(Re)learning forgiveness | Kimberly Yates | TEDxCUNY

this is a love story and it's a little non-traditional and very messy quite circuitous but ultimately beautiful and full of mystery and I got to tell you I don't do too well with mystery I don't like it I'm an actress and when you're in acting school they'll say things to you like okay everybody it is time to drop in and I would always think where I don't see a hole or maybe you'll get a note like this Kimberly that was great that monologue was great but I need you to do it again and this time plug into something deeper and I would think you know if you point me to the nearest emotional wall outlet I am there I wasn't resistant I just didn't understand and I probably like a lot of you in this room crave understanding I crave practical steps to everything in life especially the bigger fuller things but there has been one area of my life that I could just not figure out for years and this confusion led to a really dangerous limbo for the last year and a half along with a lot of help I finally cracked it we discovered the key to my future and maybe the key to yours so this is my story and it goes a little something like this when I was very young I met a boy well I say we met it really felt like we'd always known each other we come from really different backgrounds but we always understood each other perfectly we wanted the same things we had identical interests except ESPN plus he was ever so dreamy and generally amused with everything that I said and did sounds like a perfect match right but for some reason I always kept one foot out of the door and I didn't know why after many graduations and jobs and breakups and reconciliations and frequent flyer miles he finally ended up in a suit on one knee with a ring box it was so strange I look down at the love of my life my best friend my favorite person on the planet and this is what came out of my mouth I can't say yes to that question why why could I not say yes to that question he didn't know I didn't know therapists didn't know friends didn't know if we were on Jeopardy the answer would sound like this what is unforgiveness turns out I had never forgiven him for anything he had ever done not since we met not since before we met not since his skull had completely hardened I thought I had whenever he did something wrong in the course of our relationship he was pretty good about confessing and apologizing and like any good child of this therapeutic age I would listen and I would ask why why did you do that and I would probe his psyche his triggers his childhood his motivations and I would understand and I would defend him and I would excuse him and I would justify him but I wouldn't forgive him I never really forgave him because real forgiveness is not justification real forgiveness requires an accusation otherwise there's nothing to forgive you have to name the offense and be willing to admit the hurts I don't think we're comfortable with this not when it comes to forgiving people who matter to us who are close to us who can really affect our day to day lives when we first met he had a girlfriend he didn't tell me about and he was seriously pursuing me and when I found this out it blew my sheltered mind but I knew you're not supposed to be judgmental us cool girls don't get hurt right I think I felt safer if there was a good reason a good psychological reason for his behavior but that's not forgiveness that's a feeble attempt at self-protection and it's a little bit arrogant setting oneself up as the bigger person plus it turns the forgiving person into a victim of his psychological brokenness instead of seeing him for what he really is a capable person who's in charge of his actions who does wrong things sometimes what if we were all brave enough and vulnerable enough to accuse each other flat-out to say hey that was selfish and that hurt me instead of that's okay I know your dog died when you were 4 maybe then we could untangle ourselves from our dysfunction and not be defined by it maybe then we could really forgive because real forgiveness is not based on an explanation real forgiveness can't be earned it's unconditional so after he proposed I broke up with him so that I could go figure out what the problem was and I got mad I mean really mad I mean 40 pages of venomous journal writing kind of mad not about the break-up but about everything that had happened before because if you haven't really forgiven then all the wounds are still there even if you think you've buried them even if it happened years before so here I was not defending him not justifying him admitting the hurt and the pain and now what was I supposed to do with all this anger well pop psychology tells me that I'm supposed to forgive so that I can let go and not be angry or bitter see that feels like it's all about me and the root word of forgive is give which necessitates a recipient if I give my mom a gift I give it for her I don't just wake up one morning and want to feel generous so I go buy some random gift for some random person that I give on the street no I buy a gift for my mom because I love her and that's the secret love and generosity love is the impetus to forgive I don't just forgive because I don't want to feel bitter that's a nice result but I forgive because I want the forgiving to be freed from guilt to be released from the shame but where does all of this love and extravagant generosity come from and how can I tap into it well for me humility was my access road there it finally occurred to me that I am NOT Little Miss Perfect that I have been forgiven for so many things in my life and need that forgiveness if I step on someone's foot on the street because I'm more caught up in my own thoughts than I am the task at hand namely to get where I'm going without injuring innocent bystanders if I do that I need a little bit of unconditional forgiveness from that stranger if I'm 15 minutes late to lunch I need a little bit more but I have done so many worse things in my life a lot of them I did to him so when I finally forgave I was really just paying it forward from a stock pile of love and generosity that I had been receiving my entire life from him from my parents from society at large if we didn't have this kind of everyday free-flowing forgiveness society as we know it would collapse in his book free of charge Miroslav Volf describes this beautiful picture of the dance of the Three Graces from Greek mythology they stand in a circle and one's job is to give the gift and one's job is to receive the gift and then one's job is to return the gift in this endless round of giving and receiving they share they all benefit and there's no higher or lower status as giver or receiver it flows I think forgiveness is much less like a one-time action or event and much more like a circle that we can choose to participate in this circle of forgiveness so I found myself in this hippy free-flowing circle full of love and humility and generosity I love that I'm actually standing in a circle right now Thank You TEDx cutie and in this circle I found that there was no bitterness and there was no anger and there were other things there instead there was joy and there was truth when my boyfriend and the thought of him and our relationship was suddenly not tethered to every tiny infraction he'd ever committed I could see him for who he really was the most gentle person that I have ever met and I don't use the superlative lightly and wise and kind and trustworthy and yes not perfect but good and I missed all that goodness and plus I wanted to share with him all of this newfound joy and lightness I wanted to invite him to the dance so I called him up and I said remember that question that you asked me I'm ready to answer it I should pause my story here to say that it took me 16 months very little contact with him and a move across the country to finally step into the circle of forgiveness and in that time the love of my life had fallen in love with someone else someone who didn't make him subtly feel like the bad guy had taken me too long had taken me too long to forgive and in the 20 plus hours of conversation we had about that matter what became very obvious to me was that all the years of keeping him at arm's length had deeply wounded him so now I began the long and much harder journey to forgiving myself and I had to start with naming the offense what exactly had I done wrong that made him hurt so much it wasn't turning down his proposal because if you can't say yes you can't say yes and it wasn't even justifying him instead of forgiving him because you can only operate out of the knowledge that you have and I just didn't get it back then but I did out act out of self-protection and fear and indecision I did string him and myself along for a long time and if I'm really really honest with myself I was more interested in what I could get from the relationship than what I could give to it you have to name the offense specifically because then you understand how much the forgiveness costs because even though forgiveness can't be earned even though forgiveness is free for the receiver it costs the giver but whether you are the receiver or the giver and in this situation like me both the receiver and the giver when you're in this accusation period we have to be gracious and kind and step softly I actually think this accusal period should be more like an autopsy and less like a rehearsal when you autopsy something you are looking for what went wrong right you either find it or you don't and then you bury the body it's essentially a fact-finding mission rehearsal much different goal we rehearse yes so that we can repeat the activity but actors rehearse for a much deeper reason we rehearse so that we can get the words and those actions into our bodies so that we can create from that place so that we can live out of that place so that we can create out of that reality if you go on a film set you might see an actor walk onto the kitchen set for the first time and maybe this is the kitchen that belongs to his character well you'll see him do all kinds of crazy things like open the refrigerator door 35 times the reason why he's doing that is because he wants to believe that he's cooked there before he wants to rehearse that so that he can create out of that reality so that he can make you believe that reality and it works rehearsals really powerful so we have to be super careful what we rehearse so when I was in this name the offense stage I tried to be really deliberate when I was journaling or praying or talking to my sister-in-law I didn't want to rehearse the idea that I was this terrible self protective selfish fearful person I wanted to just name the offense forgive it in love and then move on this was not easy to do but in a strange and dramatic turn of events about two weeks after the last time we spoke I got a very serious head injury and I had to move home with my parents for four and a half months to recover and this ended up being sort of a gift because I lay in that bed with a broken head and a broken heart trying to start my life over and the only thing I could do was ask for help I just looked towards the heavens and asked for help this from the girl who doesn't like mystery and you know what the help came I would have these overwhelming moments these feelings of well-being and hope now have to be honest these moments were fleeting and far between and sometimes they alar so you know what I would just ask again and ask again and ask again there's this modern notion of forgiveness that it is a letting go but there's one Hebrew word for forgiveness NASA which means exactly the opposite the literal interpretation of NASA is to pick up and carry and that is really my experience of forgiveness it is something that I pick up and carry every day because of love and I'll ask for help when I have trouble doing this sometimes I ask for help daily sometimes hourly I know this may sound like a really tiresome existence and I'll admit it takes a little bit of work and certainly easier for me to get hurt now or at least it's easier for me to register the hurt but there's some pretty great things about living this way too and my favorite one is this I feel like the Grinch when he stole Christmas and then gave it back again and his heart grew three sizes see this circle of forgiveness is where we aren't tied to the Past constantly having to rehash it so we can live in the holy present with each other like The Three Graces and we can have these whole big healthy hearts to continue writing our stories on forgiveness starts with truth it's assured in by love and it leads to freedom now at some point in this talk some of you may have thought that my love story would have a traditional happy ending and true my ex-boyfriend and I don't have the most romantic story on earth but I think we have a pretty remarkable love story because that's exactly what forgiveness is the greatest love story ever told thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 146,172

Rating: 4.8239698 out of 5

Keywords: ted talk, tedx, English, ted talks, United States, tedx talk, TEDxTalks, ted x, Career/Life Development, Relationships/Romance, Life, ted, Psychology, tedx talks

Id: 8TBAM4YVFyo

Length: 17min 54sec (1074 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 11 2014