Accountants love mnemonics and acronyms. Inventory is valued using LIFO or FIFO. We follow GAAP when we prepare FS, which consist of the IS, BS, and SCF. We pay attention to AP, AR, and COGS. Data resides in a GL, where it’s recorded with DR and CR to create a TB. Tech tools use APIs to interface with the GL. SALY is both our friend and our bane. And when I studied for the CPA exam, I learned (but have since forgotten) a boatload of mnemonics to help me absorb the vast body of knowledge I needed to pass.

I’m still a CPA. I used to also be a CVA. I have friends who are EAs, CMAs, CGMAs, CAs, CIAs, CFEs and more. I have a BS and a MAcc. I was once in a program to earn a PhD.

I love acronyms that help me remember the steps or parts of a process as much as anyone else. But my brain isn’t wired to think that way. So I asked my friend ChatGPT to help me come up with an acronym for my forgiveness framework. Here’s a short version of my basic framework, which I’ve written about before:

1. Acceptance of the past. We can’t go back in time to change things.

2. Appropriate action. Whatever the other person did, they were acting appropriately given their worldview.

3. Empathy. Try to see it from the other person’s perspective.

4. Drop the burden. Let go of the heavy weight of grievance.

Here are my two favorites:

• H – Honor the past

• E – Empathize

• A – Accept their actions as appropriate

• L – Let go

And

• F – Face the past

• R – Reframe their actions

• E – Empathize

• E – Empty your grievance

Although HEAL reorders two of the elements from my original ordering, I think I like it best because it captures the healing aspect of forgiveness. How it brings peace of mind. Ending with Let go captures the relief of forgiving someone. Honor the past reminds me that I don’t need to fully forget the past, but I can give the past the respect it deserves.

I’m OK with the reordering because I don’t see this necessarily as a stepwise process that requires a sequential order, but rather as a set of elements that are present when forgiveness is complete. In my experience, empathy with the person who hurt me or did something I don’t like is often one of the first steps to forgiving that person. I’m hard-wired to capture all the feels around me.

But I also like FREE. This captures the aspect of freeing oneself from the past to create a future rolling forward from the present. And I love the image of Empty your grievance, like pouring water out of a bucket. Letting that energy dissipate because it’s no longer held captive. But I’m not sure that Reframe their actions captures the idea of looking at the event from their point of view to see that what they did was appropriate, given their worldview.

I’m mulling it over, but leaning towards HEAL. Our fractured and contentious world needs healing in any form we can provide.

What do you think?

A few weeks ago, I attended a local women’s leadership event. Every one of the speakers was a remarkable woman who had achieved amazing things. One was the first woman (and the first woman of color) to serve as CEO of a credit union. Another was a pioneer in bringing financial therapy to the state. And another one had been a state government cabinet secretary for tourism and was now an executive in a construction company.

After the event, I found myself puzzled by a common thread in the presentations of all the speakers: each had told us a good chunk of her life story.

Each of these women had powerful, inspirational stories of overcoming adversity, poverty, illness, tragedy, and profound loss. We shed tears at the pain these women endured. We applauded their triumphs.

In a gathering of women, they were vulnerable and authentic, two qualities that are our superpowers in the age of AI.

I was puzzled because I had been thinking about the ways I’d heard men talk about leadership. Most don’t describe their worst moments – the medical crises, the parental fails, deaths of loved ones – when they talk about leadership.

Most men, it seemed to me, approach their journey to leadership as a combination of grit, tactics, strategic thinking, and pure ambition. It’s a rare man who can be vulnerable enough to share the most emotionally charged events of his life, and connect that to the way he leads today.

Then it dawned on me. I realized, to my horror, that this was my internalized misogyny speaking.

Because these women hadn’t talked about leadership the way men do, they had to be doing it wrong.

I was judging these women by the standards set by a patriarchal society. That we can’t be leaders if we’re emotional. We can’t let our soft side show. We need to emulate that manly swagger.

With that realization, something shifted in me.

What if men were the ones doing it wrong?

In the last few weeks, I’ve caught glimpses of men talking about how hard it is to be vulnerable. A bit on a Law and Order episode about how they need to be tough. A random reel on social media with a man talking about how scary it is for men to be open about their feelings. Newsletters from men sharing their fears, doubts, and hopes for the future.

And in my circle of thought leaders in accountants, I know several men who willingly share their pain. The prohibition against admitting weakness and shedding tears in public does not apply to them.

Instead of doing it wrong, I realized that those women were doing it right. Whether by intention or by an innate biological tendency, they had tapped into a powerful tool for transformation: the story.

Humans are hard-wired to respond to stories. We learn from stories. That’s why Aesop’s Fables are such enduring lessons. Historians say those fables were first told over 2500 years ago, sometime in the 6^th century BCE, and eventually written down about 300 years later. Who can forget the story of the ant and the grasshopper?

The grasshopper tried to entice a hard-working ant to cease her efforts to store up food for the winter and instead, enjoy the lovely days of summer. But when winter came, the ants had plenty of food while the grasshopper had none and died of hunger. The lesson here is to plan ahead and save for the lean times ahead.

When we hear how another has overcome challenges, we are encouraged that we, too, can succeed in the face of hardship. Stories of mistakes or poor judgment that led to disaster help us to avoid those mistakes in our own lives.

Unless, of course, you happen to be an experiential learner and need to make those mistakes yourself before you can learn. I’ve been guilty of that myself. Like the time a few decades ago, when I failed to replace the worn brakes and tires on my aging VW Rabbit and slammed into a pickup truck stopped at a light on a rain-slick street. Other than a bit of whiplash, I wasn’t hurt, but my beloved Rabbit, which had taken me all over the western US and into Canada, was totaled. A hard lesson in the importance of car maintenance.

I’m not saying that men don’t leverage stories. My bloated library of leadership books contains many male-authored books with case studies and stories of how others have succeeded and built powerful companies. Patrick Lencioni, author of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team and The 6 Types of Working Genius, writes most of his books in the form of fables. One of the most powerful teachings on the theory of constraints is The Goal, by Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox, a fictional account of how a factory manager turned operations around by eliminating bottlenecks.

But what I am saying is that leaning into vulnerability, authenticity, and intimacy will become more important in the AI age.

AI learns from what it’s been fed. While Claude and ChatGPT may have read thousands or millions of stories about heartbreak and loss, the algorithms will never know the full-body ache and heaviness that comes from losing a spouse. A parent. A child. A beloved cat or dog or horse.

Claude may be able to provide helpful tips on dealing with grief or comforting someone, but that knowledge is second-hand. ChatGPT has never hugged someone in the depths of despair. It can’t deliver a plate of sandwiches to a household so swept up in sorrow that food has become an afterthought. It hasn’t made that journey through the stages of bereavement to something that resembles normalcy.

And, as research from Stanford shows, AI LLMs are terrible at telling people what they don’t want to hear. A group of computer scientists showed that when people asked chatbots for advice, those AI models were more likely than humans to affirm the users’ point of view, even when the advice was potentially illegal or harmful. These chatbots were sycophantic, not real. “In our human experiments, even a single interaction with sycophantic AI reduced participants’ willingness to take responsibility and repair interpersonal conflicts, while increasing their own conviction that they were right.”

In this world, where AI is becoming a co-worker, an assistant, a helpful resource, we need human stories of real resilience, courage, and taking the honest way forward. We need stories of doing the right thing, even when it was hard. Stories of how life broke us and how we pulled ourselves together and moved forward. How a crisis helped us realize we were on the wrong path and needed to change. And how we were brave enough to face down our fears, to explore the darkest corners of our lives.

I’ve noticed that once I shine a light into those dark corners, the monsters vanish. When I share my stories of loss, forgiveness, and leaving the past behind, I discover I’m not alone. And every now and then, I hear that my stories are helping others. And in telling my stories, I understand them better myself. I’m helping myself come to terms with my past and to leave it where it belongs, as a learning device, no longer the core of my being.

So dear reader, what stories are waiting inside you?

Each time we run that tape loop, we see just how terribly wronged we were. We retrench our position as victims of injustice. Maybe we depart from pure memory and begin a one-sided dialogue with our enemy, so that instead of recoiling in shock, we deliver the perfect retort that stops them in their tracks and forces them to admit their mistake. Perhaps in our fantasy, they even grovel and beg for forgiveness.

I’ve certainly had my share of one-sided diatribes against people in my life. But since these fantasy arguments are solidly based in my sense of injury, they don’t really help me get over the problem, and seem rather to deepen my sense of grievance and injustice.

A few days ago, I was reading Peter Block’s book, Community: The Structure of Belonging, and a section in which he discussed the ideas of Erhard Werner jumped out at me. As Block explains, Werner asserts “all transformation is linguistic.”

If we want to change our future, the first step is to change the conversations we have, and to “have a conversation that we have not had before, one that has the power to create something new in the world,” Block writes. He goes on to explain that we also need to question the stories we tell ourselves about our past, and to pay attention to the beliefs we rely upon. These beliefs, or to use Werner’s terminology, the context, both shape and limit our actions.

Since these contexts or mental models arise from language, this implies we have a choice over the belief systems we inhabit. Block explains, “we can choose a context that better suits who we are now without the usual requirements of years of inner work, a life-threatening crisis, finding a new relationship, or going back to school.”

We create a new context by reflecting on the past and considering the ways “we have not completed our past and unintentionally keep bringing it into the future,” Block writes. These are the stories we keep on an endless loop, the ones that keep us locked into that past of grievance. By completing those stories, we can stop living in the past. We are now free to create a future that starts in the present moment.

Block quotes from personal correspondence with Werner:

In summary, (1) one gets complete with the past, which takes it out of the future (being complete with the past is not to forget the past); (2) in the room that is now available in the future when one’s being and action are no longer shaped by the past, one creates a future (a future that moves, touches, and inspires one); (3) that future starts to shape one’s being and actions in the present so that they are consistent with realizing that future.

This jumped out at me because the first step – completing the past – resonates with the forgiveness framework I’ve written about before. In brief:

Acceptance of the past: To paraphrase Byron Katie, we can’t undo events in linear time, so we need to accept that what happened is what was supposed to happen.

Appropriate action: Given the worldview of those involved, they acted appropriately, even if they knew at some deeper level that what they were doing wasn’t the best option.

Empathy: Put yourself in the shoes of those who caused you pain, and try to see the experience from their point of view.

Drop the burden: Carrying the burden of anger and grievance is a heavy load. Let go of that heavy weight you’re dragging around and use the emotional energy for other purposes.

My four-element forgiveness framework breaks the past into manageable pieces, making it easier to complete.

Creating a new mental model or context for a past story means shifting your perspective from the one in your endless mental loop to one that allows for other information, the details overlooked in building up your grievance story.

It’s like an optical illusion. Just slightly shifting how you look at an image can forever change what you see in it.

Here, what looks like an impossibility – a two-headed camel – on close inspection, is revealed to be two camels standing side by side, facing opposite directions.

Or the Magic Eye illusions, so popular a few years ago:

Changing how your eyes focus reveals the image hidden within.

In my framework, the shift in perception is trying to see the event from the other person’s perspective. Trying to understand why they considered what they did to have been an appropriate action.

One of the stories from my time in public accounting that I used to keep on infinite repeat was a confrontation I had one day with a firm leader. I accused him of being a micromanager, which he didn’t like. He responded by slamming my office door and scolding me for my attitude. That event was the final tipping point in a long series of small events that ultimately pushed me out of accounting. It was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.

As I replayed that scene over and over, all I could see was my perspective – how I was being attacked. My co-workers agreed with that assessment. That boss did have micromanaging tendencies, the consensus agreed. And they were all surprised that he would yell at me. Last week, a good friend described me as “gently persuasive.” Others have called me a kind and gentle speaker.

But as I shifted my perspective to see the story from my boss’ perspective, I understood that he was trying to influence me the best way he could. It was his nature to be more stick than carrot when he was upset. And calling him out as a micromanager upset him. No one likes to be told that, especially when, as he said, he was “doing my best to get things done here.”

Changing my perspective, and forgiving him for his outburst, and forgiving myself for insulting his pride by calling him a micromanager, helped me complete that story, to use Erhard’s terminology.

I haven’t forgotten that event. But the story is now firmly in the past. I’ve put it in a box where it can stay. I don’t need to pull it out anymore, except as a reminder that the next time I’m tempted to call someone a micromanager, a softer, more considerate approach might be better.

There’s a Zen metaphor of finding the universe in a single drop of dew. The idea is that the entire universe speaks to us through everything in front of us, and that in even the tiniest drop of dew, there is a connection to all of life.

For me, that connection came to me in the eyes of a baby rat.

It was the summer of 1988. I was working as a lab technician in the Department of Neurology at the Weisman Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It was my first job after graduating from the University of New Mexico with a BS in biochemistry. Unable to find work in New Mexico, I had followed my then-boyfriend to Madison, where there were more biochemistry lab tech jobs than there were warm bodies to fill them.

My plan was to get some practical experience before pursuing my dream of a PhD in neuroscience. My boss at the Weisman Center was looking for a non-invasive method of screening newborns for jaundice. He had found an animal model in a particular breed of rats that were genetically predisposed to jaundice. Around day 18 of age, these rats began showing the same kinds of oddities in their hearing that jaundiced newborns did. We could measure these abnormalities via EEG studies using electrodes placed on the skulls of baby rats.

For the most part, the experiments I did were pretty non-invasive. With the exception of one series of experiments, a collaboration with a researcher in Utah.

That July afternoon in 1988, I was cradling a 23-day-old baby rat in my hand. At that age, baby rats were sweet, trusting, playful, and innocent little creatures, unlike their semi-feral mothers, who I rapidly learned to treat with caution and respect after one sunk her teeth deep into my hand when I was separating her from her babies.

I looked deeply into those dark, trusting eyes. Whiskers twitching, this baby was sniffing the air curiously, trying to understand where it was and what was happening. I felt the tiny staccato of its heart in my gloved hand, the slower rhythm of its breathing. It lay quietly, feeling warm and safe in my hand.

Then I plunged a needle into its soft belly and gave it a lethal dose of pentobarbital.

The researcher in Utah wanted to examine the brains of the baby rats we’d used in our experiments. My task was to prepare the heads of these baby rats for shipment to Utah via FedEx. Inside a styrofoam cooler with cold packs, I would place sealed plastic bags filled with formaldehyde, each containing the head of a baby rat. I’ll spare you the details of what came between the needle plunge and the packaging, but I’ll just say that I had nightmares the first time I performed that procedure.

But before I “sacrificed” that baby rat – the euphemism researchers use to disguise the fact that they were killing a creature in the name of science – something happened inside me. I suddenly felt a connection in the life-force energy we both shared. A seed of empathy for that creature I held in my hand sprouted. I sensed that we were somehow connected, and that by willfully destroying this life I was doing something profoundly wrong.

Up to that point, I had been a committed atheist for several years. My junior high era Jesus-freak fervor as a born-again Christian had been extinguished in high school. After too many spectacular displays of hypocrisy among members of the church I had been raised in, my faith was gone.

Suddenly, gazing into the eyes of this baby rat, I was aware of my connection to all other living beings. I had the sudden epiphany that, if there was a god, this god existed in the life-force energy we all shared. That there was something out there bigger than all of us. And that this “something” connected all of us.

We were all part of the same one thing. Years later, I would read this in the works of Neil Donald Walsh. More recently, this shared identity is a repeated theme in my studies of A Course in Miracles.

Though I didn’t know it then, that seed of empathy that sprouted in me helped me weather the tremendous loss that I would endure in 1993 when I lost my parents. It helped me to see the humanity of the truck driver who collided head-on with my parents’ car, killing my mom and dad pretty much instantly. It helped me forgive that young truck driver.

That experience in 1988 triggered another change in my life. I suddenly realized I would not be able to pursue my dream of getting a PhD in neuroscience. Back then, before noninvasive technologies like functional NMR gave scientists real-time data on brain responses to external stimuli, much of neuroscience research relied on brutal animal experiments.

I had read plenty of research papers detailing those experiments. So I was aware, at least on an abstract level, of what neuroscience research entailed. But until that first job out of college, I hadn’t thought about the reality of doing the work. This was something I needed to experience firsthand.

As I walked the hallways of the Weisman Center, I caught glimpses of what other researchers were doing. One lab was researching the visual cortex of cats. Their experiments were one-way trips, unlike the relatively benign work I was doing with those baby rats. Except for that brief collaboration with the Utah researcher, after I completed my experiments, I returned the babies to their mothers.

The cats weren’t so lucky. There was no recovery for these animals after portions of their skulls were peeled away to provide access to the brain. The body’s function during these experiments was solely to keep the brain alive. And when the experiment was over, the body had no further use.

When I started work at the Weisman Center, one of the animal care workers on the top floor encouraged me to play with the litters of kittens they were raising there as future experimental subjects. She explained that by socializing the kittens, the researchers would have an easier time handling the cats if they weren’t terrified of humans. I didn’t take her up on that suggestion. As enticing as all those litters of kittens were, I wanted to give them a fighting chance.

Lost connections

Today, many in our world have lost this sense of connection with each other. It’s so easy to demonize others as evil, as so unlike us that these others, whether immigrants or people of other races or genders or gender identities or members of another political party or rich or poor or whatever it is that is unlike us, do not deserve our empathy or love. They are not quite as human as we are, so their suffering or even their deaths simply don’t register.

We have lost the sense that we are all far more alike than different. That our diversity makes us stronger. And that, at core, we all want the same things.

We want a safe world for ourselves and future generations. We want to pursue what brings us joy. We want peace, happiness – and above all – love.

We don’t get any of these through conflict or war or persecuting or punishing others. Demonizing and scapegoating others won’t make our world better. The Nazis didn’t solve their problems by murdering millions of Jews.

What makes for a better world is connection with others.

So I encourage you, my dear reader, to see if you can find a point of connection with those you might consider your enemies.

If I could find a connection to the universe in the eyes of a baby rat, maybe you can find it in the eyes of another human.

How far does forgiveness extend? If we forgive someone, do we still hold them accountable for their actions?

I’ve been thinking about this in light of revelations that, in addition to being a powerful voice for farmworkers, César Chávez raped and abused women and children. His long-time colleague, Dolores Huerta, says he raped her multiple times six decades ago, resulting in two pregnancies.

His name was everywhere. And it’s coming down.

Here in NM, until recently, César Chavez was a revered figure. A hero. An example of someone standing up for the rights of the oppressed. And, yes, his work in that arena should be celebrated.

His name appeared all over. Avenida César Chavez. César Chavez Elementary School. César Chavez Community Center and Park. Memorials and murals all over. César Chavez Day. In revulsion, school boards, city councils, and other organizations are quickly removing his name.

Are we erasing “strong hispanic men”?

Meanwhile, a recent letter to the editor of the Albuquerque Journal complained about the “public erasure of a strong Hispanic man.” He also accused the Hispanic and Chicano leaders of New Mexico, who have allowed the similar erasure of Juan De Oñate’s name and image, of being “weak and more interested in looking politically correct,” and that this amounts to “an outright betrayal of the Spanish people of the Southwest.”

I wouldn’t call this an erasure, but rather a willingness to call out the truth.

Yes, Chávez and Oñate did great things. But they also did terrible things. Oñate has been losing his sterling reputation as a great explorer, conquistador, and viceroy of New Mexico as his dark history has become better known. As punishment for the 1599 Ácoma massacre, he ordered the right foot to be cut off of all Ácoma men over 25. In response, a few years back, the right foot of a statue of Oñate in Alcalde, NM, was cut off.

Yes, César Chávez was both a great leader and a terrible person. What he did to those women is not the way great men behave.

My question is, are these the kinds of “strong Hispanic men” we should set up as role models? If these are the best versions of “strong Hispanic men” available, there’s something wrong. It’s a very thin talent pool if you need to overlook the horrible things these men did to keep them on that pedestal. Maybe we should look elsewhere for role models. Maybe a bit of self-reflection is needed for those who don’t find these behaviors (chopping off feet, raping women) appalling.

I know lots of strong Hispanic men who don’t rape women and who don’t brutalize others.

I believe that all of us have the capacity to do great things. We also all have the capacity to do terrible things. To betray, to mistreat, to brutalize, and to abuse each other. This is a choice we make.

I also believe that for centuries, those in power have been misled to believe that with power, wealth, and prestige comes the privilege of sexual access to women at any time, for any reason. This is just one of the not-so-dark secrets in our history.

And now some of those misdeeds are coming to light. What should our response be?

I vote for open dialogue. We need to honor the women and children harmed. We need to acknowledge the terrible prices so many paid in the furtherance of “progress.”

We need to put those in power on notice that this behavior is no longer tolerated. Men who have brutalized women risk the loss of their reputations as positive role models. They will be dethroned as the heroes we might want to emulate.

Men in power need to be aware of the risk that all their good deeds will now be weighed against their misdeeds, against their mistreatment of those with less power. Those good deeds may be canceled out, their legacy tarnished, or forever destroyed.

Myself, I’ve had a few #MeToo experiences. Times when men did things or said things that made me feel, at the very least, uncomfortable, and in a few situations, violated. Those men are not part of my life. I have been fortunate that nothing truly horrific has happened to me, so far.

What forgiveness actually means

As a practitioner of forgiveness, must I forgive César Chávez for what he did?

As I’ve written before, forgiveness is for the victim, not for the perpetrator. Forgiveness doesn’t mean automatic exoneration.

Forgiveness allows us to take our power back. To heal. To leave the past in the past where it belongs so that we can create a better future from the present moment.

Forgiveness isn’t a license to behave badly. To mistreat and abuse others. To torture, rape, or murder others.

César Chávez didn’t victimize me. At most, I feel betrayed and disappointed, but not surprised, that once again, a powerful man wasn’t called out decades ago for his actions.

Do I even need to forgive him?

As a white woman who grew up in the privileged enclave of Los Alamos, NM (one of the wealthiest counties in the US in one of the poorest states), what Chávez did doesn’t impact me much, except that the people who harvest the fruits and vegetables I eat are perhaps treated a bit more humanely than they used to be.

De-normalizing what’s always been wrong

I also acknowledge that many of our Founding Fathers and great leaders have done terrible things. Washington and Jefferson owned slaves. Our government did (and continues to do) horrific things to Native Americans. JFK had multiple affairs. Barbara Sanger, an early advocate of birth control, also promoted eugenics. And let’s not forget the horrors hidden within the Epstein files, which may yet tarnish or destroy the reputations of many of the most powerful men in recent history. At least we hope that happens.

Yes. Terrible things have happened. And I also acknowledge that for many of these men, their actions were socially acceptable at the time and in their social milieu. An extreme example is our current president, who has been convicted of sexual abuse by the courts and whose words “grab ‘em by the pussy” indicate he may have done much worse things.

While in the past, this behavior has been ignored or accepted with a sly wink and a nod as a just reward for achieving power and status, we’re in a different world now.

The tormented and haunted lives of women and children are coming to light. The irreparable harm done to their psyches. Healing that may take more than a lifetime. Their voices are being heard. More importantly, their stories are being believed rather than swept under the rug, once again.

This is good. The stories coming to light.

We need to de-normalize sexual violence.

What is it we want to teach our children, our young people, about how to behave?

Our society, and civilization in general, is based on agreements, which are often codified as laws, rules, or regulations. One of those agreements is that we respect each other’s bodily autonomy. Rape has been a crime for at least 4,000 years, with the earliest laws dating back to the Code of Hammurabi around 1900 BC. So Chávez knew what he was doing was wrong. No excuses. But he did it anyway.

The letter writer correctly noted that, since Chávez has been dead for more than 30 years, we can’t get his side of the story. There will be no trial, no chance to confront his accusers. While society at that time may have been more willing to overlook his actions, it does not remove the cruelty of the actions. And we need to acknowledge that, throughout history, women’s voices and suffering have been silenced and ignored.

Choosing a different future

Men like Chávez shouldn’t be held up as perfect role models any longer.

We can never fully atone for all of the evil done in the past.

But we can pledge to build a better future. I know strong men and great leaders can treat women with kindness and respect. My life is filled with men like this.

I’m not on a rampage to erase strong Hispanic men from history. But I am in favor of revealing the dark sides of their actions. And I want to draw a line to say that rape and treating women as flesh for men’s enjoyment is not acceptable. Men who do this will risk losing their legacy.

We all have a choice in how we behave. Let’s choose kindness and respect. Honor the societal agreements we have. Treat each other the way we want to be treated.

Let’s embrace the good, but hold up the bad as an example of how not to be.

Why is forgiveness so hard sometimes? And why is it sometimes so easy?

The answer came to me on a walk last weekend while listening to the audiobook by Pema Chödrön, Getting Unstuck. One sentence, almost at the very end, jumped out at me with an answer:

My experience with forgiveness is that it sort of comes spontaneously at a certain point, and to try to force it, it’s not really forgiveness, it’s Buddhist philosophy or something, spiritual jargon that you’re trying to live up to, but you’re really just using it against yourself as another reason why you’re not OK.

When the Switch Just Flips

Here, Pema is partly right and partly wrong. Sometimes, forgiveness has been spontaneous for me.

I remember that when I forgave the truck driver who killed my parents, it felt like a sudden revelation. As if a switch inside me had been flipped. I hadn’t even been trying to forgive him. All I was seeking was some additional peace of mind. I needed a bit of relief from all the jumbled chaos in my mind, and forgiving that young man helped me clear a bit of that away.

But relying on a spontaneous event that may or may not occur feels like leaving forgiveness to random chance. It takes away our agency. Is there really nothing we can do if we sincerely want to forgive? When we want more than “spiritual jargon that you’re trying to live up to,” and you want to actually be OK?

Building a Path to the Water

At other times, I have reached a state of forgiveness by consciously deciding I wanted to forgive and moving in that direction. Initially, I tried to reverse-engineer the thought process that led me to that state. The challenge was that there really wasn’t anything I did that led me to forgiveness. It was a spontaneous inner shift, as Pema said.

The Four Elements I Keep Coming Back To

But over time, and after many experiences with forgiveness, I developed a framework for forgiveness.

Acceptance of the past: To paraphrase Byron Katie, we can’t undo events in linear time, so we need to accept that what happened is what was supposed to happen.

Appropriate action: Given the worldview of those involved, they acted appropriately, even if they knew at some deeper level that what they were doing wasn’t the best option.

Empathy: Put yourself in the shoes of those who caused you pain, and try to see the experience from their point of view.

Drop the burden: Carrying the burden of anger and grievance is a heavy load. Let go of that heavy weight you’re dragging around and use the emotional energy for other purposes.

I’ve found my framework useful for reframing events and my thinking, making forgiveness more likely. I’m creating the conditions for forgiveness to occur spontaneously.

It’s like the old adage: “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.”

I’m not the only one who’s developed a system for forgiveness. Here’s a post with a sampling of processes. All the processes and methods for forgiveness that I and others have created are really nothing more than leading a person with grievances to the water of forgiveness, but that isn’t always enough to lead to true forgiveness.

What Happens When You Have to Keep Showing Up

Forgiveness can’t be forced, as Pema says. Forcing it is what you try to do when you still have to spend holidays with that sister-in-law who publicly humiliated you at the last gathering. It’s what I did when I had to keep working with the boss who yelled at me when I didn’t like his micromanagement.

I pushed enough of the feelings down so I could be professional and continue working with him.

It wasn’t until years later that I fully forgave him. When I realized that he was acting appropriately according to his model of leadership, I developed empathy for him and the life experiences that led him to be the person he is.

My framework for forgiveness is not a step-by-step process. There’s not a particular order that the steps need to be taken in, except that Drop the burden usually comes last. These are the elements that have consistently been there for me when I no longer feel that charge of resentment or grievance.

The Desire to Forgive Has to Come First

Today, when I notice the energy of grievance building up inside, I call on those elements. They help me in reframing the situation so that forgiveness is more likely to follow.

We are at core emotional beings, though we may think we are driven by logic. One of the first lessons I learned when I began studying copywriting is that our buying decisions are triggered by emotion, then our brain scrambles to find consistent, logical reasoning that backs up that nearly instinctual and emotional decision. Copywriters and marketers take advantage of this.

By targeting an underlying core emotional driver, marketers crack open the door that makes us receptive to the logical reasons why buying this product will change our lives.

With forgiveness, the emotional driver is the desire to forgive. To be rid of the pain of hate and grievance and resentment. There’s a saying that’s been variously attributed to Nelson Mandela, Buddha, or Alcoholics Anonymous:

When you’ve had enough of drinking that poison and getting sick yourself, it’s time to forgive.

My own framework and the other frameworks I’ve written about are attempts to prepare the logical side of the brain, to appeal to the emotional energies.

Frameworks as a Change of Perspective

These frameworks are attempts at reverse-engineering the mental state that can make forgiveness possible. But they’re not the spontaneous shift that happens within. They won’t work if you don’t want to forgive. They can serve to make forgiveness less of an insurmountable barrier. They can make you more receptive to letting go of grievance, but the letting go is up to you.

They are all methods of reframing the incident or situation. They help you see that a seemingly insurmountable obstacle is not so solid after all. Seen from a different perspective, it’s clear that the gargantuan boulder is actually teetering on a cliff. A slight breeze might be enough to send it over the edge.

Forgiveness as a Door You Walk Through

Forgiveness is a transformation at a soul-deep level. I can write about practices and processes that may lead you to that place, but I can’t create in you the transformation of forgiveness. This is fundamentally a choice you make. A decision to forgive, which may appear out of the blue.

Forgiveness can be hard. Vishen Lakhiani, founder of Mindvalley, developed the 6-phase meditation method, which he wrote about in a book of the same name. This practice, which he follows every day, leads meditators through six steps that are intended to open the mind to visualize the ideal future and a perfect day.

Phase 3 is called Peace through Forgiveness, which is itself a seven-step protocol, starting with selecting a person to forgive, and concluding with forgiving into love. At the end, Lakhiani writes, “If you have something really painful to heal, you might have the same person in your daily Phase 3 for the next few weeks. But you can rest assured that you will forgive them in time.”

This mirrors my own experience.

For me, the experience of forgiveness begins with the decision to forgive. This decision opens a doorway to forgiveness. I might hover in that doorway for some time. I might take a few steps inside. I might try to see the event from the perspective of the other person or persons involved.

Over time, I might even develop empathy for the other person. Little by little, the obstacle of resentment melts away enough that the spontaneous experience of forgiveness becomes the path of least resistance.

And then it’s a smooth slide to release the past, allowing me to move into the future without that burden of grievance.

What do you think, dear readers? Is forgiveness a choice? A spontaneous event? Something else?

Grief has an uncanny way of creeping back in when you least expect it. After lying dormant for months, years, or even decades, a crack in your current life leaves just enough of a gap for it to suddenly sweep over you like a tidal wave, bringing you to your knees.

Again.

It happened to me a few weeks ago. My husband and I were at our grandson’s 8^th birthday party. This was the son of our son Nat – my stepson, to be fully accurate – who was murdered three years ago, shortly before that same grandson’s fifth birthday.

Our grandson’s mother comes from a big and raucous family. For that, we are grateful. That young boy will never lack for loving support. He will always have aunts and uncles, cousins, grandparents, and great-grandparents who will be there to support him. To somewhat compensate for the absence of his father. It also helps that they were all fond of our son.

Every year, we’re invited to Pistol Pete’s or some similar pizza-birthday-parties-and-video-games-place for this grandson’s birthday party. It’s always a bit disorienting. Everyone there knows who we are and greets us warmly. We stick out as two of the few Anglos in the group. But because we only see this big, close-knit clan once a year, we’ve long since forgotten most of the names and relationships.

This year, we sat at a table with the parents of the young man our grandson’s mother is now in a stable relationship with. As a step-mother myself, I feel only gratitude that she found someone who is willing to step in and be a father to our grandson.

The French words for stepfather and stepmother are beau-père and belle-mère, which literally mean “handsome father” and “beautiful mother.” I find these expressions quite lovely, and I will now think of myself as a belle-mère.

Anyways.

There we were at the table with the other grandparents, whom we had just met. I decided to share pictures from our mutual grandson’s birth with the other grandparents. Our grandson had an unexpectedly difficult birth and spent time in the NICU. I showed them several pictures of our grandson with tubes and wires all over him, with Nat, gowned up, stooped over that fragile life, holding a tiny hand.

The other grandfather said to me, “We’re so sorry about what happened to your son.”

Though I’ve heard those words many times, for some unknown reason, they hit me hard at that moment.

Suddenly, tears welled up in my eyes, and my voice choked up. I couldn’t say another word.

Even now, over a week since that experience, I still feel the waves of grief in me. I’m realizing I still haven’t gotten over Nat’s death. A sudden and brutal death, violence he certainly didn’t deserve, killed by an unknown person, now memorialized in a cold case file with the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Department.

Grief as growth

My friend Peleg Top recently wrote about losing his father in his email newsletter. He talked about how grief is also growth:

Grief has led me to a new chapter in my life. I am no longer someone who has a father. I am now part of the front line of my family. I am now the elder of my family.

That realization carries weight. But it also carries an invitation. An invitation to grow into the next version of myself. The elder version.

Grief cracks us open. When the familiar presence of a family member is gone, who do we become? When the planks and scaffolding of relationships that define us disappear, do we keep the same shape, or do we fall to pieces? Is that persona that was the daughter, the sister, the mother, the dear friend still intact and stable enough to continue without that support?

Or is this an opportunity to rebuild, to reshape, and to create a new life, without that steady presence of our loved one supporting and guiding us? Is grief an invitation, as Peleg writes, “to grow into the next version of myself.”

Grief is an opportunity to explore who we truly are, what lies within us, when the presence of that person is no longer part of the contours of our lives. No matter how hard we try to patch up that scaffolding, the part that person fulfilled in our lives cannot be fully replaced.

Who am I really, without my parents, my brother, my stepson as part of my identity? Is this a doorway to explore parts of me that felt blocked off when they were alive?

Rebuilding the scaffolding

I know that until my mom died, I never wore pink. But after I found many lovely bright pink things in my parents’ closet – a blazer, sweaters, and hats – I began to wear this color I had previously shunned. I feel her presence each time I wear it and remember her avid curiosity, her non-judgmental acceptance of information, and the incredible tolerance she showed for faiths outside her Christian identity.

And after Geoff died, I began collecting turtles to supplement the many I kept from his house.

Admittedly, wearing pink and buying turtles are pretty superficial changes. But those little gestures are also reflective of the ways I’ve shored up the missing planks in the scaffolding of my life. The ways I am releasing the person I used to be so I can grow into the person I am now and the person I will be tomorrow.

It’s a reminder that, while my parents, Geoff, and Nat are no longer physical presences in my life, I am free to create a new identity for myself, filling in the empty parts of the supporting frame for my life in ways that honor their memory. Not to forget them, but to incorporate what they meant to me into a new supportive scaffold for my life.

So dear reader, how are you growing through grief?

Is there something in your past, some unpleasant or even horrible experience, that you can’t quite get beyond? An event that becomes a grievance story that runs on repeat in your mind. With each repetition, we embellish the narrative with additional details until we have such a horror show running in our minds that it becomes part of our worldview.

I’m certainly guilty of that. I have a few stories from my time in public accounting that I’ve pulled out to show how terrible it was. We all have stories like that.

But lately, I’ve been reframing those stories through the lens of the model of forgiveness I wrote about earlier. And instead of seeing myself as a perpetual victim of the dysfunctional machine of public accounting, I’m seeing those events as triggers that changed the trajectory of my life. As necessary events that had to happen. Without those experiences, I wouldn’t be where I am today.

But how long do we let our grievance stories run on repeat? With each repetition, the neural pathways of that memory and the accompanying analysis are reinforced in our brains. Changing that narrative can be hard.

Last week, a letter to Dear Abby reinforced this idea to me:

DEAR ABBY: My father left our family when I was in sixth grade. Because he had cheated on our mom numerous times, he was removed from his ministry and went into education. I tried to resolve my feelings with him, but he would never admit his faults. When I finally asked him to tell me the truth, he refused.

I am now in my 60s and still angry at him. I have a wonderful wife and two beautiful kids he has never met. Before he dies, I’d like to tell him how I feel about him and ask him one more time to tell the truth. Is this worth the effort? He is 92, so I don’t have much time. -- ANGRY STILL IN PENNSYLVANIA

DEAR ANGRY: Your efforts will be better spent if you meet with your father and tell him you forgive him for his transgressions. Do this not for him but for yourself, to free you from the burden of anger you have carried for all these years -- and will continue to carry after his demise.

Spending 50 or so years stewing in this feels to me like an excessive amount of time to spend in anger. I can’t imagine how many times Angry revisited the story of his father’s infidelities and departure. Seen through the lens of grievance, any trivial experience with the father now becomes yet another example of the terrible person he seems to be, adding more fuel to the ever-smoldering fire of resentment.

While I agree that forgiveness will heal this person, I don’t quite agree with Abby’s recommendation to “meet with your father and tell him you forgive him for his transgressions.”

While I understand the desire to seek reconciliation with a parent before their death, Angry’s previous attempts didn’t work out so well. Forgiveness and reconciliation are not the same.

Reconciliation may follow from forgiveness, but it’s not required for one’s own healing. You can forgive from a distance. No difficult conversation needed. Forgiveness is about your own healing.

It’s not your responsibility to get another to acknowledge what they did to you. You can’t extract an apology from someone who doesn’t think they did anything wrong.

Let me apply the elements of forgiveness I wrote about a while back to this person’s situation.

Acceptance of the past: We can’t undo events in linear time, so we need to accept that what happened is what was supposed to happen, to paraphrase Byron Katie.

Appropriate action: Given the worldview of those involved, everyone acted appropriately, even if they knew at some deeper level that what they were doing wasn’t the best option.

Empathy: Put yourself in the shoes of those who caused you pain, and try to see the experience from their point of view.

Drop the burden: Carrying the burden of anger and grievance is a heavy load. Let go of that heavy weight you’re dragging around and use the emotional energy for other purposes.

Acceptance of the past

The father did some terrible things. Angry mentions multiple infidelities and abandonment of the family. The infidelities were clearly serious enough that he lost his ministry.

We live in linear time, so nothing can change what happened. Angry might not like the fact that he grew up without the father he would have preferred, but that is what happened. And running the grievance story in a loop for 50 or so years doesn’t heal the trauma.

Our experiences are opportunities to learn something. Maybe in this situation, the lesson to learn was about self-reliance. I don’t know enough of Angry’s story. But I’m sure there is a lesson in there.

We’re also only getting part of the story here. There’s no mention of what happened after Angry’s father left. But it appears that Angry’s mother did a decent job raising her son, decent enough that he has “a wonderful wife and two beautiful kids.” So it appears that the past wasn’t all bad.

Appropriate action

From the father’s perspective, he was behaving appropriately. Maybe he regretted leaving his family or losing his ministry. I don’t know. But following his lust and having multiple affairs was his solution to whatever internal urges inside him that drove him there. We don’t have to understand the internal motives, but Angry seems to confirm that his father didn’t think he’d done anything wrong.

I’m currently reading A Slowly Dying Cause, a murder mystery by Elizabeth George. Interwoven between the third-person accounts of the events surrounding the death of Michael Lobb and the ensuing murder investigation is a first-person narrative of the affair Michael had with a much younger woman. This affair resulted in the dissolution of his marriage and apparently contributed to his murder. George captures perfectly the fiery infatuation, the madness, and intoxication that Michael felt for this young woman:

“At first it was enough to hear her voice late at night when everyone was asleep. At first it was enough to have her near-constant texts, her emails, and her pictures. But soon enough, I felt such a craving. I can’t describe it any other way. I knew that I would need more from her because she filled a void in me that I hadn’t even known existed prior to our meeting.”

In Michael Lobb’s case, and possibly for Angry’s father, perhaps it would have been better to remain faithful to his wife and children. But perhaps not. Maybe these affairs were signs of existential problems in their relationships. As people change, so do their needs. A match that seemed perfect at one point may not be the right one later. Breakups happen all the time for whatever reason.

Children do better with parents who are both happy and fulfilled. Sometimes, the best thing for the entire family is ending the marriage. Separately, they can be better parents than they were as a couple.

And again, we’re only getting a limited, one-sided view of the story. Besides the infidelities, was there something else in the relationship with his wife that caused Angry’s father to abandon the family? And did he entirely abandon his wife and son? Did he pay alimony or child support?

And after her husband left, how did Angry’s mother talk to her son about the divorce? Was she neutral or did she stoke the fires of resentment?

Empathy

One of the most challenging things for any of us is to fully acknowledge the pain and suffering our actions cause others. In my own life, losing my parents was hard. But I can’t imagine the aftermath for the truck driver. One minute, his eyes fall shut from sheer exhaustion. Next minute, he awakens to a car directly in his path. He tries to swerve, but the vehicles collide in an explosion of metal and glass. His momentary lapse leaves two people dead. I can’t imagine living with that memory.

So I can see why the father might refuse to acknowledge that he did anything wrong. He was doing the best he could. Those multiple affairs scratched an itch. They satisfied – at least momentarily – a need. The result was losing his marriage and a decades-long estrangement from at least one of his children.

And it probably didn’t help things that Angry’s interactions with his father centered around asking him “one more time to tell the truth.” Would acknowledging the past help heal Angry? Nothing Angry can do or say to his father can change the person that his father is.

Only empathy can help Angry heal.

Not everyone is strong enough to take responsibility for the pain they cause others through their actions. It can be a horrifying and painful realization that something we did long ago, perhaps thoughtlessly, caused such immense suffering in another. And truthfully, do we want to exact revenge by inflicting the same level of pain on another? This continues the cycle of grievance and attack. The Hatfields and McCoys, into eternity.

Release the burden

Here’s the step where we reclaim our power by dropping a story that only causes pain. Let go of the story that keeps you anchored to the past, and that prevents you from seeing the love, beauty, joy, and peace that is always available here and now. Your only responsibility is to yourself. To stop punishing yourself for things others did that hurt you. To extend love and to be a beacon of love in the dark.

If the father truly abandoned the family and removed himself from contact, then keeping that grievance going all these years isn’t hurting the father at all. Dad may not even be fully aware of the pain he caused. While Angry has been wallowing in poison, Dad may be blithely going on his way, perhaps living his best life and blissfully unaware of the grievance tale Angry has been playing on an endless loop.

As Viktor Frankl reminds us, our ultimate power – a power that can’t be taken from us – is the power “to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s way.”

The choice to choose an attitude of forgiveness over anger is solely up to Angry. It’s also solely his decision whether to reach out to his father for a final attempt at reconciliation. Will making one more attempt bring him more peace, or will he be happier leaving things as they are?

After my parents died, a friend who had recently lost his mother asked me if I felt there was any “unfinished business” with them. Of course, I would have preferred to have them around for a few more decades, but our last phone call reassured me that they were happy with the choices I was making.

Not everyone is that fortunate. I have a family member who cut all of us off over 20 years ago for reasons not fully known to any of us, but likely related to some “unfinished business” from the past.

In my own case, I no longer feel the urge to pull out the grievance stories of my time in public accounting as a badge of my suffering. Instead, I’m grateful for those experiences because they fuel my commitment to making accounting better than it was for me.

My question to you, dear readers, is what grievance story can you let go of?

For the last few years, I’ve chosen a word to serve as a theme for the new year.

I’m not the only one who does this. My Facebook and LinkedIn feeds are full of posts with my friends’ new words for the year. My friend Nicole Davis even shared the ChatGPT prompt she used to find her new word for 2025:

As I close out 2025 and step into a new year, I’ve been sitting with one question. What’s the word that will guide me, shape me, stretch me and lead me in 2026? The word that captures the version of myself I’m becoming. What is my word for 2026?

So I tried out her prompt. After a few more follow-up questions from ChatGPT, here’s what I got:

“The word hiding inside you: FOCUS

“Focus — on what actually matters, not everything that asks for your attention.

“Why FOCUS fits you for 2026

• It guides decisions: Is this what I need to do?

• It shapes your days: fewer distractions, clearer priorities

• It stretches you: saying no, finishing instead of starting

• It leads you: energy goes where intention lives

“This is the word people choose when they’re done being busy and ready to be effective.

“In 2026, I choose focus.
”I will do what needs to be done — not everything that can be done.”

This fits me in so many ways.

I’ve been through a lot in the last few years that largely extinguished my ability to focus.

In April 2022, I had ankle surgery. I didn’t anticipate how thoroughly debilitating it would be to spend 6 weeks in a non-weight-bearing cast. I didn’t expect that my recovery period would be measured in years, not months. Almost 4 years later, I’m still not there.

By the middle of 2023, I was exhausted and experiencing burnout after several years without a real break. Unlike those I saw on social media who spent the pandemic baking sourdough bread or binging Netflix to fill their hours at home when offices shut down, my freelance writing work only increased as clients asked me for content to help their customers and clients navigate the pandemic.

Part of that burnout was two back-to-back book revision/rewrite/update projects. I rewrote the same book for two different audiences, updating it to reflect changes in tax law and adding additional content in my client’s voice. Two 400-plus page tomes with detailed tax strategies for retirement were the result.

In December 2023, I reached my breaking point. I remember being in a Las Vegas hotel room, where I was attending Digital CPA – my third accounting conference in Vegas in six months – and I was trying to finish a project, working at a tiny desk, barely large enough for my laptop,

And I hit a wall.

For the first and so far only time, I had to bail out on a project. Burnout, depression, and brain fog all hit me. I just couldn’t.

Then, a few weeks later, in January 2024, my stepson was murdered. It was the knock on the door we’d been dreading for years, as do all parents of drug addicts. From the little the Bernalillo County Sheriffs could tell us, he’d been killed by an unknown person at a homeless encampment in the desert outside Albuquerque. While the sheriffs stressed that it wasn’t a drug deal gone bad, they didn’t have much more to go on than the accounts of the other people living there.

My ability to concentrate and to be productive in my work as a freelance writer largely evaporated. My brain felt like mush.

Maybe my brain fog was from grief. Or menopause. Or burnout. Or I was depressed. I don’t know exactly what was up. But focusing for more than 10 minutes at a time was beyond me.

The volume of work that had previously been easy for me to crank out now felt impossible. Some weeks, the only work I managed – and only barely at times – was the few hours I spent on the podcast I had begun hosting for CPA Trendlines.

Over the last year or so, I even started wondering if I needed to find a new line of work. I considered reaching out to friends at tech companies to see if there were any openings for me. I never did – I was pretty sure they would pigeonhole me as a content writer, and I knew I couldn’t keep up with the expected pace of work. I wasn’t sure what else I could do.

Gradually, it dawned on me that I’m already doing the work I am meant to do. And with that realization, my ability to concentrate is also returning.

I also found things that help me. Getting back on hormone replacement therapy for menopause helped a lot. Taking liberal doses of lion’s mane, reishi, and other brain focus supplements and practicing Tai Chi daily are all acting as brain tonics for me. They help unwind the background anxiety that so easily teeters into despair.

Another help for me has been writing about forgiveness and grief here in Open Items.

Best of all, I’m starting work on a new project that fills me with joy.

It occurred to me a few weeks ago that my interviews with over 100 thought leaders in accounting for my Disruptors podcast is a gold mine of content. So I’ll be leveraging that content in a book and in other places. I’m looking forward to seeing my name on the cover for a change.

As I well know, writing a book is a lot of work.

I know I’ll be leaning hard on my word for 2026 – FOCUS – to get me to that goal.

So, dear readers, what is your word for 2026?

Photo by Abyan Athif on Unsplash

As 2025 comes to a close and 2026 rapidly approaches, I’d like to encourage you to take a moment to express gratitude. Gratitude opens the door to the blessings the universe wants to send you. It sends the message that you are receptive to those gifts.

It also updates your mental state from frustration, disappointment, or grievance to a state of appreciation for what you have. You become open to joy, love, and peace, which are the core things we all want. Gratitude connects you to presence, that state of being where the traumas of the past and the worries of tomorrow slip away, and all that remains is the magic of the eternal now.

Gratitude for the past

What did 2025 bring you that you’re grateful for? What people, places, experiences, and material things did you encounter that made this year especially wonderful?

For me, 2025 marked the release of the 100^th episode of the podcast I host for CPA Trendlines, The Disruptors. Rick Telberg and I initiated this project near the end of 2021 on a whim, as a means to capitalize on my extensive connections to the profession’s disruptors. Neither of us had done a podcast before, but it felt like the right thing to do. My guests have included well-known thought leaders like Ron Baker, Ed Kless, Jason Staats, and Jen Wilson, as well as lesser-known leaders like Questian Telka and Tony Proctor. Just before Christmas, I recorded episode 133, which will go live in February. These conversations with visionaries and challengers of the status quo restore my faith in the accounting profession. My intention with the podcast has been to disseminate enough ideas that anyone who’s discontented can find something that will improve their life as an accountant or bookkeeper.

This has also been the year I leaned into forgiveness as a topic in Open Items. Writing about the traumas in my life and what I have learned and continue to learn about forgiveness has helped me heal. Yes, I still miss my parents, my brother Geoff, and my stepson Nat, but I am learning to release those past events so I can create a future rooted in the present.

Gratitude for the present

What are you grateful for in your life right now? What qualities of yourself are you thankful for? Who are the people in your life that make your life especially wonderful? What in your current situation are you grateful for?

I’m grateful for my continuing good health and for the health of my immediate family members. I’m thankful that our 21-year-old cat is still with us. I’m grateful for the quiet of my rural neighborhood here in New Mexico.

I’m also grateful for my career as a writer. Writing forces me to think deeply, to fully learn whatever it is I’m writing about. And it allowed me to leave the dysfunction and burnout of accounting, yet remain connected to this industry. Because of my status as a CPA and a freelance writer, I’ve met people I never would have met had I stayed in public accounting.

Gratitude for the future

What are you excited about for 2026 and beyond? What opportunities and experiences do you have planned that were made possible by what you did in the past, and what you are doing in the present?

While tomorrow – or even later today – is never guaranteed, I have much to look forward to. While several of my friends are preparing for New Year’s Eve galas and balls, my husband and I are planning a quiet evening at home, with a meal of tasty bites from one of the Middle Eastern delis in town.

I’m also excited about several projects for 2026. I’ll be finishing up work on my latest book project for a client. I am also starting work on my own book, a compilation of the ideas and insights I’ve learned from speaking to so many Disruptors.

I’m also looking forward to getting strong again. After nearly four years, my ankle is finally healed enough that I can resume the exercise routine I had before I injured it.

Above all, I’m grateful for language, which enables me to convey ideas in my brain to the brains of others, and which allows me to ponder, question, and possibly assimilate the ideas of others into my own thinking.

Gratitude has helped me heal my mind and my life. And I’m looking forward, with immense gratitude, to the blessings of 2026.

If you’ve gotten this far, I’d love to hear what you’re grateful for.

Every recovering accountant has at least one horror story about their time in public accounting.

For one friend, it was the time she spent 40 consecutive hours on an audit. A former coworker who moved to industry finished her first month-end close at 1 am and was expected to be back at work just seven hours later. Other friends told me how they exceeded revenue or realization goals, but that they were excluded from the bonus pool because they didn’t put in enough hours.

On the first episode of my Disruptors podcast, Amanda Aguillard said this:

“Our industry tends to have a little bit of a martyrship complex, where you should be proud of the fact that you work 70 or 80 hours a week. You should be proud of the fact that your family doesn’t remember your face, and that’s not real attractive to folks that are coming up through the system.”

One of my horror stories happened when my brother Geoff died.

Here’s the abbreviated version: He passed away at the end of August 2009, when our firm was busy completing business tax returns that had been extended until September 15 and personal returns due on October 15. The firm gave me the standard three days of bereavement leave, and then I was back at work. My family delayed his memorial service until after October 15 because I was working weekends.

When I share this story with friends today, they’re uniformly horrified. But my work with forgiveness is forcing me to look at this experience in a different light. I see it now as exactly what I needed at the time.

Yes, the way my firm treated me was inhumane, and I don’t condone it. And if I were leading a team today and something like that happened to one of them, I would give that person at least two weeks off. Working weekends would be out of the question.

Fortunately, many firms today are recognizing the psychological trauma that long hours at work induce. As Amanda mentioned above, the long hours I tolerated are no longer acceptable to the younger generation. Many guests on my podcast have structured their firms so that weeks with more than 40 hours are the exception, not the rule.

However, as I reflect on that experience, although it was challenging, both emotionally and physically, I no longer want to wear it like a badge of honor. It wasn’t a Nietzsche-like experience that didn’t kill me, so it made me stronger. But it was what I needed to get through that tough period.

The evidence for this conclusion is that I survived it. I got through it. I didn’t have a breakdown. My familial tendency for alcoholism didn’t suck me in.

I’m still here, and I think I’m doing OK.

Yes, I would likely have recovered from my brother’s death sooner had I had more time away from work. But that time at work was like a cocoon that let me escape the horrors of Geoff’s death.

My brother Geoff, like many end-stage alcoholics, had an ugly death. He had been bingeing for several weeks, downing a bottle of vodka daily, and it appeared that he was trying to sober up on his own. When alcoholics sober up from a lengthy binge, their electrolytes often get out of whack, resulting in a spike in blood pressure. But when that spike hits the resistance of a hardened cirrhotic liver, a wave of blood backs up. With nowhere to go, veins around the esophagus weaken and may even rupture. EMTs, who often see this, call it an upper GI bleed.

That’s what happened to Geoff. He bled out in his kitchen, where he had collapsed. He died sometime after August 3, the date of his last bank transaction. But it wasn’t until nearly a month later, on August 29, that his good friend Marla found him.

I’m sure he didn’t realize the seriousness of what was happening. There’s no record of him calling 911 for help. Even if an ambulance had been five minutes away, it likely would have been too late.

My first of many trips to Geoff’s house, a three-hour drive from my home, was two days later, long after his body had been removed and after my brother Doug, his wife, and several of Geoff’s friends had cleaned up the worst of the blood in the kitchen. Doug also hauled away two trash barrels full of empty vodka bottles before I arrived. Scattered around his living room were about 20 Smirnoff mule mugs. I kept one and pitched the rest.

But the stench of death was overpowering and persistent. Some of Geoff’s blood had seeped through the cracked and peeling kitchen tiles, then through the worn pine floorboards, and dripped down to the dirt under his house. No amount of Clorox or Lysol could cover that up. The entire floor, down to the joists, had to be torn out and replaced, with a heavy layer of lime on the dirt.

Blowflies buzzed through the whole house. Doug cautioned me about putting anything on the kitchen floor because the black mouse-turd-looking things scattered around were blowfly pupa. Marla even used Geoff’s shop vac to clear maggots out of the cabinets under the sink.

Besides the horrible smell, everything in the house was coated with a waxy, yellow-brown layer of tar, the result of Geoff’s decades-long chain-smoking habit.

Cleaning out that house was nasty. Every day when I came home, I would toss all my clothes, including the old tennis shoes I wore, into the washer and take a long, hot shower.

Work was a respite from that horror.

After my parents died in 1993, one of my linguistics professors at the University of Washington, Cecile McKee, told me, “After my pop died, it was getting back to work that helped me the most.”

There’s a Zen saying:

Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.

After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.

My take on that with grief:

Before trauma, get up and go to work.

After trauma, get up and go to work.

Simply moving my body through my usual routine helped me heal.

Even though the firm’s treatment of me in that difficult time seems callous and impersonal, my current-day perspective says it was what I needed at the time.

When Geoff died, I had eight tax seasons under my belt, five of them at that same firm. The work was familiar. The tax department was heavy on compliance, light on advisory services. It was work I could easily get through in the brain fog of grief. The repetitive process of preparing and reviewing tax returns used the analytical, number-centric side of my brain while giving my emotional, intuitive side a break.

Focusing on that work was an escape from the horrors of Geoff’s death. It allowed my shocked and grief-stricken emotions to heal in the background while I did the work, pretty much on autopilot.

I know that if the work really had been too much, if I had been collapsing in a sobbing ball under my desk, or if I couldn’t get out of bed in the morning, my bosses and co-workers would have taken care of me. They were good people who cared about me. It would have been OK if I had needed more time off. They would have figured it out.

And I can’t lay sole responsibility on the firm leaders for what happened. Back then, I accepted that long hours were a requirement of the job. There weren’t many examples of firms doing things differently. I wore those long hours and my meager time off like a badge of honor. And I didn’t want to leave my colleagues in the lurch. At that point, I wasn’t even questioning whether this schedule was reasonable or the only way.

I was proud of my career as a CPA, and my brothers accepted the calendar-driven demands of my work. None of them pressured me to pick a date sooner than mid-October for the memorial service. The delay allowed us all to heal a bit from our collective grief around losing Geoff.

So I willingly went back to work after three days. I didn’t ask for more time off. It didn’t even occur to me to talk to my boss about possible times for a memorial service before the 10/15 deadline.

I had internalized the pathology and dysfunction of how traditional firms operated, so I got up every morning and went to work. That I managed to get through it without too many enduring scars is evidence to me that the rhythm of work was what I needed for my healing.

Today, I see things differently, and I am grateful that the culture around accounting firms is shifting toward a more humane approach.

I no longer want to hold that story up as a badge of honor, of the dysfunction I experienced in public accounting. I no longer view it as evidence of how inhumane and callous the firm leaders were.

There’s often an awkwardness when someone in your circle loses a family member. In the last few months, two friends lost their spouses suddenly and unexpectedly. I’m not sure what to say beyond “I’m sorry for your loss.” I assume my coworkers felt that same awkwardness. My stoic presentation and ability to dive right back into the work were likely helpful to them in navigating what could have been an emotional quagmire.

I was doing what I thought was appropriate at the time, as were my co-workers and the firm leaders.

I forgive them and myself.

We were all doing the best we could. Had I been in charge of the firm, I might have handled things differently, more humanely.

That experience may have made me stronger and more resilient. And it may have marked the beginning of the end for me in public accounting. But it is also providing me an opportunity to deepen my commitment to forgiveness.

I turned 62 this year. By this time in most people’s lives, everyone has had experiences that change their outlook. Many have been through significant losses. Others have had amazing triumphs. I might look at a friend’s life and think, “Wow, at least that didn’t happen to me” or “How did she get so lucky?” Like most people, I can’t help but compare where I am to where others are.

Our experiences are what we need in our curriculum of life. It’s how we respond to those experiences that make us who we are. Those responses prepare us for the next challenging experience.

About a month ago, one of my neighbors had a devastating house fire. While the structure is more or less intact, aside from a gaping hole in the garage roof, smoke damage destroyed everything. He, his wife, and two young children got out safely. Tragically, their dogs did not.

The cause of the fire was likely faulty wiring in the garage. My neighbor could have reacted to the loss of his home and sweet dogs with rage at the previous owner for selling a home with an electrical time bomb ready to go off. He’d already found a few other creative wiring choices elsewhere in the house that had required immediate repairs. He could have been bitter at the prospect of once again starting over from nothing. He and his wife could be arguing about who was more responsible for not ensuring the dogs, who were hiding in terror under beds, got out safely.

Instead, my neighbor responded with gratitude and forgiveness. He’s grateful that he and his family are safe and uninjured. He becomes emotional when describing the outpouring of support from neighbors, the Red Cross, and his insurance agent. In the wake of that generosity, he’s committed to this neighborhood, a place he’s only lived in for about a year, and is beginning the slow process of rebuilding. While he and his family are mourning the loss of their beloved furry children, they are accepting that loss as something no one could have prevented.

Myself, I’m grateful for the journey I’ve been on – even the hard parts like losing my parents, a beloved brother, and my son – for the lessons I’ve learned along the way.

The biggest lesson I’ve learned is the importance of forgiveness. As I wrote a few months ago, I didn’t set out to forgive the truck driver who killed my parents. That came about as a survival technique. I had so much going on in my life when they died. I had just moved to a new city. I was starting a demanding PhD program in linguistics. And, shortly after moving, I had ended a nine-year relationship.

Something had to give. And that something was the anger I harbored for the truck driver.

I couldn’t undo the events of that November day in 1993, but I could change how I thought about it going forward. I could let go of the heavy weight of rage and grievance that swirled around my head, keeping me up at night, chattering mindlessly, all the should haves and could haves and lost chances. During my last phone call with my parents, they expressed their pride in seeing me follow my dream, and they pledged their financial support to help me fulfill it.

But in the wake of their death, all that chatter was interfering with my ability to focus on my studies. To make good on their investment in me.

So I forgave that truck driver. And I forgave my parents for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. That decision allowed me to move on from that awful day. Yes, I still grieve losing them so early, but I’m grateful for the lessons they taught me while they were here, and I’m grateful for the lessons I’ve learned and continue to learn with forgiveness.

Over the years, my understanding of forgiveness has expanded. Back then, forgiveness was survival, something I needed to do for my own mental health. However, I am realizing that forgiveness is one of, if not the most important thing we can do.

Consider how much more peaceful our world would be if we just gave each other a bit of grace. Instead of instantly throwing a finger or seeking to retaliate when someone cuts you off in traffic, what if you instead instantly forgave whatever caused them to be suddenly in your lane, just a few feet from your bumper? What if you gave thanks to your own quick reaction in averting a collision?

What if we considered the provocative message on someone’s t-shirt or yard sign with curiosity instead of judgment, as Ted Lasso suggests? What is it in someone’s life experience that inspires them to hold an opinion diametrically opposed to yours?

Or when your spouse does that one thing that drives you nuts, that thing you’ve nagged about so many times, yet they just did it again. Maybe their way makes sense to them, but yours feels alien?

Forgiveness creates a kinder world. A world where we are less likely to continue the ever-escalating and never-ending cycle of grievance and vengeance. Where we are more likely to connect and less likely to divide. A world where we work to promote human flourishing.

In my own life, practicing forgiveness is an ongoing transformation. I’m more likely to give people the benefit of the doubt. More willing to do what’s needed when someone else drops the ball. And far more tolerant of other viewpoints.

I don’t always succeed, but I’m willing to forgive myself when I fall short. And more willing to step up and be honest about my own failures, and to do what I can to make it right.

A Course in Miracles teaches that forgiveness is our primary function here on earth. I feel that as an aspirational goal, as something I’ll one day be able to do. But until that day, I’ll settle for doing what I can to create a better world, one day, one person at a time.

I’m grateful for the lessons I’m learning from forgiveness. For the way it has helped me become a better person. Forgiveness enables me to navigate our politically contentious world with more generosity and tolerance. Shedding the baggage of revenge thoughts and grievance gives me the mental capacity to think about the positives in my life. Cutting off that mental chatter of the could have, should have, lets me hear the sounds in our quiet neighborhood.

Most precious of all, forgiveness gives me an inexhaustible peace of mind.

Where does forgiveness turn into gratitude? When you’ve endured a truly awful experience, how can we say, “Thank you for that experience,” as Oprah encourages us to?

For me, that has come when I fully let go of grievance, the need to be the perennial victim, and to see all the experiences of my life as opportunities to learn a lesson that I apparently need to learn. Sometimes, over and over until it sticks. Forgiveness and gratitude come when I am willing to see the other person or the situation as a key that unlocks empathy, kindness, and love.

My parents died on the first day of November, 32 years ago. For years, I’ve made a practice of posting daily gratitudes on Facebook for 30 days each November. Many of those posts mention how grateful I am for having John and Jackie Farr as my parents. They taught me compassion, tolerance, empathy, and unconditional love, and supported all the twists and turns in my life path – at least to the extent that I was somehow moving upwards and forward.

They patiently supported me as I switched from engineering to biochemistry to linguistics, including a year as an exchange student in Germany. My mom counseled me when I had problems with a manager at work, and they were happy that they were in a position to help me out when I finally settled into a PhD program in linguistics at the University of Washington.

I am incredibly grateful to have had parents like them. One of my childhood friends told me just a few years ago how much she appreciated the chaotic and laughter-filled dinners with my family, when she saw how my parents interacted lovingly with my older brothers, who had a well-deserved local reputation for creative misbehavior. That wasn’t the case for her.

But what do I have to be grateful for the experience of losing them so suddenly, so irrevocably, when they both died in a head-on collision with a semi? Boom, and their lives were over. No warning, no chance to say goodbye. Whatever the last words we said to each other in that last phone call were now the very last words we would ever say to each other. The last time I saw them was now the final time I would ever see them.

The expectation that they would be around for at least another 20 years was extinguished. They would never see me finish grad school, marry, or be a parent. They wouldn’t be around to see what became of me when I finally figured out what I wanted to do when I grew up (which I’m still working on). My dad wouldn’t be available for long-distance car trouble diagnosis, and my mom would never sew me another piece of clothing or give me kind advice when I had work or relationship problems. All of that was gone, in an instant.

I was enraged at the truck driver for the first few weeks and months after the accident. How could he have been so irresponsible to have gotten behind the wheel of a lethal weapon when he was too tired to stay awake?

Within a few months, I found my way to forgiving that young man in a sort of superficial way. It was really an act of self-preservation. I had so many other things to grapple with – new city, grad school, change in career, end of a relationship, and navigating newfound singlehood. There was so much turmoil in my life; something had to give. I had to let go of that weight of grievance. I couldn’t change anything about that horrible past event, and I needed to clear out mental bandwidth for my demanding present.

It wasn’t until much later that I fully forgave and developed empathy for him and what the experience meant for him. I cannot imagine the nightmares he surely had, reliving that instant when he snapped awake to see a car directly in front of him, desperately wrenching the wheel to swerve at the same time my father swerved the same direction, the vehicles colliding in a twisting explosion of metal and glass. Then, discovering that the two in the other car had both died, I can only guess at the guilt and shame he must have felt.

In the first weeks and months after the accident, when my brothers and I were still numb, we told others that two things blessed us.

One, that our parents had died together. In 1984, about a month after I started my year as an exchange student, my mom’s dad and my dad’s mom died within two weeks of each other. After I returned, I witnessed that palpable grief around my surviving grandparents as they grappled with the loss of their life partners after 60+ years together. Their sorrow was never far from the surface.

We couldn’t imagine either of our parents without the other. They were a unified whole. Our mom was one of the first women our dad had ever dated, and my mom had found in young John Farr “a diamond in the rough,” as she told her mother. As great as our loss was, we couldn’t imagine how shattering it would have been for either of them to confront life without the other.

The second blessing we had was that we would not have to watch our parents decline in health and mental acuity as they aged. We had seen how difficult it was for our parents to stand by and support their own parents as they became more frail, sicker, and finally let go of their bodies. I experienced some of that with my husband’s mother. And now, as I watch my childhood friends lose their parents, and as I attend celebration of life services for those parents, I sense how fortunate I am to have been spared that particular hell.

But those two blessings are prices I would gladly pay to have a few more years with their company.

On one of my trips back to New Mexico to help clear out my parents’ house, I had a chance encounter with a friend from my college years at UNM. My brother George introduced me to him and a tight-knit group of friends who gathered for weekly volleyball matches and put on plays together. Back in the 80s, both of us had been in relationships with others, but now, we were both single at the same time.

Perhaps we would have gotten together as a couple eventually if my parents hadn’t died. I can imagine a scenario where we could have met up on one of the trips I would have inevitably made to visit my brothers and parents. But there was something raw, honest, and open about me at that moment that made me willing to say yes to a relationship that made zero logical sense but 100% loving sense. We’ve now been together for 31 years, married for 25. So perhaps I can thank my parents’ deaths for bringing us together.

The real blessing for me has been how that experience eventually led me to embrace forgiveness, empathy, and gratitude. Looking into those dark corners of my soul where I stored all my petty grievances and all the perceived slights of my life, all my self-recriminations for things I could have done and should have done, and opening that up to the light of forgiveness has given me a sense of lightness, peace, and joy. Unlocking all those secret rooms to let light into the festering pain is melting those phantoms into nothing.

That experience also turned me into a writer. A few months after losing my parents, I started a practice of daily journaling. At 9 PM every night, I set my linguistics books aside, and, sitting at a writing desk that had been my father’s, I wrote and wrote until all the excess words were drained out of me. I kept that practice up for months, until I found my way to a kind of peace.

I restarted my daily journaling practice a few years after my oldest brother died, and have kept it up for more than 12 years now. Some days the words come out slowly, but on other days, I write as fast as I can to keep up with the voice in my head. Writing is where I ask myself questions and try to understand the world around me. Sometimes when I write, I feel the presence of my parents, my brother Geoff, and my stepson Nat, and sense the unconditional love their spirits are extending to me through time and space.

If my heart hadn’t been ripped open like that, a wound that has taken years to heal, I’m not sure I would have found my way here. Writing about forgiveness and gratitude has opened up new parts of my soul, and new avenues for expression.

So yes, today, I can say thank you for that experience. It has made me who I am today, and for that I am grateful.

Are there different kinds or levels of forgiveness? In my own forgiveness journey, I’ve encountered what felt like plateaus or way stations. Places to hang out and get comfortable with a new feeling of lightness as I shed the weight of grievance, piece by painful piece. As I’ve written before, I believe forgiveness is an individual journey.

I’ve been wondering if there are other ways to think about forgiveness. So I asked my research assistant, Perplexity, for some help.

One of the names that popped out was Dr. Steven Marmer. Other models also came up, and I’ll do deeper dives into some of them in the coming weeks. Dr. Marmer is a psychiatrist and member of the clinical faculty at UCLA Medical School. His research specialties lie in the areas of trauma, dissociation, and resilience. In 2014, he created a five-minute video for Prager U based on his clinical experiences.

His model of forgiveness differentiates between these three types of forgiveness:

• Exoneration

• Forbearance

• Release

Let’s walk through each of these in turn, then I’ll share my thinking.

Exoneration

As Dr. Marmer explains,

Exoneration is the closest to what we usually think of when we say “forgiveness.” Exoneration is wiping the slate entirely clean and restoring a relationship to the full state of innocence it had before the harmful actions took place.

Exoneration occurs in three common situations. First, where it is clear that the harm or injury was an accident, and no one is a fault.

The second is when the transgressor is a child or someone you have loving feelings towards and did not understand the hurt they caused.

The third situation is when the person is truly sorry, takes full responsibility, asks forgiveness, and commits to not repeating the action in the future.

As Dr. Marmer explains, in all these situations, accepting the full apology of the other person and granting complete forgiveness is appropriate. You will both feel better. Failing to forgive in these situations may even result in harm to your own well-being.

Forbearance

Forbearance is when the transgressor makes a partial or conditional apology. They might even throw in some blame at the victim. Their apology lacks genuine sincerity. Exercising forbearance may be the best route when you want to keep a relationship intact. Forbearance is a watchful kind of forgiveness, which Dr. Marmer describes as “forgive but not forget.” If enough time passes without problems, forbearance can lead to exoneration and full forgiveness.

Release

In Dr. Marmer’s model, this is the kind of forgiveness when the transgressor doesn’t acknowledge that they were at fault in any way, or their apology is obviously insincere. This is the situation when no reparations are offered or available and is among the most challenging types he encountered in his practice. He gives examples of adult survivors of child abuse or a business partner who cheated another.

Release is simply letting go of the burden of grievance. It does not require exoneration of the offender. It also does not require the limited atonement of forbearance. This is all about the person who was wronged. This is releasing the anger and pain so you can move on. It means you are not allowing the person who hurt you to live rent-free in your mind. It liberates you from the “tyranny of living in the traumatic past.”

My own experience

This appears to be a useful model. However, its flaw is hiding the real gift of forgiveness in the last option: Release.

In Dr. Marmer’s words:

Release does not exonerate the offender. Nor does it require forbearance. It doesn’t even demand that you continue the relationship. But it does ask that instead of continuing to define much of your life in terms of the hurt done, you release your bad feelings and your preoccupation with the negative things that have happened to you. Release does something that is critically important: it allows you to let go of the burden, the “silent tax” that is weighing you down and eating away at your chance for happiness. If you do not release the pain and anger and move past dwelling on old hurts and betrayals, you will be allowing the ones who hurt you to live, rent-free, in your mind, reliving forever the persecution that the original incident started.

Exoneration and Forbearance both combine reconciliation and atonement with forgiveness. I believe these are all separate. Reconciliation and atonement depend on outside forces, beyond your control. As Release shows, reconciliation and atonement are not required for forgiveness.

In June of 1994, my brothers and I attended the sentencing hearing for the young man who had been driving the semi that collided head-on with my parents’ car, killing them instantly. He had pleaded guilty to reckless driving and was facing a maximum of 30 days in jail. Some of us spoke. I also read a letter from a brother who couldn’t be there.

At that time, I had not yet fully forgiven this young man. But I remember I had found a functional peace of mind amid all the grief and turmoil that allowed me to continue my graduate studies in Seattle, make travel arrangements to visit NM, and even have fun. I remember being in that courtroom and speaking about how this truck driver had stolen our parents from us, and that they would not be around to see what would happen to us, to meet the grandchildren and great-grandchildren yet to come. Speaking those words out loud remains one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.

Exoneration didn’t make sense, nor did Forbearance. Nothing this man could do and nothing that would happen in the courtroom could fully “wipe the slate clean.” His apology, offered to us in the courtroom, didn’t change anything. My brothers and I lost our parents. This young man had been in a horrific accident that cost two people their lives. We would most likely never see him again. A sequence of bad business policies, poor decisions, and a quirk in the roadway had all converged on that moment.

The young man’s employer, one of the many oil and gas companies in that corner of the state, was following common business practices in working its truck drivers hard, with expectations of long hours and little time off. Maybe the truck driver and his co-worker in the passenger seat had stayed out too late or had said yes to a shift when they were too tired. A curve and a rock barrier made it hard for my dad and the driver to see each other until they were on top of each other.

In the end, the driver was sentenced to 30 days in jail, at our request. He was also supposed to pay us restitution for funeral expenses, but as a victim’s advocate told us, there was no legal mechanism to make that happen.

Release was what I needed to heal.

For me, forgiveness is a decision I’ve made for myself. It’s a purely selfish choice. Forgiveness has about my own peace of mind. Forgiveness means letting go of the burden of the endless cycle of grievance, vengeance, and attack, followed by yet more grievance, escalating with each cycle. Forgiveness allowed me to step out of that cycle.

Forgiveness is letting go of the past to create a future from the present. My future was no longer anchored to the past, when I had living parents.

Over time, my forgiveness has deepened to empathy for the driver. I hope he’s managed to heal from the trauma. I hope he’s had a good life.

Be the light of love.

Let’s be honest.

The culture we’ve created isn’t serving us well. Everyone has something to complain about, and we show that by attacking “the other side.”

If only THOSE PEOPLE would do things differently.

If only THAT PERSON hadn’t said that or done that. What were they thinking?

Social media has made it easy – and nearly expected – for us to attack each other, to call each other names, to be anonymous assholes.

I first observed the anonymous asshole effect when I was an exchange student in 1984 in Münster, West Germany (back then, there were two Germanys). I lived in a complex of four- and five-story student dormitories, each housing between 120 and 150 students. Laundry was in the basement. Germans prefer air-drying their laundry to clothes dryers, so we had three washing machines and one rarely-used dryer.

An array of clotheslines stretched between the walls of the drying room. I was cautioned about leaving socks and underwear down there, as theft of those items was rampant. So, like the other residents, I draped my wet clothes over the lines and retrieved them a day or two later.

Sometimes the clotheslines were full. When I encountered this, I neatly stacked my neighbors’ clothes on the lines to make room, as did most other students. However, there were a few of what I called anonymous assholes who would shove laundry like curtains on the lines to create space. When that happened to me, my clothes would have a line of accordion pleats along the middle.

It was similar in the shared kitchens on each floor of the dorm. Anything not locked up in our assigned refrigerator compartments was likely to be stolen or damaged. Not everyone cleaned up after themselves, so sometimes the sink and counters would be cluttered with dirty dishes, and the tiny trash can would be overflowing, with empty cans, jars, and food wrappers stacked around it. Without eyewitnesses, the less considerate folks were empowered to pull crappy stunts.

Now, wrinkled laundry isn’t that big of a deal. And theft of food or dishes and leaving a mess in the kitchen were also maybe not capital crimes. But those who did, did so with impunity, knowing that it was unlikely anyone would catch them in the act and chew them out. The characteristically blunt northern Germans living in my dorm would not hesitate to do so.

Social media has emboldened us to treat others disrespectfully. It’s been a creeping tendency. At first, it was just a few on the fringes, trolling others with fake names and concealed identities. Today, emboldened by a President who publicly smears others, many of us are saying things on social media – and in public – that our grandparents and parents would likely scold or punish us for. And just a few weeks ago, more than a few gleefully and ghoulishly celebrated the public murder of Charlie Kirk.

Do we really want to live in a world like this – where we say terrible things about neighbors, delight in the misfortunes of the opposition, and even express glee at the assassination of business leaders and celebrities we don’t like?

Me, I don’t want to.

And as I’ve leaned into forgiveness, I find I’m also leaning into kindness. Forgiveness has opened up empathy in me. I try to see the goodness in each person. Even in people as casually cruel as our current white house inhabitant.

I’m no longer amused by the witty insults so easily tossed around by so many. I skip past the content with a snide tone. Give me the facts and your thoughts, please, but leave the meanness behind.

I’ve observed that what we often object to most in others reflects what we don’t like about ourselves. Our enemies reflect back to us our own worst characteristics.

Ask the right questions

I recently re-read one of my favorite books, The Answer to How is Yes: Acting on What Matters by Peter Block. In this book, Block argues that modern culture’s emphasis on efficiency and pragmatism has cut us off from the creativity and intimacy we can access when we change how we approach problems. We like How questions that keep us chugging along toward our goals and that promise simple solutions to big problems.

How long will it take? How much will it cost? How have other people done this?

While there’s nothing wrong with these questions, and considering these questions does have an essential role in planning for the future, Block points out that asking these questions too early cuts us off from creating work that matters.

Instead, Block encourages us to consider Yes questions that open other avenues of inquiry. He offers Yes questions that pair with the How questions.

How long will it take? becomes What commitment am I willing to make?

How much will it cost? becomes What is the price I am willing to pay?

How have other people done this? becomes What do we want to create together?

Instead of immediately asking the How questions, Block urges us to step back and first ponder the Yes questions.

My question for myself and my dear readers is:

What kind of world do we want to create?

I want to create a kinder, more just, and more tolerant world with everyone. A world that benefits us all, not just those who hold the wealth and power. I don’t know how, but I agree with Block that the first step will be to work together, even with our sworn enemies, to create a vision we can all agree on.

Yes, I admit I’m a naïve idealist. But I also believe that over the long run, love will win. Love, like water, is often seen as too soft and yielding to amount to much. But as anyone who’s seen the Grand Canyon will attest, water wears away stone.

We may have a Grand Canyon’s worth of hate, vengeance, and enmity to wear down with love, but I have faith that we can do it together. It might take generations. Or it could happen in an instant. In the grand scheme of the universe’s timeframe, either is the blink of an eye.

The first step is forgiveness

Can you find it in you to forgive those who have done terrible things to you? Charlie Kirk’s widow recently demonstrated to the world that she could when she publicly forgave her husband’s murderer.

I forgave both the truck driver who killed my parents and the anonymous person who murdered my stepson.

Not everyone is capable of such profound forgiveness, but until we try to see the other side as fellow humans who also want many of the same things we want, we will continue this cycle of attack and counterattack.

We all want our children and our loved ones to thrive. We want a safe place to live, and mostly, we want to be allowed and encouraged to follow our bliss. To serve others in the unique ways that only we can.

What grievances are you carrying around that get in the way of answering your Yes questions? How would you feel without the bitterness that expresses as meanness towards others? In what ways are you being an anonymous asshole? And how would it feel to let go of those grievances, that bitterness, those urges to lash out, and instead step into love?

I encourage you to see the innocence that dwells in each of us, and to focus on that. Look for the ways we are alike instead of different. Instead of so readily dehumanizing the other side, look for and connect with our shared humanity. Seek joy, peace, and love instead of spite. And think about what you would create if given all power?

Instead of being an anonymous asshole, I challenge you to become a bold beacon of blessings.

What if there was a therapy that could reduce your risk of heart attack, improve your cholesterol levels and sleep quality, reduce pain, blood pressure, anxiety, depression, and stress?

Would you be interested? And what if this therapy also contributed to your overall feelings of peace, love, joy, and well-being? Would those benefits seal the deal for you?

Forgiveness can do all of this and more.

As I’ve been studying forgiveness, I’m intrigued by the physiological benefits of forgiveness training. Fred Luskin’s book, Forgive for Good: A PROVEN Prescription for Health and Happiness, outlines his work with the Stanford Forgiveness Project. In this study, participants in his forgiveness training reported many fewer physiological symptoms of stress: fewer headaches, stomachaches, tiredness, and muscle aches. These results lasted for at least four months after the study was complete.

In another study, Dr. Luskin worked with Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland who had lost a family member to murder during the “troubles.” Overall, they reported a 35% decrease in physiological symptoms of stress and a significant increase in their feelings of vitality and well-being.

Other researchers have found reductions in hypertension, improved sleep, reduced stress, and improved mental health, among other physiological benefits.

In one study, researchers split patients who had been diagnosed with stage-1 hypertension into two groups. One group received eight weeks of forgiveness training immediately, while the other acted as a control group. The patients who received forgiveness training expressed less anger, and many also saw their high blood pressure decrease. As the authors concluded, “It is suggested that forgiveness training may be an effective clinical intervention for some hypertensive patients with elevated levels of anger.”

A meta-analysis of 128 studies demonstrated a significant, positive association between forgiveness of others and a broad spectrum of physical health markers. Intriguingly, the researchers found no difference between the age, gender, race, education, or employment status of the subjects in the individual studies. Additionally, the positive correlation between improved physical health and forgiveness training was independent of the type of training and the research design. “It indicates that the relation between forgiveness of others and [physical health] is universal regardless of individual differences or study characteristics.”

The positive impacts of forgiveness training are long-lasting. While few longitudinal studies have been performed, several studies have followed up with participants several weeks or months after forgiveness training ended, finding that participants largely retained the positive benefits.

These physiological benefits are in addition to the well-documented non-physiological benefits of reduced anxiety and depression, increased hope and self-esteem, improved emotional regulation, healthier relationships, and a greater sense of emotional freedom.

As a scientist and CPA, I’m drawn to the quantifiable and measurable impacts of forgiveness. I like numbers and measurements. It’s reassuring to me that science confirms that forgiveness has other impacts on our health beyond the mental health benefits I’ve experienced.

I also recognize that there’s a lot about the human body that science can’t yet explain. For example, science can’t explain the nearly instantaneous relief I’ve experienced several times from homeopathic medicines or acupuncture treatments.

Science doesn’t have all the answers to our questions.

But I do know that when I forgive, I feel better.

The physiological benefits – the reductions in blood pressure, cardiac improvements, improved sleep – are things that science can readily measure. These are quantifiable and are easy to measure. Researchers can simply put a blood pressure cuff on someone or measure the cortisol level in their blood.

Perhaps we should consider these physiological benefits of forgiveness as a proxy for what we all seek at a deeper level: to feel more peace, less stress, and to feel better. We want to extend our love and to be loved in return. However, these qualitative benefits are much harder to measure and quantify. Self-assessments aren’t always accurate, and they’re not easy to compare between people.

Can we put a numeric scale on our feeling of bliss? Where is my peace level on a scale of one to ten? How did I measure the reduction in mental stress when I forgave the truck driver who killed my parents? Was it a five-point reduction, or just two or three? On a scale of one to ten, how much better did I feel when I forgave myself for not intervening forcefully in my brother Geoff’s downward slide?

How do I quantify the sensation of a weight lifting off me when I forgive? How do I measure the freedom of leaving the past behind to create a future from the present moment? What’s the ROI for my attempts to see the good, the pure, the innocent in every person I meet?

While the researchers I cited above hypothesized that doctors might consider recommending forgiveness training to some of their patients, and while this might be a possible entry point to practicing forgiveness, I don’t see this happening on a broad scale.

Our medical system – and American culture as a whole – focuses on treating symptoms, not the root causes of the symptoms. It’s much easier for a doctor to prescribe a drug that addresses a symptom than to try to uncover the root cause of the problem. Bonus for the drug companies if the patient needs to take this for the rest of their life.

Forgiveness, on the other hand, helps with the root cause of the physical problems. The improvements of physical ailments are more of a side effect, not the primary reason a person might want to practice forgiveness. These beneficial side effects – reduced anxiety and anger, better sleep, reduced blood pressure – create a virtuous cycle, which reinforces the decision to forgive.

The non-quantifiable benefits of forgiveness – the sensations of lightness and peace –are what we are really after when we seek to forgive.

In my own situation, forgiveness has given me peace of mind as the most significant benefit. I’m not telling my grievance and blame stories to myself and others. I’ve been able to move on and create a future from the present instead of being tethered to the past. I feel lighter in body, mind, and spirit. I sleep better.

As I feel better, I want more of what makes me feel better. So I’m expanding my circle of forgiveness. I’m still finding more events and people to forgive.

I’m doing my part to create a better, more loving world. And at the same time, I’m healing my mind and body.

Won’t you join me in healing yourself and the world?

Are you telling a story of grievance, of unfair treatment, or how someone’s actions hurt you so badly that you are fully justified in making others suffer? When you think of that long-ago event, what do you feel? Anger? Sadness? A need for revenge?

It’s so easy to live in an endless loop of grievance where we are the victim, and someone else is to blame. Our brains are hard-wired for stories. And we create stories around all sorts of things.

The entire meaning of events from the past or objects in our lives comes from the stories we tell and the meanings that we extend to those things.

For example, the teacup in the image above belonged to my grandmother. Without that family connection, this lovely cup would simply be a pretty thing to own.

Far too often, however, the stories we tell about events in our past become an access point for a spiral into blame, grievance, and resentment.

In his book Forgive for Good, Dr. Fred Luskin describes the process of creating grievance and blame stories. As we move through our lives, we sort through the many experiences and create stories from those experiences that have meaning for us. But we don’t always consciously register the purpose of those stories, as he writes:

You may not have considered that the main purpose of your story is to help you understand what happened. The primary purpose of any story you tell is to help you place what happened in context. The secondary purpose is to describe what happened.

These stories are not always “an objective accounting of reality,” Luskin writes. They may be told for specific purposes. A story told to convey bad news will be a different kind of story than one intended to influence other people. As Luskin explains:

The kind of story you tell determines how you remember the incident and how it affects your life.

Too often, through telling a story, we lock in the negative way a hurtful situation has affected us. The danger is that we can get caught telling a story where we take offense too personally and then blame the other person for something done in the past. We paint the picture of helplessness in the face of someone’s cruelty. In so doing, we create a grievance story.

Throughout his book, he weaves in stories of people he worked with in his forgiveness classes who came to him with long-standing grievance stories. Dana was passed over for a promotion and complained about her unfair treatment so often that her co-workers began avoiding her. Marilyn grew up with a cold and distant mother whom she blamed for her difficulties in her relationships with men, for her depression, and many other problems in her life. Alan’s wife had an affair, which he believed she had done to hurt him and ruin his life deliberately.

As Dr. Luskin explains, running those stories on repeat makes it more difficult to heal from past hurts, and blaming others for our past hurts and current difficulties takes away our power to regulate our emotions:

There is great danger in giving people without your best interests in mind power over you. There is great danger in giving people who have hurt you power over how you feel.

Ultimately, the only person whose thinking and behavior each of us can fully control is our own. And much of that stems from the stories we tell about what happened to us.

When you run your grievance and blame stories on repeat, you’re extending your suffering and not allowing yourself to heal.

Changing the story with The Work

But how do we change those well-worn stories? One method I’ve found particularly useful is an inquiry method developed by Byron Katie called The Work, which she describes in her book Loving What Is.

The Work is a set of four questions that can help unravel the web of resentments we weave and assist us in finding our way to a new story, one more compatible with forgiveness. The central idea in The Work is that our suffering doesn’t come from the events in our lives, but from our thoughts about those events. When we believe thoughts that make us victims, we suffer, but when we don’t believe those thoughts, we suffer less, and may even find our way to happiness.

Here are the four questions:

1. Is it true?

2. Can you absolutely know that it’s true?

3. How do you react when you believe that thought?

4. Who would you be without that thought?

Here’s how I applied The Work to a situation that could have turned into a grievance story about unfair treatment.

About ten years ago, the firm where I had spent nearly 11 years had an unusual spike in departures: eight people left within about six months (spoiler alert: I was one of those eight). In an all-hands meeting in the conference room, the partners announced they had chosen someone to fill the recently vacated tax manager position. They chose the young man I had trained, mentored, and supervised for the previous five years, promoting him from senior to manager in a single step.

How could they do that? By all measures of fairness, I was the obvious next one in line for this spot. They hadn’t even offered the position to me. I had been biding my time, as a mere supervisor, for years. It was a stinging rebuke of my loyalty to the firm.

And was this guy even qualified? As far as I could tell, he’d never even reviewed a return, let alone supervised another person. Were they giving him the job because he was newly married and male?

Are they trying to get rid of me? Are they doing this to push me out, as they did with another long-time co-worker, whose hours and pay had been cut to part-time, resulting in her departure?

The owners are treating me unfairly!

Is it true?

Of course it’s true! This shows that for all their talk about equity and inclusion, these two male partners are ageist and sexist. Even though they praise my work and leadership in the firm, they prefer the younger guy to a woman in her 50s.

Can you absolutely know that it’s true?

Well, no.

From a business-mindedness perspective, this decision made perfect sense. I had already told the tax partner I was bored with my role and that the only thing keeping me tethered to the firm was the people I worked with. But as those people began departing, that tether was loosening.

I had also told him I was considering a career change to something outside of public accounting. To that end, I took copywriting courses in my free time and even attended a copywriting conference in Florida on my own dime. And while I had offered to write blog posts and newsletters for the firm, they weren’t interested in my writing services.

I suppose they had a hard time seeing me beyond my current role as the one who could crank out the big, messy tax returns and the business valuation reports while also being the resident wordsmith they could call on to polish letters to the IRS or dash out a quick report. They were content to profit off my efforts for however many more months – or years! – I was willing to stick around.

I would have been a terrible choice for tax manager. My heart wasn’t in it. I had approximately zero interest in being on the partner track.

By 2015, I had caught a few glimpses of CPAs who were operating their firms differently. They offered higher-level advisory services and worked with fewer clients. Those fewer clients were paying them much more, so they were able to shed their D and F clients. Instead of 70- and 80-hour workweeks during tax season, these firms had normal, 40-hour workweeks. They were also experimenting with new pricing strategies and had shed the billable hour.

I had made a few attempts to get the firm leaders interested in moving in this new direction. However, there was no interest in moving away from the status quo, which had been successful for over 40 years.

I’m sure that if they had offered me the promotion, I would have turned it down and would have recommended the young man I’d been supervising for years.

That young man was an excellent choice to be a manager. While he hadn’t had much experience leading others, he saw opportunities in that firm that didn’t appeal to me.

How do you react when you believe that thought?

I was seething in anger. Should I turn in my resignation, effective immediately? How could I work under someone whom I’d been supervising for years?

I was also hurt that the position hadn’t been offered to me. For the last several years, at the end of the annual performance review theater, the tax partner would say that while he was pleased with my performance, no promotion was available at that time. And now that a position had opened up, they were mistreating me by not promoting me.

Who would you be without that thought?

I would be happier. I would be happy for that young man’s success and congratulate him on his new role. I would recognize him for his hard work and support him in his new role.

And I could forgive the firm owners for passing over me. In a way, they were giving me their blessing to pursue other interests. I was clearly no longer on the partner track. I was free to move on. The ties keeping me tethered to the firm had just loosened a bit more.

This inquiry happened rapidly for me. By the time I was back at my desk, I was able to congratulate the new tax manager, who had stopped by to check in with me. I told him that while it hurt to be passed over, I knew that he was the best choice.

A happier ending for my story

Today, that young man is a tax partner of that same firm, alongside two women partners. The two owners who passed me over have since retired. Every time one of the young accountants I mentored in the past makes partner, I get a huge grin.

A few months later, I left that firm, and a few months after that, I was approached by an employment attorney. She was working with my former colleague, whose hours and pay had been cut, ultimately pushing her out of the firm. She was filing a lawsuit against the partners. The attorney wanted to hear my account of what happened. When I shared my story of being bypassed for a promotion, her face lit up, as she told me I likely had grounds for a gender and age discrimination lawsuit.

In good conscience, I couldn’t accuse the two partners of doing something illegal in my situation. At the most, I could accuse them of hurting my pride and chasing me away, and maybe for not being the greatest of leaders. They had made a decision that made the most sense for them. They were doing the best they knew how. They weren’t doing it to hurt me or cause pain intentionally.

Now I recognize that there’s often a blurry line between a decision made for business reasons and a decision made for discriminatory reasons. And I don’t want to discount the experiences of the millions of women who have been bypassed for leadership positions. The statistics in accounting speak for themselves: In 2023, women accounted for 57% of accountants and auditors in the US, but only 39% of partners are women, according to a report from Becker.

But in my situation, and because the tax partner knew me well, I really can’t accuse the partners of gender or age discrimination. They knew I wasn’t interested in eventually taking ownership of that firm, so they wisely didn’t offer me the job.

Changing the story is the first step

By changing my story of unfairness and grievance to one of acceptance and understanding, I could forgive the partners. I might not have been happy, but I could live with the situation. I took the first steps to move on from the present instead of being stuck in the past.

I was also able to shift my orientation from victim to guide. The true hero in the story was the young man who got the promotion, leading to his goal of making partner. I could take pride in being one of the guides who helped him get there.

What stories are you telling?

Those stories of grievance and blame can hobble us in our actions. It’s much harder to do the work that really matters when we’re chained to the past.

Changing the story of a painful event from your past isn’t always enough to forgive. But expanding your perspective to include other versions of what could also be true can at least crack open the door for forgiveness to eventually creep through.

For me, looking at the event from the perspective of the others involved is an essential part of developing empathy, one of the four elements of forgiveness I wrote about earlier. Using The Work has helped me recast events from the past to create new stories, stories of how crippling setbacks and horrific, heartbreaking tragedies have become a springboard for transformation and for creating a life where I can act on what matters most.

Near the end of his book, Luskin writes, “Forgiveness is the beginning of a new chapter, not the end of the story.”

What’s the new story you will tell?

Forgiving those who have harmed you is hard enough, but what if the person you need to forgive is yourself?

When my brother Geoff died from drinking, I wondered if I could have done something to get him back on the path of sobriety. He had been drinking way too much for the better part of 40 years. Our parents worried about him. My other brothers apologized when I witnessed the craziness of his uncontrolled drinking, something they had tried to shield me from for decades.

About five years after our parents died, Geoff checked himself into inpatient rehab. Sobering up was rough for him. He had to go to the ER because he had seizures as his body detoxed. He spent six months in a halfway house after his treatment ended. But he was committed to a new life of sobriety, or so he told us. And he had a good life for quite a few years. We were relieved.

About eight or nine months before he died, I was pretty sure he had relapsed. He had called me on the phone, and an odd pitch in his voice gave him away. His voice always sounded different when he was sober and when he was drinking. My heart sank, but I didn’t call him on it. I didn’t tell anyone about my suspicions. I wanted the truth to go away.

I was terrified that speaking it out loud would make it so. So I kept that information to myself.

A few months later, he called again. It was March, and I was in the middle of tax season. As a CPA, my life was tax returns. Long hours, little sleep, and no time to think about much but getting the next one out the door. Somehow, he caught me at home, and I must have complained about the stress of tax season. He told me he had gotten an IRS notice and had paid the balance due of $5,000, even though he was pretty sure “it was bogus.”

I implored him to send me his tax return and all his tax documents, including the IRS notice, so that I could get his money back. “That’s what I do for others, let me do it for you!” I begged him.

But no envelope arrived in the mail, and the matter passed out of my mind. I kept finding reasons not to go see him or call him. Mainly, I was afraid of witnessing the reality of his return to drinking. I was hoping he would figure it out and sober up on his own. Or maybe I was wrong. Maybe it was my imagination. Maybe he wasn’t drinking again.

When I did find all those documents after he died – our parents instilled in us the importance of keeping essential papers filed neatly away – I understood immediately why he hadn’t sent them to me.

This was 2009, when you could still go to the post office to pick up tax forms, and the IRS and state tax authorities would mail you a packet of forms, instructions, and tax tables to fill out by hand. So I found all his tax documents, the IRS balance due notice, and a copy of his tax return, filled out in pencil.

If he had sent that to me, I would have immediately known something was wrong. My brother, who had worked as a carpenter for decades, worked with numbers, measurements, and angles every day and took calculus in college, could no longer add or subtract.

The physical evidence of muddled math demonstrated the extent to which alcohol had addled his brain. If he had sent me his documents, I would have immediately jumped into action, seeing it as a clear cry for help. I would have driven the three hours to his house and taken him directly to rehab. And I’m sure that’s why he never sent me his papers.

He was ashamed of his vodka-soaked life, and that shame kept him from reaching out for help.

Instead, he was left to his own devices. And in early August of 2009, he died, alone in his house. His last bank transaction was on August 3. His body wasn’t found until August 29, when his best friend Marla stopped by, worried that she hadn’t seen him around for a while. She found him sprawled in the kitchen, where he had collapsed almost four weeks earlier. It was a horrific sight.

My brother Doug filled two trash barrels with empty vodka bottles. Geoff’s bank records showed he had been stopping by the local mini-mart daily for weeks, spending around $20 – the cost of a bottle of vodka – each time. His manner of death suggested he was trying to end his current binge cycle, but his body was too damaged for a safe, at-home detox.

Would it have made a difference for Geoff if I had tried to save him?

My brother George didn’t think so.

“Nothing would have changed the outcome,” he told me. “It was only the timing that would have changed. Geoff was determined to kill himself.”

But still. I was sick with guilt. Maybe I could have made a difference if I’d called or visited him more often. What if I had shared my suspicions about his drinking with others? What if I’d asked him if he was drinking again?

The elements of forgiveness

As I have studied various models of forgiveness and compared them to my own experiences, my thinking is coalescing around four aspects of forgiveness. I don’t think of them as steps in a process but as elements that are present when forgiveness is complete.

Acceptance of the past: To paraphrase Byron Katie, we can’t undo events in linear time, so we need to accept that what happened is what was supposed to happen.

Appropriate action: Given the worldview of those involved, they acted appropriately, even if they knew at some deeper level that what they were doing wasn’t the best option.

Empathy: Put yourself in the shoes of those who caused you pain, and try to see the experience from their point of view.

Drop the burden: Carrying the burden of anger and grievance is a heavy load. Let go of that heavy weight you’re dragging around and use the emotional energy for other purposes.

I’m pretty sure I’ve never followed these in any sequence. It’s more like following an upward spiral, where I revisit these aspects repeatedly at different stages of my healing. This model has been working for me. However, it may not work for you.

Here’s how I worked out these elements with my brother’s death.

Acceptance of the past

Nothing could undo what happened. My brothers and I, and all of Geoff’s many friends, were devastated by his death, but we couldn’t magically go back in time and change the outcome. However, I could change the story I was running in my mind about what happened.

In his book, Forgive for Good, Dr. Fred Luskin describes how many people he’s worked with have a grievance story about what happened. This story paints the person as a victim of a horrible injustice, which has led to continuing issues. Growing up with a cold and distant mother is why a woman in her fifties could not form deep relationships with her children. Losing out on a promotion gave another woman such a chip on her shoulder that co-workers no longer wanted to be near her.

As Dr. Luskin explains, running the tape of this grievance story on repeat interferes with healing from trauma. It wasn’t helping me to keep running the tape of past regrets and all the things I should have done. I needed to tell myself a different story. What happened was what needed to happen.

Accepting the past feels to me like a prerequisite for forgiveness. I can’t forgive while still ruminating on all the what-ifs, regrets, and self-flagellation for what I did or didn’t do.

A Course in Miracles teaches that the past is best thought of as a teaching device, that we may learn to do better in the present moment, and thus create a future unburdened by the negatives of the past.

“Let no one hour cast its shadow on the one that follows, and when that one goes, let everything that happened in its course go on with it.”

Shortly after I lost my parents, someone (and I’ve forgotten who) told me: “A person’s life comes to an end when their life’s work is completed.” With both my parents and Geoff, that felt true. All three were constantly working on creative projects, and it seemed that they had all completed their latest projects and hadn’t started a new one yet. However, Geoff’s current “project” appeared to be to see how much vodka he could drink.

Appropriate Action

Geoff was doing what he felt was the best – maybe the only? – thing he could do, which was to keep feeding his addiction. But he likely didn’t grasp the precarious state his latest binge cycle had left his body in. I don’t think he quite realized that sobering up on his own could kill him, even though he’d had seizures previously when detoxing. His deep shame about relapsing kept him from reaching out for help.

On my side, Geoff’s relative reticence led me to assume that he was doing fine. It wasn’t unusual for him to go radio silent on us. He regularly unplugged his phone so no one could reach him. Though I suspected he was drinking, I didn’t know the extent. Until I saw his house and his bank records, I couldn’t fathom him downing a bottle of vodka every day for weeks on end. I was busy with my own life. I thought Geoff’s silence meant he didn’t need anything from me.

Empathy

None of us Farr siblings understood why Geoff was an alcoholic. None of us understood the inner demons that he’d been trying to drown out with alcohol for nearly four decades. I knew that he’d lost a close friend earlier that year. Maybe that was part of what pushed him over the edge and put him on the slippery slope out of sobriety into binging. Too proud to ask for help, he was coping the best way he could.

His addiction was like a runaway freight train, off the tracks and headed for a ravine. The only way to save him would have been for him to leap out the window, even risking death to do so. He would have had to take decisive action to get off that train. And based on how he died, it appeared he was taking that action. He was trying to sober up after a long binge cycle. But his body was too damaged to make that leap safely.

Whatever caused him the pain was gone now.

I looked at myself with the same empathy I extended to Geoff, and to the truck driver who killed our parents. I had been doing the best I could. Yes, I could have done better, but what I did do was what I felt was the right thing. I’m trying now to do better.

Drop the burden

Instead of carrying that weight of guilt like a millstone, I let it go. Instead of running my story of guilt and grievance nonstop, I’m replacing it with empathy, forgiveness, and releasing this tragedy.

I will never forget Geoff, nor will the pain of losing him ever be gone entirely, but I’m determined to move forward, doing the best I can to honor his memory.

As my brothers and I, alongside Marla and his many friends, cleared out his house, we found many signs of the joy he had spread. We heard stories of his generosity and good nature.

I took on the task of picking through the heaps of papers overflowing from baskets, bowls, and boxes in every room. Warm postcards and letters from lifelong friends mixed with electric bills, property tax notices, bank statements, and random photos.

Mixed in with that chaos were at least 20 blank greeting cards. My guess was that he bought those with the intention of letting someone know they were in his thoughts. But somewhere between the spur-of-the-moment purchase and the execution of his intention, he lost momentum, and once the cards were added to his current catch-all pile, they were forgotten.

We never found a will among his papers. We heard corroborating stories from several of his friends that he wanted Marla to have his house after his death. Marla and he had been in a long-term relationship, then broke up, reconciled, and broke up again. Through it all, they remained best friends.

Selling his house would have been difficult during the housing crisis of the late 2000s. It was an odd house, a one-room cabin that the previous owner had progressively expanded bizarrely, with oddly placed doorways and no light switches. The proceeds, split five ways, wouldn’t have made a substantial difference to any of us. But for Marla, having a home to call her own would have been life-changing. So, channeling Geoff’s generosity, we gave Marla the house.

Decades of drinking had damaged Geoff’s body and brain. My brother George’s assessment was probably correct; the outcome was inevitable, and only the timing was unknown.

Leaving his body gave his soul the freedom to dance.

As Kahlil Gibran wrote in a section of The Prophet:

Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.

And when you have reached the mountaintop, then you shall begin to climb.

And when the earth shall reclaim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

When that passage was read at our parents’ memorial, Geoff whispered in my ear, “And now they’re dancing.”

I like to think of the three of them, dancing together forever.

Last week, I wrote about what forgiveness is and what it isn’t. In brief, forgiveness is releasing the past to allow you to live fully in the present. It’s not forgetting the past. Instead, forgiveness means your present and future peace of mind are no longer dependent on the actions of others. You don’t need an apology (though sometimes those are nice) or for the justice system to punish those responsible for your hurt.

Forgiveness is a state of mind.

But how do you get there? Every expert on forgiveness has a proprietary multi-step process. But which one should you start with? Which ones work?

Let me digress to introduce the concept of state and path functions, which I learned about in physics class some 40 years ago, when I thought I’d be a biomedical engineer when I grew up (ha, ha).

A state function is one in which only the change in state between the beginning and end points matters.

A path function, as the name implies, depends on the path taken.

For example, let’s say you’re planning a trip from Boston to San Francisco. If you only care about the beginning and end points, any path that begins in Boston and ends in San Francisco will get you there.

You can fly non-stop between the two cities for the shortest and quickest path. Maybe you’ll choose a cheaper flight with one or more stops along the way. You could travel by bus or train. Or you might decide to drive. You could ask Google Maps to find the quickest route, or maybe you’ll take a meandering road trip that hits all the places in between that you want to visit.

All these options begin and end in the same cities, but the paths taken are very different. Each path comes with specific costs of time, money, and effort required. Some options can be completed in a day (assuming cooperation from the air travel gods). Others may take many days or weeks to complete and require much more planning. For some options, the key part of the journey is reaching the destination. For other options, the journey itself may be as meaningful as the destination.

Achieving forgiveness is similar – you must desire to move from a state of unforgiveness to a state of forgiveness. You are seeking a transformation from overwhelming anger, bitterness, or regret to a state of peace, acceptance, and empathy.

When I think back to my experiences with forgiveness, I wasn’t using any specific method. Until a few months ago, I wasn’t even aware of the existence of step-by-step processes to achieve forgiveness. I have been forging my own path through the wilderness.

What I wanted was to let go of the emotional and mental energy I was expending to maintain the fire of anger burning within me and the urge to seek revenge upon those who wronged me (including myself). I wanted to transform the churning morass of rage into something different. I was seeking relief from grief, from anger, and from regret.

I couldn’t change what happened, and I needed to let those events remain in the past, and not be a continuous and controlling part of my present and future.

I needed to free myself of the weight of the past I was pulling with me into the future. To release the mental energy I was expending on living in the past so that I could focus on the present and allow the future to unroll before me.

The key for me, the approach that made each of my experiences with forgiveness a permanent transformation, was empathy.

It wasn’t until I looked at each triggering event from the other person's perspective that things began to change. By assuming that, from the other person’s point of view, what they did was rational and appropriate under the circumstances, I was able to step out of my misery.

The truck driver who fell asleep at the wheel and killed my parents was doing the best he could with a job that required long hours.

My brother was seeking escape from his internal demons, and alcohol was an easy out.

The person who murdered my stepson was triggered by something, and striking out violently was what felt appropriate at the moment.

All those bosses who mistreated me or others, or who made sexually inappropriate comments, were demonstrating the type of leadership and power they had been taught, and which had worked for them in the past.

Empathy and a change in perspective worked for me and continue to work for me.

But because I’m an accountant, and we accountants love our repeatable and efficient processes, I’ll list here some of the methods that people who have made the study of forgiveness their life’s work.

Something may resonate with you. Or maybe you’ll need to forge your own path through the wilderness as I did. But if your desire to achieve the state of forgiveness is strong enough, any of these paths will work if you’re willing to do the work required for that path.

Dr. Frederic Luskin, the director of the Stanford Forgiveness Project, who has been studying forgiveness for decades, has a nine-step process of forgiveness.

1. Know exactly how you feel about what happened and be able to articulate what about the situation is not OK. Then, tell a couple of trusted people about your experience.

2. Make a commitment to yourself to do what you have to do to feel better. Forgiveness is for you and not for anyone else. No one else even has to know about your decision.

3. Understand your goal. Forgiveness does not necessarily mean reconciliation with the person that upset you or condoning of their action. What you are after is to find peace.

4. Get the right perspective on what is happening. Recognize that your primary distress is coming from the hurt feelings, thoughts, and physical upset you are suffering now, not what offended you or hurt you 2 minutes—or 10 years—ago.

5. At the moment you feel upset, practice stress management techniques to soothe your body’s flight or fight response.

6. Give up expecting things from other people, or your life, that they do not choose to give you. Recognize the “unenforceable rules” you have for your health or how you or other people must behave. Remind yourself that you can hope for health, love, friendship, and prosperity and work hard to get them. However, you will suffer when you demand these things occur when you do not have the power to make them happen.

7. Put your energy into looking for another way to get your positive goals met than through the experience that has hurt you. Instead of mentally replaying your hurt, seek out new ways to get what you want.

8. Remember that a life well-lived is your best revenge. Instead of focusing on your wounded feelings, and thereby giving the person who caused you pain power over you, learn to look for the love, beauty, and kindness around you.

9. Amend your grievance story to remind you of the heroic choice to forgive. Move from victim to hero in the story that you tell.

Dr. Robert Enright, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (Go Badgers!), studies forgiveness from a scientific perspective. In his book, Forgiveness is a Choice, he describes a four-phase method.

1. Uncovering Phase

   • Recognize and confront the emotional pain and anger caused by the offense.

   • Explore the impact of the injury on thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.

2. Decision Phase

   • Make a conscious choice to forgive, understanding what forgiveness means and why it matters.

3. Work Phase

   • Actively work on understanding the offender and developing empathy.

   • Engage in exercises (such as journaling or perspective-taking) to process emotions and foster compassion.

4. Deepening Phase

   • Discover meaning in the experience and release negative emotions.

   • Achieve greater emotional relief and possibly increased compassion for self and others.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who headed South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the 1990s, developed a four-stage method, which he describes in a book he co-authored with his daughter, Mpho Tutu, The Book of Forgiving.

1. Telling the story

2. Naming the hurt

3. Granting forgiveness

4. Renewing or releasing the relationship.

Dr. Everett Worthington, a retired professor of psychology, created the five-step REACH method. The REACH method was used in an extensive international study of forgiveness:

R: Recall the hurt – Acknowledge and remember the details of the offense and your emotional response.

E: Empathize – Try to see the situation from the offender’s perspective to foster empathy.

A: Altruistic gift – Offer forgiveness as a gift, remembering times you have been forgiven.

C: Commit – Make a public or private commitment to forgive.

H: Hold onto forgiveness – Remind yourself of your decision to forgive, especially when doubts or negative feelings resurface.

And from A Course in Miracles, a simple one-step process of selective remembering and forgetting:

To forgive is merely to remember only the loving thoughts you gave in the past, and those that were given to you. All the rest must be forgotten.

These are just a few of the many, many processes out there. I have no guidance on which is the “best” or the “fastest” or which leads to enduring forgiveness.

I like the aspects of empathy in the REACH method and Dr. Enright’s process. As I described above, it was when I embraced empathy and sincerely tried to see the situation from the other person’s perspective that I was able to fully release the grievances and hurts and move to forgiveness.

My only advice is to try out whichever resonates with you. Mix and match if that works for you.

I like to think of forgiveness as a mountain peak, with many paths to reach that peak. Some are well-trodden. Others have had only one explorer. But the objective of all these paths is to reach that peak of forgiveness.

Of utmost importance is a sincere desire to forgive, and to release that burden of hurt and grievance you’re dragging around with you.

If you don’t want to forgive, nothing will work.

First, I'd like to talk about what forgiveness is not.

Forgiveness isn’t letting someone walk all over you. It isn’t weakness, nor is it giving in to injustice. It’s not letting someone get away with murder or bad behavior. Nor is it letting the bad guys win. Forgiveness doesn’t mean you forget the painful events of your past, and it doesn’t mean you deny your pain. You don’t have to reconcile with the person or institution that caused you pain. You don’t need to stay in a situation or relationship that harmed you.

I’m by no means an expert in the study of forgiveness. Many others have dedicated decades of their lives to this idea and have developed multi-step processes and distinct stages of forgiveness. They have written eloquent volumes on the nature of forgiveness, including this lovely passage from Dr. Frederic Luskin:

“Many of us have trouble with forgiveness because there are so many different views about it. To some, it means that their religion compels them to get over something that hurts them. To others, it means that they have to become friends again with people who mistreated them. Finally, some people think that forgiveness is the same as saying what happened was okay.

“Actually, no one has to forgive—forgiveness is a choice. Forgiveness means that we release our suffering over difficult situations; it does not mean we have to put ourselves back into hurtful situations. Forgiveness means that even though what happened is not okay, you can move on and make peace for yourself.”

In his book, Forgive for Good: A Proven Prescription for Health and Happiness, Dr. Luskin lists these as a few of the attributes of forgiveness:

• Forgiveness is for you and not the offender.

• Forgiveness is taking back your power.

• Forgiveness is taking responsibility for how you feel.

• Forgiveness is about your healing and not about the people who hurt you.

Forgiveness means I’m no longer dragging the burden of anger, grievance, and hurt with me into the future. All those hurts from the past are still there, in the past, but they no longer define my future. Forgiveness allows me to experience the peace and joy of the present moment. I’m building a future that’s not mired in the resentments of the past, but one that flows forth from the peace of the present moment.

Forgiveness is letting go of grievance. It’s stepping out of the cycle of the need for revenge. It’s stepping out of the victim mode and preparing yourself to be the hero of your life.

It doesn’t mean the wheels of justice won’t continue turning to punish the wrongdoer, or that some version of recompense won’t be required of that person or institution. Those things may still happen. But in many circumstances, those things won’t. The person who killed my stepson will likely never be found or brought to justice.

But forgiveness means that whether or not those things happen is irrelevant to my healing. My peace of mind and healing no longer depend on the outcome of the justice system's workings.

Many who have witnessed the execution of the person who murdered a loved one report that this experience does not bring closure and does not result in peace of mind or relief. Getting revenge by killing the person who killed your special person keeps the cycle going. Those executed for murder also leave behind friends and family, who may now be grieving and perhaps seeking their own retribution.

Forgiveness is all about you and your peace of mind, your mental health, and your return to the joyful and loving person you are at core.

After I forgave the truck driver who killed my parents and the stranger who murdered my stepson, I felt lighter in body, mind, and spirit. Because I am no longer dragging along the cognitive load of bitterness, anger, and unresolved grievance everywhere I go, I can use all my mental energy and focus on this moment and creating the future I want.

Forgiveness is a state of mind. It’s an expansive state, where I can access the love, joy, and peace that are my birthright. I feel better, emotionally, physically, and spiritually when I let go of grievance and find forgiveness.

Coming next: How do I forgive?