Dr. Shawne Duperon

I’m launched baby. I’m here.

Dr. Shawne Duperon

You know it’s so funny and you probably get this too and the folks that listen to you. You don’t really pick your subject. Your subject picks you.

Things that we teach are things that we need the most.

A lot of folks know my story. I’m pretty open about it. I’m an incest survivor and I’m at the point now as a grandmother and it’s an odd thing to say that I can even say that being molested as a child was the thing that launched me to thrive.

Not that I would wish anything as horrific as being molested on anyone and at the same time, we get our journeys. It’s about who we become in the process of those journeys.

I have become an amazing human because of the things that happened for me rather than to me and the power of forgiveness is a big part.

Dr. Shawne Duperon

Yes.

Even as you said it transmute or transform, it really is a process.

The questions that we get all the time on our website or on social media is “How do I forgive?” And the answer especially for something traumatic and to be traumatic would include getting breast cancer or losing your job or your home or having a child murder.

We have all our definition of what’s traumatic and the process is going to be the same every single time which is oxymoron. It’s a process. It’s different and it’s the same and it’s different and everybody goes through a process and all our processes are iterate processes. Meaning, they’re not linear.

In research, there’s a lineage of what people go through when they forgive. It starts with anger and shock, grief, and then, getting to a place of acceptance and then, finally peace. But it’s not a straight line. It’s an iterate process.

Dr. Shawne Duperon

Let’s say you lose your job and that can be very traumatic for a lot of folks or you lose a large client. Then, you’re in shock and you’re so angry and then you get another opportunity the next day and you’re saying to yourself, “Oh cool. One window closes and another window opens.” and then, you don’t get that one and then you go back to the shock again.

The power of forgiveness is this process of ebb and flow allowing the different feelings and these different phases move you forward and move you backward.

It’s that pendulum swinging that allows you to shift and change because really what happens is your perception starts to change and the intensity of the emotions starts to fade away and you actually change as a person and that is the process of forgiveness.

When I hear things like forgive and forget, I want to say that is just crap. This is not about forgiving and forgetting. It’s not about taking the high road. It’s not about any of that.

Dr. Shawne Duperon

You are spot on Kamala. That’s exactly what it is.

Here’s the thing. If you jump to “I’m taking the high road,” whatever’s incomplete will show up in different ways whether it’s in sabotage or sideways. Maybe you’ll smoke cigarettes or you’ll eat 10 Reese’s peanut buttercup. It’s shoveling down what’s incomplete because we as human beings want to transform in complete conversations.

You and I already know this about you guys just from how you feel in who you’re being that nothing gets resolved, then, it keeps repeating itself until you face it.

I thought I might as well face it, move through it, transform it, lob it up, and be with it. That’s the courageous route and that’s where all the miracles show up.

Dr. Shawne Duperon

I love what you’re saying because I hear this over and over again and I’m deeply appreciating your vulnerability.

Being with your feelings is important and that’s what you have personal control over.

I’ve got a couple of tools that we use a lot at Project Forgive. Everything we do on Project Forgive is free. You can get this download. You can see the free broadcast on Facebook live.

One of them is a meditation on forgiving yourself for not being forgiving.

You know that one person, you just look at him and you want to say, “Oh my gosh. Shoot me in the head. He’s a jerk!” and you’re trying to deal with him and be more evolved and more spiritual and you just look at him and you get a rush up your body and you’re just going to go, “Oh my gosh. Get me away from this jerk.”

One of the tools we use is forgiving yourself for not forgiving. You say like “Okay, I really want to forgive this guy but he’s such a jerk. I’m just going to simply practice forgiving myself for not being forgiving,” and we have a meditation on that.

Let me get another and this one is my absolute hands down, favorite tool and it’s called “Accepting the apology you’ll never receive.” This actually alludes to what you were saying because we may have control over ourselves. That’s all we have control over.

Dr. Shawne Duperon

I’ve got a great analogy of my neighbor. This neighbor, he’s one of those people as soon as I see him, I’m immediately annoyed and he lives right next door to me. To give you an example, I’ll go out to get the mail and he’ll be like, “Good morning Shawn” and I could already feel like going up my body like the annoyance and I’ll say “Yeah. But Bob, it’s 6pm,” and he’ll say, “I know. But you look like you just got up.” These are the things he literally says to me.

Now, my teachings as a trainer and as a leader, we’re always responsible for what we’re broadcasting. We’re always giving off some kind of signal or a vibration and we’re in charge of that signal or that vibration, and most people that meet me say, “Oh my gosh. You have great energy. You’re so fun.”

If you were to ask my neighbor, he’d say, “Ugh. That woman is a little intense. She’s probably got a lot of anger going on over there.” That would be his experience of me.

Accepting apology I’ll never receive but something I can do in my head that Bob will never do. So, as soon as see Bob, what I’ve been practicing is pretending that he’s apologizing to me and he’s not apologizing. He just doesn’t have those skills and what he’d be saying to me if he could apologize, he’d say, “Osh, I am so sorry. As soon as I get in a social situation, I am so awkward, I say the dumbest things. You know my background. You know that I’m hurting and the truth is I just really want you to love me and sometimes, the exact opposite comes out of my mouth and will you just forgive me?”

Dr. Shawne Duperon

You can even feel my compassion and my softness, my being shifts on a dime and who I’m being with this neighbor now is exquisite, loving, compassionate, and I can give up that annoyance on a dime because I’m becoming so masterful at accepting the apology I’ll never receive and I use this neighbor as an example because that’s an easy one.

Some of us got stuff like especially for the holidays. We’re going to be around in-laws and they’ve got opposite political views. We’ve got all kinds of upset around racial divide and inequality and all kinds of things going on that are much bigger than a neighbor saying, “You don’t look that great in the morning,” and I love to use that example because it can be applied universally to anything that you’re facing so you can shift you and you can have peace in the moment.

Dr. Shawne Duperon

I think it’s beautiful. Every single person has their own unique way that they find internal peace.

If it works for you, rock and freaking roll. It’s like a fingerprint.

Dr. Shawne Duperon

There are so many myths about the power of forgiveness. Even anger has. Anger to me is so precious. We have such mixed emotions as a culture around anger and we see it as something negative.

I see anger as something beautiful and positive. Use appropriately. Not violence. Usually we equate anger with violence.

Anger is one of the most important processes of forgiveness and honoring it because your body, your intuition, and your soul tells you something’s off and that’s so important to listen to and experience.

Does that mean you get to shout at somebody and yell at him and scream? Of course, not. We just culturally haven’t become skilled at expressing appropriate anger and we’re seeing it right now in politics.

Dr. Shawne Duperon

I’m a media trainer by trade and I work with both sides of a partisanship and my job as a marriage counselor is to bring people together and we’re at this very ugly angry stage where we have inappropriate anger when actually, this can resolve itself in a really beautiful way. I’m excited to see how this lily ball and it’s getting us more familiar with being able to express anger because I’m noticing anger shifting around all these political conversation and strife globally so that we can find some resolutions.

So anger in my world is really important.

Dr. Shawne Duperon

Beautiful.

I just have to say, I really like you guys. You guys are so exquisite. It feels so good to have this conversation.

With the power of forgiveness, anger is so important because, every single time, I’ve seen it. I’ve interviewed a lot of people. We’re doing a documentary. I’ve talked to a lot of researchers. I’ve talked to a lot of experts.

Underneath anger is grief and the access to grief is through your anger. If you don’t feel this anger, you don’t get to the heart of grieving.

Dr. Shawne Duperon

We get this documentary launching in 2017. We did all kinds of interviews and we interviewed 24 four-year olds. We asked them about the power of forgiveness and they were adorable. What is the power of forgiveness? It’s a bunch of sorry’s. It’s when you don’t hate anyone anymore. It was just precious and I had this jest feeling and I said, “What about anger?”

So I asked every single one of those four year olds what they thought about anger and every single one of them said anger was bad. I’ll bet you a million dollars, their parents are not saying “Don’t be angry. Angry is evil.” They’re doing it unconsciously and our game is to make the unconscious conscious, and it’s to have conversations like this because underneath that anger is when you find that grief.

Another example of anger that I love to use outside of the political arena is mothers against drunk drivers. Those moms got really mad. That organization got really mad for a good 10 years and it took many decades to actually make drinking and driving illegal. It was a fight and these mothers were mad enough and inspired enough to work through that so actual change can take place.

When we find that we’re angry whether it’s angry about politics or angry about our personal life…

When we get present to the anger and then finally let the grief bubble up, that’s when we can actually make physical changes.

Sometimes, it’s about setting boundaries. Sometimes, in political arenas it might be getting involved as an activist in some way. You can see what’s going on in Standing Rock right now. People are just really getting involved by that because they’re inspired by what’s going on over there and they want to make a difference.

Dr. Shawne Duperon

For me, in Shawn’s world, the politics are merely a reflection of what’s been going on culturally and internally for decades and it has just manifested in our politics and I can just see for me, what this fight means for me internally as an incest survivor. I can see themes everywhere.

As I start dealing with my own pain that’s unresolved, I’m getting more and more peace about the politics and actually, solutions are coming forward for me as how I can participate to make a difference and I am seeing that happening in so many places in social media.

Are there a lot of folks that are staying in the anger and staying in the combativeness? Yeah, a lot of folks stay there, and those aren’t the folks I hang with. I’m sure the folks even listening to this podcast actually picks accountability and responsibility for what’s going on internally to be able to manifest a powerful way, and that is really why I say this is such an exciting time, even though it’s painful, because exciting times also include pain and include fear.

It’s always that dance between love and fear. Not that either one is good or bad because I have come from a paradigm that fear is actually good. Because it’s showing you where you need some progress and where you might need to amplify some love spaces or actually take some risks and feel some anger and do some grief work.

Dr. Shawne Duperon

Yeah, and it’s going to sound like a cliché.

Dr. Shawne Duperon

We all have our own inner power. How we deal with things is up to us and we can either be in that fear space where we’re annoyed and angry all the time just with the little things that upsets us or we can come from that compassionate, loving place.

I love to come from the compassionate, loving place authentically by doing the masterful techniques internally so I can shift myself on a dime, and I do believe it becomes a mastery.

Just like Mother Theresa says, “Forgiveness is a continuous attitude.” It’s a continuous act. Martin Luther King talked about that as well for many years and to me, embodying and practicing a mastery of accepting apology I’ll never receive or forgiving myself for not forgiving actually illumines me in those ways so I can be the best and most profound person I can be.

My wish and my hope is for those listening that they also have the courage for that kind of mastery.