't forgiven them. They they might already be off the hook. They might be living their life just free as a bird. You withholding forgiveness is not affecting their life one single bit. It is only affecting yours. For years and years and years, I could not make myself forgive the things that happened to me in my past. And because I could not forgive them, I was also blaming so much of my situation and my circumstance on that person, on those occurrences, on those things that happened, on that trauma. And all that did was disempower me. All that did was take away every single ounce of power I had over my emotions, over my choices, over my life, and it gave it all to this person. When you withhold forgiveness, you are giving that person, that situation, all the power over your emotional state. You and your emotional state determines all of the actions that you take, right? We've talked about that. Your emotions create motivations, create your actions. So when lack of forgiveness is causing you to remain in emotional state, in an emotional state that's causing you to take actions you don't much care about, that means that you are letting that person, that person, that thing that's top of your mind right now, you're letting them choose your actions. By withholding forgiveness, we are letting the people who hurt us determine our future. Because we think if we forgive them, their life is gonna get better, and they don't deserve that. But is our life getting any better by holding on to it? I mean, if you're really honest about it, is it? When we withhold forgiveness, it is like we are drinking a poison and expecting the other person to die from it. That's what it is. We think we're hurting them and really we're just hurting ourselves. And we rationalize it and tell ourselves that they don't for deserve our forgiveness. They don't deserve it. But hear me out. Whether or not they deserve it is beside the point. They might be a totally disgusting, awful person. Whether or not they deserve the forgiveness makes no difference. What I want you to ask yourself is do you deserve to stop drinking poison? Because you've been drinking it and they're not an idiot. And if the person that you can't forgive has already left this world, if they are already dead, what in the world are we doing? Because there's this feeling that we need this person to take full responsibility for this. And when this person has already gone, either they're out of your life and you don't have contact with them anymore, or they are dead. They have left this physical world. There's this lack of closure that is really hard for some people to get over. And I get it. I really, really, really, really do. But I'm going to tell you from the other side of things that I have had that person who hurt me come and take responsibility for it. I've had that closure that so many people want. And I'm here to tell you it doesn't make a bit of difference. It didn't make it feel better, it didn't go away. Nothing that anybody says now or in the future can ever change the past. Even when, and those of you who have had this, those of you who have had that person who hurt you actually come and apologize, I'm going to tell you at first it's actually really hard to accept. It's not actually a good feeling because you kind of want them to hurt. It's like really, you just want to be angry at them. And when they apologize, it becomes really hard to stay angry. But even once you get past that point, even if you were to make amends, nothing will ever take away what happened. Nothing will change the past. And you withholding forgiveness is not changing the past. Them coming up and saying, I'm sorry, I take complete full responsibility. I was a total jackass. I was an absolute disgusting piece of a human being. Nothing that could ever come out of this person's mouth will ever take what happened to you and erase it. There is one thing that can start to winken, weaken that attachment you have to all these emotions and all these feelings that you feel when you think about the past, when you think about this thing that you do not want to forgive. And I know you have all heard that forgiveness is not about the other person, that it's about you, but that is really hard on a surface level to understand. When you've been hurt really bad, you hear that and you say, bullshit. I hope that person burns in hell. I will never forgive that person. But I want you to think about the way you feel when you are holding on to those emotions. And know that every emotion you have is creating an imprint on your emotional state of being, on who you are as a person, about in how you show up in relationships, how you show up at work, how you show up in stressful situations, how you accept happiness into your life. I guarantee you, if you are someone who is holding on to forgiveness, you also have a hard time holding on to joy and contentment. You might feel it, but you probably have a hard time holding on to it. And it's because at the root of withholding forgiveness is still this need for revenge. There is hatred. And that is a heavy, heavy feeling that hatred will never hurt the other person. The reason forgiveness is for you and not for the other person, it's because you care enough about you to stop having the hatred affect you and your life and those around you. And you are ready to start holding on to happy. But happy lives in a totally different frequency range than hatred, revenge, revenge. And when you have hatred in your heart, if you have hatred in your spirit, if you have even an ounce of hatred or a want for revenge against someone, it is a heavy frequency that keeps you from holding on to happy long enough to make happy and joy and contentment your constant state of being. And I am telling you that no amount of forgiveness that you are holding is keeping that other person in a state of hatred. They're not hating you because you aren't forgiving them. They might feel sad over it, they might be depressed over it. It's not your concern. And as much as you think the forgiveness lets them off the hook, I'll tell you what the forgiveness does. Forgiving them puts the weight on them. And now they have to deal with that awful, awful feeling of having to forgive themselves. If you have ever had to try to forgive yourself for something, oh my God, that is hard. I still have things in my life that I struggle with and I've had to forgive myself for, and still not as much anymore. I will tell you, it got a lot easier once I forgave. But forgiving yourself is so much harder than having to forgive somebody else. But that person you are holding forgiveness from, you're actually helping them by keeping that forgiveness from them. Because as long as you don't forgive, as long as they know that you have hatred towards them, you are allowing them to focus some of their energy on you, and they don't have to focus it on themselves. Once you release it from you, all of the weight is now on them. You are energetically holding some of that weight off of them and helping them. You think you are hurting them, but you are not. You're holding some of that energy for them. Now, I don't mean to make this sound like forgive them to make it harder on them. But this is why forgiveness is for you and not for them. Nothing about you forgiving them is going to make life easier in their corner. Now they have to deal with it on their own. They don't have you holding any of that energy anymore. You released it and you said, hey, here it is. Do with it what you will. Forgive yourself, don't forgive yourself. But I'm done carrying any of that anymore. The emotional weight that you let go of when you finally forgive is incredible. And it opens up your energy, it opens up your capacity to do greater things when you let that go. We only have capacity so much, so you need to choose wisely on what you're allowing into your emotional frequencies. And one thing that I wish somebody had told me a lot sooner, I think I came to it on my own. I don't even know where I heard this at, or if I just decided. But that I could forgive the person and not forgive the thing that happened. What happened was not okay. It was not okay. What happened to you, whatever it was, was not okay. You can forgive the person and let them deal with it and still acknowledge that the deed was bad. They can be two separate things. Now, I don't know if this helps you at all, but I am gonna tell you that something that really helped me as far as people who hurt are people who have been hurt. And I'm not trying to make excuses for anyone, but I will tell you that one thing, one thing that helped me was to say if this person could do this, what must have happened in their life to them for them to be even capable of something like that? And come to find out there were some pretty horrific things that happened to this person. When you are broken and you have been broken and beat and tore down all of your life, it becomes very easy to break other people, to do those things to other people. Broken will breed broken until somebody stops the cycle, and you can choose to do that. Whoever hurt you was probably hurt. Does that make it okay? Absolutely not. But I guarantee you, if you hold on to that, if you continue to be the victim, if you continue, and I I am saying this in all love, I know this sounds harsh. I know it does, but please take this with love. If you continue to allow yourself to be the victim and to be hurt and to blame anything in your life right now on that situation, on that person, you are putting yourself at risk to hurt someone else. Emotionally. Now, maybe not physically, if you have been abused, I'm not saying you're gonna turn around and abuse someone. But I know that I emotionally cut myself off for my children early on in their lives because I could not let go of what happened to me. And because of that, it stunted my emotional growth. It stunted my emotional wellness. And I started to see that it was affecting the way I was as a parent. And I could not let that happen. I could look back and I could see the cycles. So many of us are living in generational cycles. Somebody has to break it. Somebody has to be the bigger person who finally says, you know what? I am forgiving, not because I care about you, not because I care about the person who hurt me. You can care about that person. It's totally fine too. But that's not the reason I'm forgiving. I'm forgiving because I care about myself. I care about my emotional wellness enough and about how that emotional wellness affects the people that I take care of that I'm willing to let this weight go and let somebody else deal with it. Forgive because you care about yourself and because you care around the people you care about the people around you. Forgive because the weight that you are holding is not yours and you are carrying that for somebody else right now. And when you do that, you are actually giving them power. Power that they don't deserve, power that they have not earned, and weight that is theirs to carry. This is what it means when people say forgiveness is not for the other person, it is for you. It is not a shallow statement. Even though when you very first hear that, it it really does. It can almost make you angry when you first hear that, if you've gone through some big trauma, if you have some big forgiving to do. And that's why I know some of this might have been triggering for some people. But I'm not here to make you comfortable. I didn't start this podcast because I wanted to make people feel great about where they were and not make any change. I started this show because there are things that need to be said and there are people who need to hear them. And somebody showed me tough love in my life when I needed it. And I'm giving that to you right now. If you are the one who needed to hear this, you can feel it right now. Stop poisoning your own system and hoping it affects them somewhere down the line, because it's not. It's just not. And I'm gonna tell you what will happen when you release that. Because when you get out of the victim mode, there is another harder step. I want to say harder step, but another step that comes after this. Once you release that and you forgive them and say, okay, you know what? What you did was not okay, but I'm gonna forgive it. Now, what you have to do on your end is totally up to you, but I'm not carrying this weight anymore. What happened, happened. Now, up until this point, I know that in my life there were so many things about me and how I was that I blamed on my past. I am this way emotionally because I was hurt. Because I went through trauma at a young age. This is just the way I am because this happened to me. There was a lot of how would I be different if this hadn't happened? How would I be a different person had I not had to go through with that? I would have been different, absolutely. But I'll tell you what, I probably would not be speaking to you right now. I couldn't speak on forgiveness if I never had anything to forgive. Maybe that is something I was supposed to go through, maybe it wasn't. But I can look at it and say, okay, you know what? That happened, and I have learned so much from it. And I'm going to choose from this point on not to let that circumstance have control over who I choose to be. Once you forgive, and I'm not saying forgive and forget, we never forget, nothing ever changes the past. But once you forgive and you release, the other thing you have to release is the hold that that situation, that that trauma has over your life and who you get to be. You no longer get to blame that, and this is hard. We don't get to blame those circumstances anymore for the things that we choose to do. It was not my fault what happened. It is not your fault that those things happened to you. But once we come of age, once we become adults, once we become aware that we have control over our emotions, maybe that's this point for you right now. Then this is the point at which you have to start taking responsibility. There was a point at which I had to start taking responsibility for my life and my choices. And I could no longer blame anything that happened before. I had to say, you know what? It was not my fault. But now, every choice I make from this point on is my responsibility. And there is a big difference, I want to tell you, between blame and responsibility. You are not blaming yourself for anything and everything. You are taking responsibility. You have an ability to respond from the moment you decide that your life is under your hands and not the person who hurt you, not the past that you didn't get to choose, not the child upbringing that you didn't get to choose, not the trauma that you didn't ask for, none of that gets to dictate your choices from now on. Even if it's from an emotion that stems from that circumstance, it's still your choice. Do you want to maintain that emotion, or do we want to work on that, choose better thoughts, choose better beliefs that can create a different emotional state for you so that you can choose better and you can do better and you can show those around you that there's a better life? So that you can set a better example for those who look up to you. From this moment on, we have a responsibility. For all of our choices and everything we create. When you get out of victim mode and you get in that mode, that is true empowerment. That is what empowerment is. It's taking responsibility for the good and the bad. Because if you can say, okay, I did create my life, I am the one who made the choices to get myself where I am at. Nobody else had control over that. Yes, other people did things. Yes, I reacted to those things. Yes, they reacted to the way I reacted. Yes, there were some cycles that happened. But I chose every choice from my adult life on. I'm not saying you have to talk responsibility for all the things that you happened when you were a kid. But as an adult, when we say, okay, I am taking responsibility for every choice I made, and I'm no longer saying, well, that's not my fault. I only did that because this happened to me. And so I feel like this, and that's just what happens, and that's just the way I am. No, we don't get to do that anymore. As long as you are doing those things, you are living in victim mode. And we will continue to do this. I'm not saying I'm not somebody who ever lives in victim mode. I find myself periodically throughout the day. Anytime you blame a circumstance for something that you go through, you blame a circumstance, you blame a situation, you blame another person for anything, you're living in victim mode and you're taking away your own power. This is not about perfection. This particular conversation is about you finding one thing that you have not forgiven that you are allowing power over your life, and then saying, from now on, I am taking responsibility for everything good in my life and everything bad. Because if I created everything I have, no matter how awful you might think your life is or how great you think your life is right now, I don't care how down in the dumps you are, as soon as you say, and I'm telling you, I have been down in the dumps. I have been down at the bottom. And it's at that point when I said, you know what? I did create all of this that I actually felt empowered. Because you know what? If I created all of this, then I get the choice to create something new. But as long as you are giving power to all the circumstances and the situations and the people who have hurt you, as long as you are giving them the power, then you will never feel like you have the power to change anything. You will start things and you will stop things. You will have an idea and you will talk yourself out of it. You will have a dream and you will tell yourself it's stupid. You will knock yourself down over and over and over again because you will never have true empowerment over your life as long as you are giving power to somebody else by withholding forgiveness. If this is hitting you and you need a place to start, I want to tell you, I just start here and just ask yourself. The first question, which you probably already have the answer to if this has hit home for you, is who or what am I still giving power to? Who is it that I'm still allowing to have power over my emotions and therefore they have power over my actions or my lack of actions? Now ask yourself, what would change in my life? What would change in your life if you stopped giving that person, giving that situation power? What if you took the reins back? What would change in your life if you stopped giving them or that the power? If you still feel resistance, ask yourself, what am I afraid that forgiveness means? Because the only reason you're gonna have resistance against this is the meaning that you've given to forgiveness. For a lot of people, that's the real issue. The meaning that we've attached to forgiving. You need to know that forgiveness is not weakness, forgiveness is not approval, it's not saying, hey, that was okay, don't worry about it. It's not pretending it doesn't happen or it didn't happen, it's not forgetting, it's not living in denial. Forgiveness is accepting that you cannot change the past, and that you are deciding that you get control over your future, not that person in the past. Because that's the thing, too, is that you're not giving that person now control over your future and your actions. You are giving the person that hurt you, that existed however many years ago. Think about that person at the time that they were doing whatever it is that they did. That's the person you're giving control over your life right now. How amazing would it feel to look at that person and say, hey, you don't own me anymore. Bye-bye. What you did was not okay. But I forgive you because you obviously have some issues that you need to deal with, but I don't have to be a part of that anymore. You go deal with that on your own. That is your weight to carry. Here you go, hand it over to them, and now you are free to detach yourself from the past and all of the emotions connected to it. And now you are the only one who gets to decide your emotional state and your actions for the future. That is power, that is responsibility that sets you up to choose and to be how you want to be. It's the first step to stop living in reaction mode, to stop living in blame and to start living in choice, in your choice of what you choose for your future and not what that other person in the past is dictating for how you are and what you do. Something that I have said today has hit a nerve. I'm sorry and I'm also not sorry. Because maybe it was meant to. Maybe something needed to jar you out of whatever it is that you thought you were holding on to. Whatever power you thought you had by not forgiving, I hope that you realize now that the only way to actually have that power is to forgive. We all have something to forgive. And it might be big, it might be small, and everybody's interpretation of what big forgiveness is or small forgiveness is is very different. Regardless, we all have something to forgive. I had a very, very large thing in my past to forgive. But there are still other things that I'm working on, whether it's forgiving someone else or forgiving myself. Nobody is perfect, so there's always things that are gonna come up, and this is something that we're gonna constantly deal with. But the lack of forgiveness is attached to hatred, it's attached to anger, and so you just have to decide if you want to be attached to those emotions or not. Because once you let them go, you put that on the other person's plate. And as long as you're holding on to it, you could be allowing them to not have to face it. How much, however much you think they are being affected by you not forgiving them, they're not. Regardless of what you choose, they've had to move on, whether it's this world or the next world. The pain you think you are causing, you are only causing yourself. The power you think you hold, you are only giving to them. You don't have to forgive the act, but you can forgive the person. It is time to let it go. And when you do, I am telling you, you will feel so much power over your own life, over your own circumstance. You will feel the agency to actually make change, and you will feel so much lighter. And I want that for you. I want that for every single one of you listening. Don't be afraid to share this with somebody that you think needs to hear it. Somebody who's holding on to pain that is not their own. Somebody who deserves better. You deserve better. It's time to let yourself have it.

SPEAKER_01 30:18

Thank you so much for listening. And if something you heard today made an impact or changed the way you think somehow, then share it with somebody you care about. Because sometimes it's that one moment, that one idea that changes everything. And until next time, remember if you want to do something you've never done, you have to become someone you've never been. That is the identity of Vanton.