You're Forgiving the Wrong Person

There is at least one moment in every person’s life where they say the right things out loud, but silently believe something completely different. Usually, it’s harmless—like saying you’re "fine" when you’re actually a ball of stress. But sometimes, it’s about the grudges we hold. 

We all keep a list of the people who have wronged us, waiting for apologies that may never come. But in this episode of Better Beliefs, we uncover a different, older list—the one with our own name on it. It's the tally sheet of our regrets, our shame, and the times we didn't show up for ourselves. 

Joining the show is author, podcast host, and spiritual coach Rachel Harrison. Rachel shares her powerful personal journey through a chaotic family dynamic, codependency, and alcoholism, detailing the exact moment she realized that healing her life didn't start with changing the people around her. It started in the mirror. 

In this episode, we explore:

• The Trap of Transactional Forgiveness: Why waiting for an apology keeps your peace of mind hostage. 
• The Physical Toll of Resentment: Fascinating data from the Stanford Forgiveness Project on how holding grudges literally makes us sick. 
• What Codependency Really Is: Understanding how "control disguised as love" drains our energy. 
• Spiritual Forgiveness: How to take the judgment off your past so you can finally step into your present. 
• The Power of Self-Compassion: Why beating yourself up at 2:00 AM doesn't protect you—it just keeps you stuck. 

The person you are becoming can't meet you halfway until the person you used to be stops blocking the road. It’s time to put down the weight you were never supposed to carry forever. 

✨ CONNECT WITH RACHEL:

• Read her book: Grab a copy of Rachel's best-selling book, Recover Your Soul, on her website: https://www.recoveryoursoul.net/
• Listen & Learn: Check out Rachel’s podcast and explore her coaching programs: https://www.recoveryoursoul.net/

🎵 SHOW CREDITS:

• Written, Edited, & Produced by: Brent Kocal
• Show Ownership: Better Beliefs is owned by 6350 Ventures 
• Cover Art: Jenny H Designs 
• Original Opening Music: Lonely Ramblers 
• Additional music credits:
  • "Space Time Thought" by CTRL-S
  • "Lu sciccareddu" by TEO
  • "Orange Lullaby" by Nitzan Rom
  • "Above the Clouds" by Theater of Delays
  • "This Must Be Love" by Rynn
  • "Oh Yeah, Life" by Just for Kicks
  • "Contemplative Question" by The Tennessee Pistols

SUPPORT THE SHOW: If this episode resonated with you, please take a moment to rate, review, and share it with someone who needs to practice a little self-forgiveness today. 

Watch the Video Version of This Episode: https://youtu.be/T_OOTCt5Bmk

Transcript

0:00

The person you most need to forgive isn't the one who hurt you. I know that sounds totally backwards, and right now you probably got a name in your head, somebody you're still waiting on an apology from. But that's not the grudge that's costing you. Today, you'll rethink what forgiveness actually is, and how putting down one thing you didn't even know you were carrying can change a lot more than how you feel. Let's get into the There's at least one moment in every person's life where they say the right things out loud, but they silently believe something completely different. Most of this is harmless. It's actually around things that we don't wanna get into, like when somebody asks you how your day is going and you say, "Fine," even though you're a ball of stress. But sometimes it's about things we're not ready to confront, especially when it comes to the grudges we hold. We all have a list of people who've wronged us, the family member who said that thing at Thanksgiving six years ago, or the friend who bailed when we needed them. Maybe it was a boss who took credit for the win when you did all the work. Now, we try to tell ourselves we've let it go, that what happened in the past stays in the past, but the truth is we carry most of it with us. And when we think about forgiveness, that list of people, that's exactly what we think about. Specifically, is it time to cross a name off of it? We think about whether they've earned it, and we think about whether we even owe them that. Here's the thing. That's not the list that's costing us the most. There's another list. It's longer, and it's older, and almost every name on it is our own. It's like a tally sheet keeping track of the times we've stayed when we should've left, or the times we've left when we should've stayed. It keeps track of the words we said that we'd give anything to take back, and the words we didn't say when somebody needed to hear them. It keeps track of the years we've wasted, the people we've hurt, and the version of ourselves we became when we weren't really paying attention. We don't really think of that as holding a grudge against ourselves. Instead, we like to call it regret or shame, and on the times it taught us something, we like to call it growth. But no matter what we call it, the weight of it is the same weight, and it's the weight we've been dragging around for way too long. The question of this episode isn't really who do you need to forgive? The question is, when was the last time you forgave yourself? we're gonna talk about forgiveness, I think forgiveness is one of the most important parts of us being free, and it's free of our own suffering and our own way that we see things. Because forgiveness is the part that stops saying, "You did this to me," and you start saying, "This happened to me, That's Rachel Harrison, an author, a podcast host, and a spiritual coach who spent years learning the difference between forgiving the people around her and forgiving herself. Welcome to Better Beliefs. What if the only thing standing in your way is what you believe about yourself, about the world around you? Thousands of people have faced that very same question and discovered the power to shift reality itself. I'm Brent Kocal and on Better Beliefs, I tell the stories of real people who changed everything by first changing their minds To fully understand Rachel's story, it'll help if you understand how she grew up. For starters, there was no yelling in her house, no conflict. It was what you might imagine when you have a single Buddhist mother who raised her without the noise that most of us just take for granted. Then when Rachel grew up, she got married. Her husband, Rich, came from the opposite side of the proverbial tracks. Alcoholic home, lots of fighting, parents divorced when he was three. But as a child, he didn't look at that as a fight. To him, intensity was love and conflict was connection. For Rachel, though, it looked a lot more like war. It was a battle, and it was a battle that was complicated because he saw our lives very different than I did They had two boys. Rich and her oldest son developed a complicated relationship, which Rachel describes as verbal abuse. Not to mention, her and Rich were fighting a lot, and she stood in the middle of all of it, trying to hold it all together. She started drinking just to cope with everything, and it turned into her escape. So there was a lot of very real painful situations happening in my house that I just wanted peace, love, and happiness. I was raised by a Buddhist mom. I didn't know how to be in complexity. And so all of this intensity, I was codependently people-pleasing, trying to triangulate and make everybody not be unhappy, and it's impossible. It's literally impossible to do that. She just mentioned codependency. In case you haven't heard that term before, it's what happens when you make other people's feelings your responsibility, when their happiness becomes your measurement for whether you're doing it right, and when fixing them becomes the way you avoid looking at yourself. In researching this episode, I came across Melanie Beattie. She's an author who did foundational work on codependency in households where addiction was present. She wrote a book in nineteen eighty-six where she makes the case that codependency is really control disguised as love. And that's why, with some distance from those chaotic days, Rachel sees she was really not addicted to alcohol. It was the idea that if she could just manage the people around her well enough, all the pain would go away. And it's easy to slip into that in our relationships because we think so much of how we feel is a result of the people around us. We think if we can just get our spouse to stop doing the thing or our kid to start doing the thing, or maybe if we can get our boss to value what we do the right way, if we get any of that to happen, then we'll finally feel okay. But there's a problem with that strategy, because you can't change other people, and trying is exhausting. And that's really where I re- recognized my big issue was not addiction, my big issue, or alcohol, my big addic- addiction was people. I was codependent. And I actually drank because I was so uncomfortable in my skin that it was the way to handle feelings that I didn't know how to feel. So then you start getting curious about how do I feel, right? And then you start thinking, "Is this more than just feelings and is it more than psychology? And I'm gonna do these mindset things and I'm gonna have these goals." Well, what if you're actually looking at what's underneath in all of that that is driving work cycles, video games, drinking, shopping, buying, um, power, you know, and you start looking at it from that perspective. When she started having these deeper thoughts, she realized she couldn't find the answers and keep drinking. One of them had to go, so she went to her first AA meeting. But she walked in conflicted. And so when I went to AA the first time, I went in and said, "My name's Rachel, I'm an alcoholic," but that's not what I really thought. What I really thought is, "My name's Rachel, and my husband is an alcoholic, and I'm here. Yeah, I drink too much, but I'm not powerless over it." Oh, no. Went back out. I am definitely powerless over alcohol. She went back out of that meeting and drank for another year before she came back in, this time clear that she was there for herself. That was two thousand eighteen. I wanna put a pin in Rachel's story here because we need to talk about forgiveness before we pick it back up. Most of us look at forgiveness as something transactional. When somebody does something wrong, they apologize, we forgive them, books get balanced, and everybody moves on. But if they don't apologize, well, then we get to hold onto the grudge forever because technically they haven't earned forgiveness. That's transactional forgiveness, and it's really a trap because it makes our peace of mind dependent on other people's behavior, and I don't know about you, but the only time I'm disappointed in people is when they don't behave the way I think they should. Also, let's be real. Half the people we're waiting on an apology from, they don't even know they hurt us, and the other half, they're waiting for an apology from us. What we don't realize is what's happening under the surface while we're waiting. Stanford University started a trial they called The Forgiveness Project in nineteen ninety-nine. It originally followed fifty-five students who were coached to forgive other people in their lives versus a control group who held onto grudges. The researchers, they were looking for how it would affect them both at the biological and psychological levels. And what they found is that the group who practiced forgiveness had less physical symptoms of stress, things like lower blood pressure, than the control group. But here's the kicker. The people who hold onto the resentment the longest, they don't get better. Researchers followed the control group after the initial study and found they got sicker. Their blood pressure went up, their sleep got worse, and in some of the people, their heart health declined. What this is all pointing to is that the grudge doesn't hurt the person who wronged you. It hurts you. So getting back to Rachel, she was having a tough time forgiving her husband in the traditional sense, so she turned to what she calls spiritual forgiveness. The difference in spiritual forgiveness over traditional forgiveness is traditional forgiveness says you hold on to there having been something done that was unforgivable or that was wrong. Spiritual forgiveness opens it up and says, "Yes, that happened." Yes. But you're taking the judgment off of it as if there is wrong being done instead of seeing hurt is being caused, wounds are happening, situations are happening. But you look at it from a larger perspective that our souls are here having this experience, and if we knew that we are nothing more than an expression of God, we would never do these harmful, hurtful things to another person. It is our own woundedness, it is our own fear, it is our own pain, and it is the mechanisms that are in our mind that respond and react in ways that are hurtful and harmful to others. Notice what she just did. She didn't excuse the behavior, she didn't minimize it, and she didn't ignore it. She just took the judgment off of it. That's the move. You can acknowledge that something hurt without making the story that you have to live inside of. If you can get yourself to let go of the judgment towards yourself, towards all, then I think what you'll realize is the things we hold onto hold on to us. And the moment that we let them go, that's when we get ourselves back. Is there a conversation that you, you had that was an "I forgive you" conversation? And if so, who was that conversation with? With myself is the number one person that I think that we have those conversations with I always looked at forgiveness as something that happens between us and the person who hurt us. Rachel is saying it happens in the mirror first. Think about it this way. When somebody does something that hurts you, two people walk away from that moment: the person who did the hurting and the person who was hurt. What we do is we spend all of our energy on the first one. We think, "How could they do that?" or, "Why did they do that?" or, "When will they understand?" And we completely ignore the second person, which is ourselves. But if we redirect some of that attention towards ourselves, we might start thinking of different questions like, who was that person who got hurt? Was it the one who allowed it? The one who didn't see it coming? Was it the one who just stood there and took it? We can be brutal with that person 'cause that person is us. when you have been holding onto a grievance for s- with somebody for so long The work that you have to do is not about that person. The work that you have to do is around the, around yourself. Because ultimately, we're processing th- everything through our own processor. And one of the things that for me was I held a belief that I was responsible for all of their happiness and their relationships, and that I was failing every time that there was some sort of harm, that I personally had done something wrong. So the first forgiveness had to be the forgiveness to myself When she rewinds the whole thing, the fighting, the drinking, the need to control the people around her, she realized the person she had to forgive first wasn't Rich, it was her. She had to forgive herself for believing she was supposed to fix everyone else, and for blaming herself every time she couldn't, and for drinking to cope with an impossible job she never actually had. If you can't forgive yourself for how you showed up, you can't really forgive anyone else for how they showed up either, and you're just pretending to if you tried. And there's a word for that kind of pretending. It's called resentment. It's what happens when we lose the battle inside of ourselves between who we were and who we're becoming. And you can't become the new version of yourself while you're still at war with the old one. This is what the Buddha was talking about in the Dhammapada when he said, "Greater in battle than the man who can conquer a thousand people, is the man who would conquer just one, himself." So Rachel did the forgiveness work on herself first, and she noticed that she stopped trying to change Rich. She stopped trying to fix her kids. She stopped managing everyone else's emotion. And then she noticed something she wasn't expecting. By letting them be who they were, that's when they actually changed. The work that I've done, which is the spiritual journey, the wild hero's soul's journey that we're all on, is not for them. It's for me. However, my entire family system has healed, and I have a relationship with my husband that I can't believe 'cause neither one of us are even remotely the person that we were even a year ago This is a paradox that shows up a lot in Eastern traditions. Chapter 48 of the Tao Te Ching says, "The world is won by those who let it go. But when you try and try, the world's beyond winning." In other words, the things we try the hardest to control, those resist us the most, and the things we manage to let go of, those move towards us. Rachel didn't heal her marriage by working on her marriage. She healed it by working on herself. And her husband, who she'd been at war with for 25 years, he became her best friend. And when I quit seeing everybody as sick and broken and started seeing us as souls, and I started stepping more into spirituality for myself, not for them, it shifted everything with everyone and has actually healed our entire family in a way that I, I can't even describe, um, how much has happened. And everything is very lifey. I mean, there's a lot of lifey stuff that happens that is complicated, but it's not, it's not abusive. It's not, um, end of the world. It's not everything's falling apart. It's, it's... It... I can't even put words into it. It's very compassionate. It's allowing. It's forgiving. It's accepting and, and in that everybody has space to be who they are, and giving everybody space to be who they are, that's actually what forgiveness does. It doesn't erase the past. It just makes room for the present. When we hold a grudge, we freeze somebody in the worst version of themselves, the version that hurt us at a specific moment in time, and then we don't let them be anything else. But we do that to ourselves, too. We freeze ourselves in our worst moments, and we define ourselves by our failures. We carry around old versions of who we were like they're still who we are, and that's not fair to anybody, not to them and definitely not to you. ultimately the more you get into awareness, judgment is not bad, it's just a protector. So we're, we're constantly coming up with protective mechanisms because we're trying to have certainty. We're trying to figure it out. We're trying to be safe. So everything ultimately comes to this level of internal safety. So judgment is a way for us to try to, A, have certainty, but B, judgment is a massive protector of our self, judgment of ourself or others, to try to, like, keep us safe Every time we judge ourselves harshly, we're not really being honest. We're being defensive. When our inner voice won't let us off the hook, it keeps replaying mistakes at two in the morning, and it reminds us of every dumb thing we ever said. That inner voice thinks it's protecting us. It thinks that if it beats us up first, we'll be ready for whatever comes next, and it thinks if we never forgive ourselves, we'll never make that same mistake again. But our inner voice is actually wrong, and I think intuitively we know that. It's just a matter of practicing compassion for ourselves, which I get that's not an easy thing to do. But maybe it'll help if you realize what you get out of compassion, which I found in a study from the University of Texas when I was researching this episode. What they found was that self-compassion outperforms self-criticism in both motivation and resilience. So self-criticism, that might be our go-to, but it doesn't make us better. It makes us smaller. It makes us avoid the things we're afraid of failing at, which is usually everything that matters. We're great at being compassionate to our friends. We try to build them back up when they make mistakes and then talk endless loops of shit to ourselves when we make one of our own. We give to everyone else what we refuse to give to ourselves, and then we wonder why we feel so alone. And most of that then slides down the slope into our basic core wounds that we're here to learn more about and to heal. And when we're curious about what those are, then you can see that the judgments are really just protectors of our own woundedness and belief systems. And we can be in the world without judgment. And every time we hold onto a resentment, which is you did something to me, this isn't fair, I want it to be different, we just continue to harbor more of our woundedness and our separation from spirit and from others, and we make ourselves more miserable. I'll have you consider that holding a grudge, whether it's against someone else or yourself, it doesn't keep you safe. It just keeps you separate from the people around you and from the person you're trying to become. this opportunity of forgiveness is not about saying that what happened was okay. It's about saying, "I'm going to choose to feel it in my body in a different way so that it c- stops hurting me, so that I discontinue the w- the continued woundedness in it." I started this episode talking about two lists, the list of the people who've wronged you and the list of times we've wronged ourselves. And I think most of us spend our whole lives working on the wrong one. We wait for apologies that might never come, and we keep score of offenses other people forgot about years ago. And the whole time, the list with our own name on it, it just keeps getting longer. Rachel's story, it's not really about getting sober. It's a story about what happens when you finally turn towards the person you've been avoiding the whole time, which is you Not to blame yourself, not to excuse yourself, just to see yourself. And then to say the thing you probably don't say enough, that the person you used to be did the best they could with what they had. That the mistakes you made, those made you. And that the weight of it, all of it, was never yours to carry forever. Because the person you're becoming can't meet you halfway until the person you were stops blocking the road. So maybe forgiveness isn't a gift you give someone else, and maybe it's not even a gift you give yourself. Maybe it's just putting down something you were never supposed to be carrying in the first place. Now, here's what I'd leave you with. Pick one thing you haven't forgiven yourself for, just one, and it doesn't have to be big. Actually, you know what? Start with a small one, and then sit with this question. Who would you get to become if you finally put it down? Thank you so much for investing your time in listening to today's episode. Thank you to Rachel for reaching out and wanting to be on this show, and for sharing her story, and for the work she's put in to building what she's built. If you wanna connect with Rachel, you can grab a copy of her bestselling book on Amazon called Recover Your Soul. I'll drop a link to that in the description. She also has her own podcast and several coaching programs on her website. I'll drop a link in the description to that, too, and I'd really encourage you to check all of them out. Rachel is amazing. As for the show, do me a favor. Rate this show on whatever platform you're watching or listening to it on. Five stars is awesome. Share it with somebody you feel like needs to forgive somebody else. That's it for this episode. I'll see you on the next one. Better Beliefs is owned by 6350 Ventures. It's written, edited, and produced by me, Brent Kocal. Yes, I do all the things. Cover art for the show is by Jenny H Design, and original music you hear at the opening of every Better Beliefs podcast is by The Lonely Ramblers. All other music credits are in the show notes