Even if you know why it happened, that is not going to heal you.
It’s something that was very deep and it caused, I would say, a lot of damage. And, you know, I can look at it now in retrospect and say, he could have done this or he could have done that. But what I can say is that it was very hurtful for him to do that. And for him to not be able to do something that was more protective of his children, so that if he didn’t want to sit with her — and I’m just supposing he didn’t want to sit and have dinner with her — you could have said, listen, I’m going to come and pick up my children and take them with me for a couple of hours or for Christmas Day.
You can heal from that experience
So when I’m talking to you, I want to talk to both sides, for those women and maybe even men who are sad because their dads, their memory of their dad for Christmas was, he was absent, he didn’t do anything, or whatever the case might be. I want to tell you that you can have that experience, and you can heal from that experience.
In fact, two of the people that I talk about very frequently in the book, Louise Hay and Edwin Gaines, who wrote the foreword for the book, they talk about the fact that people who have suffered greatly are people who ultimately have the capacity to have the greatest compassion in the world.
The answer to the question, why, is really not helpful
And this is the reason that I took the time to do this video right now, because I wanted to talk to those people who are saying, why did that happen to me? Why did my dad not bring me what I wanted? Why did my dad not show up for me for Christmas? Why were my holidays not as great as everybody else’s?
Well, the answer to the question, why, is really not helpful. Because even if you know why it happened, that is not going to heal you. What we need to get to is — this was, at least from my experience, what I found was helpful to me. I understood what my experiences had been. Why didn’t matter. And then I had to decide that as a result of those experiences, I was going to grow.
I could become a more loving and a more compassionate being
I could become, as Edwin Gaines says in the foreword to For the Love of My Father, I could, as a result of those experiences, become a more loving and a more compassionate being than I would have been without having those particular experiences. And I know that maybe what you’re seeing right now, it’s a stretch for you to understand and to feel that that is even a possibility. But I’m here to tell you that that worked for me.
Now, what works for me doesn’t necessarily have to work for you, but at least you have one person who is saying, this is how it worked for me. The reason why I had such difficult, challenging, horrible experiences with my father and my parents in general doesn’t really matter. The fact is that it happened. And the fact is that my next step was to figure out how I was going to heal from that.