Ep. 15 Coaching Lesson 3: Self-forgiveness: You need it to change your life!

Self-forgiveness is one of the hardest things to feel. Yet, we all need to forgive ourselves for the wrongs we’ve done to others and for those we've done to ourselves, in order to truly move.

In this coaching episode from Lesson 3 of my online course “Get Me Started!”, decide what you need to forgive yourself for as you ponder the power you have to create the life you want free from pain and struggle with these winning life strategies.

TIMESTAMP:
0:00   Welcome
0:13   Introduction to episode
3:24   Grief and forgiveness
6:37   Anger and forgiveness
10:28 Forgiveness and self-love
14:33 How to forgive yourself
17:36 Dysfunction and self-forgiveness
21:24 Transformation & Personal power
23:00  Course details
23:49  Closing

Get your free mini-personal growth journal that accompanies the first six lessons here

BOOKS (by Vonne)
"Lessons in Surviving Suicide - A Letter to My Daughter"
"Divine Healing - Transforming Pain into Personal Power"
"The Power of Change"

RESOURCES (Blog, Course & Meditations)

COURSE Discount

COACHING:
Start at Lesson 1: Regrets: Letting them go! Audio or YouTube
Go to previous Lesson 2 - Failure: Your friend or foe?  Audio or YouTube

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Transcript

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Vonne Solis  0:00  
Welcome to another Grief Talk Coffee Chat episode. I'm your host, Vonne Solis.

Vonne Solis  0:13  
Okay, so welcome to another solo episode. This is a coaching episode, Lesson Three of my course Get Me Started! from the Beyond Bereavement series. As I always like to start off with, there is a downloadable PDF of a mini-personal growth journal that is available to you, if you want to follow along with these coaching calls and do some of the exercises, even if you just read them as we go along. 

Vonne Solis  0:47  
Today's lesson is on self-forgiveness. You need it to change your life. And this is a very important step. In my course I have 13 lessons. We could think of them as steps and the PDF that is available for you to download covers the first six. And as I've said in earlier coaching calls, at the point of starting lesson seven, it is more benefit to have joined the course at that point. Which is discounted, I'd like to say 50% off for anybody that comes through it through these podcasting episodes. But nevertheless, even if you just want to work at no charge, and just work along with me, and download the journal. .Work at your own pace. Don't download the journal. Just absorb the information, I'm saying. If it resonates with you, terrific. If it doesn't, well, then there's plenty of information out there that helps people get where they want to go in terms of manifesting and creating the life that that they truly desire. 

Vonne Solis  1:49  
My teaching is a little bit different in that I am a bereaved mother. And so even though I have been at this game for 40 years now, in terms of the manifesting, creative visualization. The whole the whole nine yards in, you know, in what definitely made The Secret several years ago, you know, just sort of blow up in the world, and many people got on that bandwagon about thinking, well, maybe I really can manifest in my life. So I had been at that for about 27 years when my daughter passed away from suicide in July 2005. And so I had to rethink a lot of those strategies. Those practices. My beliefs. My very foundation. And I came up with this course that I launched earlier in 2022 and started the podcast in July of 2022. And decided as part of this platform to do some coaching so that people can kind of sort of see me in action. And if they liked my style of teaching, and if they're interested in the subject matter of which we next we're going to delve way more into spiritual and metaphysical things, which is, you know, for me anyway, at the at the core root of creating anything we want in life, really, this particular coaching series, is dedicated to Beyond Bereavement Get Me Started!, to help people who are coming from either human loss. Other types of loss that have really impacted their life, or some other type of adversity. 

Vonne Solis  3:24  
So don't let the Beyond Bereavement fool you. I named it that so that, one of the missions on my podcast here and in my work as an author, and my work as a coach, and in my work, you know, as an online instructor, is to help people understand that grief is not related to just human loss. We all suffer grief from various things. How long it lasts. How intense it feels is, of course, dependent on what we are grieving. In terms of bereavement specifically, yes, you by and large would think that or associate the word bereavement with a human loss. But I like to take it just a step farther than that, because it helps us all develop compassion and empathy for one another when we think about, hey, our experiences really aren't that different. Okay? I may not want to lose a child, and I maybe never have lost a child and maybe I don't even have kids. But as I like to say none of us invented emotions. We all have the same emotions and just experience them to different intensities at different times for different reasons and in different ways. But really, at the core of our being we're all the same folks. Organic human beings. So anyway, in wanting to grow my community, I don't ever want to exclude anybody from it. And I just want anybody who's coming from anything, or just wants to view some different type of content, absorb some different type of material, to help perfect their lives even more or grow their lives even more I should say. That's what I'm all about. Is just being here with you and letting you know what I've learned over the past four decades. 

Vonne Solis  5:06  
But as I apply it to my lessons, and this one being self-forgiveness, it's very important to just quickly refer back to Lessons One and Two. Lesson One being about letting go of regret. Lesson Two, considering whether our failures are friend or foe. So if you haven't seen those coaching episodes yet, I encourage you to take a look at those episodes, and I'll put the links down below for that. But at any rate, this one, they all are standalone, but watching them in order really helps to sort of build a story. 

Vonne Solis  5:42  
So when we look at self-forgiveness, we, in my this is in my teachings, and in my experience and in my view, we need to look at, well, what the heck are we forgiving ourselves for? Well, if you look at failure, and if you look at regret, you're basically looking at behaviors and actions that we took that either did really hurt somebody, or may have hurt somebody. And when we look at that, and it's very, very difficult to look at that because a lot of what we regret and what we consider as failure, and hence what we need to forgive ourselves for, comes from a place of anger. And anger, at the root of anger is pain. And specifically, unresolved pain. 

Vonne Solis  6:37  
None of us likes to think of ourselves as angry beings. And in fact, when we have outbursts, short, you know, outbursts of anger, we can feel guilty about that. We can kind of admonish ourselves and sort of privately and secretly go, Hmm, I could have acted better. We may apologize to the individual or individuals that we've been yelling at. We may not. We may be bullies throughout our whole adult life, and maybe we were even bullies as children or teens. And I'm just using the word we so that it's just in general terms here because the population is made up of people who are really wonderful, sweet, positive human beings. And then there are people who are not. And within that group of people who you know, that collective of people who are not really nice, sweet, gracious, positive human beings, and I'm not saying you have to be like that all the time, I'm just saying that that is who we are at our core, there is the group that is nasty, and in so much pain that they really, really, in my opinion, maybe can't even act from any other way than in anger. And I'm not going to get into self harming and addictive behaviors and all the other things that result from severe pain or unresolved pain of any kind. Just sticking to anger and the more lightweight things that we deal with in our everyday emotional states that are not aligned with who we really are at the core of our, I'm going to say spiritual beings here as pure, beautiful, light energy, these are things that we come to the planet to work on through our various experiences. A lot of which are painful for many people, and as a result, produce feelings of anger that never really gets resolved. And gets taken out on the self or other people around them, including loved ones. 

Vonne Solis  8:52  
So when we look at self-forgiveness, the other thing I want to say about anger is that it can make us feel fearful and even out of control. And that can influence the actions and behavior that we take. So when we become conscious of our behavior, our words, our actions, that as we evolve, as we change as we heal, it is necessary to go back and look at those things that we don't feel aligned with in our actions, our words and our behavior. When we look at the practice of self-forgiveness, and there's a lot of information on that. This is, you know, I mean, you can hear about self-forgiveness in therapy. You can hear about it in you know, personal coaching. Health and wellness coaching. You know, forgive, forgive, forgive. Forgive yourself. Forgive yourself. And a lot of people, starting with the fact that they don't really love themselves, have a very, very difficult time forgiving themselves, because the regrets the failures, the guilt, the anger, the whatever else negative we're experiencing can run so deep. And sometimes we just don't even understand anymore why we're feeling all these negative feelings or we never understood it to begin with. So forgiving the self really has to be rooted in a deep understanding. A very, very clear understanding of what it is we want to forgive ourselves. 

Vonne Solis  10:28  
A lot of people start with forgiving other people. Okay, it's really easy, well, maybe not easy, but it can be easier to feel hurt, rejected, abandoned by, betrayed by, you know and any other, not loved by, a whole bunch of these things. It can, it can be really easy to feel that from other people, and then take a big leap and a big step in our personal growth and go, Well, I'm going to forgive them for that. But when it comes to taking the next step of, Well, are you going to be able to do that for yourself? Because you know, a lot of those same feelings, they say, we attract what we need to learn and what we are currently experiencing, and the energy,we're vibrating at. Just throwing that in there. So if we're attracting that from other individuals and they've pained us to such a degree, right, we need to consider whether we're thinking of, regarding ourselves, in that same way. 

Vonne Solis  11:32  
So taking a really, really good hard look at, I want to love myself. I've been told I should love myself. All personal coaching, manifesting, lots of therapy will talk about loving the self as well. So the two kind of go hand in hand. Forgiving and loving the self, which is all tied into everything I've just talked about. But in addition to that, worthiness, and power. Or more specifically, our lack of personal power. 

Vonne Solis  12:04  
So when we look at self-forgiveness and decide we're ready. We're ready! I can't take this anymore. I want a better life. I just want to toss all the negativity. I don't want to feel this bad anymore. I don't want to be sick anymore. I don't want to feel vulnerable anymore. I don't want to feel weak anymore. I want to be strong. I want to live an authentic life. I want to align with who I know deep down I really am. And I want to go after those passions I'm so certain about. And even if I don't know specifically what they are, I know there's got to be more to living than the way I'm currently living today. That's one scenario. 

Vonne Solis  12:39  
The other is being in a situation or having an experience that could be loss. It could be trauma. It could be a relationship breakup. It could be a firing from a job. It could be financial difficulties or ruin. It could be any number of situations, one to many, that is you know, almost going to topple us. And we decide, I don't want this anymore. But where do I start? Where do I start? How do I start to change? It's impossible. Hopelessness, you know?

Vonne Solis  13:11  
And a lot of people will even go after training and courses and stuff, and they just say I don't get it. I don't get it. Part of that is I am absolutely certain we are, we come to this planet, kind of with a plan to just be lazy about growing ourselves. Expanding our consciousness and becoming our fullest, you know, human beings at our fullest potential. Which is why there's so much training out there and personal coaches, and books and decades and decades and decades of resources of people trying to help people see the good in themselves. So nothing new there. So you have to actually kind of wonder what, you know, maybe we have a collective lesson to learn as humanity on this planet about loving the self. And I kind of evolved enough to, in my experience, to understand that as much as it's important and necessary to forgive other people, if we don't forgive ourselves, basically first, the unresolved pain of what I was saying earlier in the context of whatever we're feeling and however we're being impacted by negative experiences, that is still, that still needs to be resolved. 

Vonne Solis  14:33  
So how do we do it? How do we forgive ourselves? Hear lots about it, forgive yourself. Okay, so how do we do this? It's not like, you know, we just sit down one day and go, I forgive myself. It's a little harder than that. So a lot of how I came to do the current work I'm doing, in offering this coaching and my online course, was in the writing and publishing of my last book, which is called Lessons in Surviving Suicide - A Letter to My Daughter and I went through a series of about two and a half to three years of really studying in-depth, the emotions I was feeling and all that was preventing me from, you know, healing to, you know, taking my healing to the next level. So I'm not going to go into any of that, specifically. I'll put the link to my books on my website, if anybody's interested in any of my work that I've done in in that medium. But at any rate, so when I look at at forgiving myself, it was like a loaded question. And I knew, it had come up as an emotion, self-forgiveness. And I'm, because my daughter chose to enter life at age 22 and I've felt responsible for many, many, many, many, many years and I won't say I still don't feel a smidgen of responsibility for that, and guilt and regret and everything else that I put in that book, I had to really stop and think and not just for a day. I had to, I had to think for quite a while and revisit the notion of self-forgiveness. And that's what led me to discover and feel and experience for myself, I had to go back to those other emotions, and really get clear about how they were impacting me and what they were really making me feel about myself. 

Vonne Solis  16:23  
What did I really regret? What did I really feel I failed at? How worthy do I feel? How successful do I feel as a contributing member of society? What have I got to give to the world, if my own daughter didn't want to even be on the planet? What does that say about me? And the more I talk to people, the more I understand that a parent can have that exact same feeling when they have a child launch off into the world and leave home when the child fails at something that they really wanted to do, or isn't succeeding, another way to look at it, at going after their dreams. Or, you know, any other number of situations that we can look at that we feel at the center of that situation, or that experience that is negatively impacting us, and basically, building upon the already negative things we feel about ourselves that have not been resolved.

Vonne Solis  17:36  
And hey, a lot of us who have come from dysfunction will be already feeling this from early childhood, if not babyhood, when we're not getting the care that we want. And I think the older we get when we come from dysfunction, the more natural it feels to think that things were our fault. Mom or Dad didn't want us. Mom or dad left and, or I didn't get the love. Must be must, you know, I didn't get the love from my parent. Must be me, it must be me. And there's nothing to correct that thinking, especially if you've come from trauma. And understanding our brains don't fully develop till age 25, you can see that the more dysfunction we have come from, the more dysfunction we subject ourselves to the older we get and repeat patterns of all sorts of experiences that are not building us up, but rather tearing us down, well you can understand the mess that we can be left with mentally, emotionally and even physically. We won't talk about spiritual stuff here today, but you know, I mean, just as a human being, we can become pretty much our own best wrecking ball. 

Vonne Solis  18:49  
So self-forgiveness starts, we don't want to do big leaps here, just want to think about self-forgiveness. Think about whether we have the capacity today to feel any for ourselves. And if we do, then it starts with having an acceptance of our most painful experiences, and whatever else we consider as our failures and our regrets and having an appreciation for what we went through. And I think this is key. I think that when we experience something that is so painful, and so difficult, and I am not going to go down the road here about things like child abuse and stuff that needs therapy. My work here is simply self-help. Self-practice. For things that need medical intervention, therapy, that is a completely different situation and I encourage that. I've been to therapy myself. I've had doctors help. 

Vonne Solis  19:54  
This is just stuff that we can deal with on our own that doesn't feel too overwhelming. So I just want to be really, really clear about that. If you do need medical help, if you do need therapy and so on, and you know can pursue it, I encourage it, because it can be very, very helpful if you find the right practitioners to work with. So this is keeping it in the self-help context, okay? Those things that we can revisit and look at as our most painful experiences that produces all the other negative emotions, of which we're talking about self-forgiveness today for those things that we regret and feel we have failed at, and anything else that's popping in there for you, that you're feeling, Yeah, I could have done better, you know? Didn't pursue something and I knew I should have. I should have made that decision or whatever. 

Vonne Solis  20:50  
For me, I was able to take it to the level of feeling responsible for my daughter's choice, you know, my daughter's suicide. But I've been at this a really long time, and there's still some stuff that I can't even revisit. So, keeping it to what you can revisit. Looking at that, developing an appreciation for those painful experiences, going, Well done! Hey, pat yourself on the back. Well done, you did it, you're here, you survived. It may not look pretty, but you're here. And now you want to take it to the next level.

Vonne Solis  21:24  
So, it is so much easier to forgive yourself, when you can actually see the true scope of what you have come from, or the true depth of how hard you've been on yourself. Pretty easy to go, you know what, girl, guy, whatever, however you want to call yourself. By name. What a great job you have done getting to where you are today. This isn't where I want to stay, but I'm here today. And the minute you decide to forgive yourself even just a little bit, that is the exact moment your transformation starts. That is the exact moment you give yourself permission to choose to think about your life differently and create experiences accordingly. 

Vonne Solis  22:18  
On a closing note here, I'm just going to say. When you can view your past painful experiences as challenges to be overcome, rather than problems that can beat you and are beating you down daily, you connect to your personal power. And when you connect to your personal power, you can do anything. Now, I'm not talking about yes, you're gonna fly to the moon. That's not what I'm talking about. You can do anything when you know what it is you authentically, truly want for your life and are ready to welcome into it.

Vonne Solis  23:00  
So that is the basis of all my work. And if you choose to sign up for my course, I'm offering it as I said, a 50% discounted price. And I'll give the link to that discount so you can pop in and go take a look. You're gonna get all other kinds of information and exercises and a lot more in-depth teaching. This is just to connect with you. Give you a little glimpse into the type of work this is and more importantly, to invite you just to think about what it is about your life that you may wish to change. That you want to change and feel ready to get started. 

Vonne Solis  23:49  
Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. Until next time.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai