094: FORGIVING YOUR DAD – How to Do It
Brad Singletary
There is no doubt that there were injuries and wounds that came to you. So now here’s the opportunity for you, the person who needs to forgive your dad. Here is your opportunity to mature and grow and evolve past whatever hurt what happened to him. Why did this happen? In order to forgive, you’ve got to consider the dignity of the offender and that he is more than his mistakes.
00:00:30:04 – 00:00:51:26
Brad Singletary
You need to offer grace to all. Because we all need a little grace. At any given time, people are doing their very best. If you’re a father. I believe that right now and in the past, every day that you’ve been a father, you’ve been doing your very best and you can do better. It’s just a sacred purifying process.
00:00:52:21 – 00:00:58:14
Brad Singletary
Serve the peace that comes from. So forgive your father and be a better one.
00:00:58:23 – 00:01:24:03
Intro
So if you’re a man that controls his own destiny, a man that is always in the pursuit of being better, you are in the right place. You are responsible. You are strong. You are a leader. You are a force for good. Gentlemen, this is the Alpha Quorum.
00:01:27:23 – 00:01:58:09
Brad Singletary
Welcome back to the Alpha Quorum Show. Brad Singletary here. Going solo again today, fellas. So I. It’s Father’s Day week, and I had this awesome plan to have my boys in here. I still might do that at some point, but I had this awesome plan to have my six boys come in and talk about dads and their relationship, what they see as important, and the relationships of their friends with their dad and so forth.
00:01:58:20 – 00:02:32:18
Brad Singletary
And just get some younger folks, some younger men’s perspectives on fatherhood. It didn’t work out today, mostly because my kids so my three older boys, their mom and I are divorced and they don’t live with me all of the time. And we had through Sunday night to spend time together and we didn’t have the greatest day on Sunday.
00:02:32:18 – 00:03:09:22
Brad Singletary
And so it wasn’t the right feeling. We didn’t have quite the right vibe between us to come in here and record a Father’s Day message about fathers and sons and so forth. And so you got me. I am an imperfect person constantly making mistakes, constantly using emotion in properly. I have many flaws as a dad. And so I just thought about what kind of message could be could come up here that might be significant for us here around Father’s Day.
00:03:09:22 – 00:03:44:07
Brad Singletary
And I think about the problems that are associated with poor fathering in the world. I think one of the most problematic things that happened in the entire world is the missing or avoidant or absent or abusive father. At some point here soon, we’re going to talk about the boy crisis, the work of Dr. Warren Farrell, and we’ll share some things, some statistics and so forth in that which have to do with the impact of the bad dad.
00:03:45:19 – 00:04:13:00
Brad Singletary
And I think we all have to some degree, some healing to do regarding our relationship with our fathers. So I want to talk about today forgiving your father. There’s no doubt that there were injuries and wounds that came to you as a result of the connection or disconnection that you may have had with your father or a fatherly type.
00:04:14:25 – 00:04:46:28
Brad Singletary
There’s a large number of young men in America who are raised without a dad. A great number of children are raised in situations where their parents are divorced, and so they have less. So they’re spending less time with their own fathers, and that creates some problems. So why the need for forgiveness? I was reading something recently about this guy named Dr. Robert Enright.
00:04:47:14 – 00:05:22:02
Brad Singletary
In 2020, he got approval to do a forgiveness therapy, like a research study in a maximum security prison. He had been trying to do this for like 36 years. So this study is apparently the strongest set of data on emotional healing related to forgiveness ever published from a correctional context. The idea was to help the prisoners forgive their own childhood abuses rather than, you know, seeking forgiveness for their their own crimes.
00:05:23:09 – 00:05:53:04
Brad Singletary
And this guy, Enright, Dr. Robert Enright, was a pioneer in the study of forgiveness, and he was twice nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. One of the things that he talks about is that forgiveness involves extending undeserved mercy and grace to the offender. It’s kind of a controversial definition. Sometimes the people who are most resistant to forgiveness are often the most hurt.
00:05:53:04 – 00:06:19:00
Brad Singletary
And they’re so hurt that forgiveness just seems like a complete impossibility. It’s maybe a disgusting thought to think about. And so what happens instead? What goes instead of forgiveness and peace is resentment, hatred, anxiety, depression. Just some of those things kind of build up. And when you’ve been badly hurt by other people, forgiveness is the best treatment since this guy, Dr. Enright.
00:06:19:15 – 00:06:47:16
Brad Singletary
His research on forgiveness was first rejected. The science of forgiveness has kind of exploded into this huge field. There’s over 3000 published articles showing that forgiveness has physical and mental health benefits. A lot of those things, you know, reduce stress. There was a UCLA study of of people that found that stress levels rose and fell with resentment and anger.
00:06:47:16 – 00:07:18:15
Brad Singletary
And both of those things decreased with forgiveness. So some of that stuff is pretty obvious. Psychologists have found that lifetime stress is linked to mental health problems. But an interesting correlation is that that those mental health problems were decreased in some cases, almost erased in some cases by forgiveness. And Dr. Enright studied the male prisoners were taught to and kind of helped through the process of forgiveness.
00:07:19:05 – 00:07:49:27
Brad Singletary
Their anger and depression subsided, their anxiety improved, their in their ability to have empathy increased. And six months later, after this little series of things that they did, six months later, the improvements remained with them. Another four week forgiveness study was done with a group of terminally ill cancer patients, and even though they only had like six months to live, all of their psychological health measures improved.
00:07:50:06 – 00:08:23:15
Brad Singletary
So it’s pretty clear that forgiveness improves well-being regardless of the circumstances. And but the resentment, the rumination, someone has said that rumination is the bad boy of mental health. And the research has linked this unwanted, like, obsessive thinking, rumination and remembering old situations. There’s research linking that to some old transgression or some old injustice that has been unhealed.
00:08:24:26 – 00:09:03:23
Brad Singletary
When we forgive Dr. Worthington remarks, it quiets rumination. So there are more psychological benefits and more than holding grudges. Which is long term resentment, hostility and revenge just kind of boils over the desire to be vengeful. Unforgiveness is characterized by ruminating on the past. Unforgiveness is a stress response, and your body can respond in many different ways. Our sympathetic nervous system is activated, and we have more fight or flight reactions.
00:09:03:24 – 00:09:19:07
Brad Singletary
Cortisol levels can rise, which severely impacts our health. Chronically high cortisol levels. It increases our vulnerability to diseases and it compromises our immune systems at the cellular level.
00:09:21:22 – 00:09:55:26
Brad Singletary
Dr. Worthington says forgiveness activates the parasympathetic nervous system which moderates all that sympathetic hyper arousal that occurs. So what is forgiveness? David White said To forgive is to assume a larger identity than the person who was first hurt. And through psychological virtuosity, extend our understanding to the offender. So this really captures his forgiveness. Doctor invites forgiveness therapy program.
00:09:56:18 – 00:10:27:20
Brad Singletary
Some critics say that forgiveness just lets the perpetrator off the hook. But it’s not about reconciliation. Aristotle says forgiveness and justice go together. In an ideal world, the offender here would express some remorse, maybe admit to they’re wrong. But the paradox of forgiveness, the paradoxical strength of that is that it doesn’t require an admission or an apology in order to heal.
00:10:28:15 – 00:10:51:27
Brad Singletary
So if forgiveness isn’t reconciliation, I think a lot of people misunderstand the intent of forgiveness. It’s not about I forgive you. And we can go back to how everything always was or how we wanted it to be, how it used to be. It doesn’t mean reconciliation. It means that you’re ridding yourself of the poison that is infecting you.
00:10:52:05 – 00:11:29:05
Brad Singletary
And I want to talk about how to do that. So how do we forgive someone? I believe that forgiveness is basically to consider the dignity of the offender. We’ve got to consider their humanity. Forgiveness really reconstructs your own and the other person’s humanness. So we have to extend our understanding to the offender. And here’s here are some of the things that I work with, with people about this situation.
00:11:30:04 – 00:12:08:25
Brad Singletary
So in order to forgive, we have to be able to consider the person with an empathetic, compassionate kind of consideration. Zig Ziglar used to tell the story about a man who and I pictured this was maybe back in the twenties or thirties, a man whose son came home from school and he was all beaten up and he had a maybe a black guy and a bloody nose and he asked the boy what he did, what he had done, and what happened.
00:12:09:01 – 00:12:27:12
Brad Singletary
And he said, Well, the kids at school beat me up. This group of boys on the way home, they beat me up. The father asked if he fought back and the boy said that he didn’t. They were too many. He was scared, whatever. And so the dad began to call him Sissy and sent him to school the next day in a dress.
00:12:28:06 – 00:12:49:17
Brad Singletary
And he said, Well, if you’re going to be a sissy, you’re going to wear a dress to school. And at some point, the teacher asked him, Oh, my goodness, Mr. Jones, why would you do this to your son? Don’t you love him? And he said, Well, of course I love him. That’s why I did it. That’s what that’s what my job as a father is, is to correct him.
00:12:49:17 – 00:13:08:24
Brad Singletary
And and in this case, this is what I did to teach him this lesson. Of course, I love him. My dad loved me, and he did the same to me. So if we’re trying to consider, why was your dad so messed up or why did we do those things? You have to look at the context of his life.
00:13:08:24 – 00:13:37:26
Brad Singletary
First of all, our adult brain isn’t even fully formed until we’re at least 25 or 26 years old. So I’ve told my kids I don’t want them getting married or even being anywhere close to anything like that or having children until after they’re 25 or 26 years old. It’s just a fact that judgment, decision making, so many of those things are not even fully connected in our brain circuitry until we’re 25 or 26 years old.
00:13:37:26 – 00:14:06:02
Brad Singletary
That’s been a very important lesson for me. That’s why you can’t rent a car until you’re 25 years old. Insurance companies who insure those vehicles understand the risk and they know what happens in the brain. But we are acting like people are adults when they’re 18 years old and it’s just not true. My dad always said it takes 40 years to build a man and I believe it 40 years to build a marriage, 40 years to build a man, you got to hang with it.
00:14:06:21 – 00:14:47:27
Brad Singletary
And so if your dad was a young father, we’re going to take a whole bunch of it away from him because he’s doing this at a time when he’s not even mentally, fully prepared to make good decisions if he’s, you know, a younger person. If we look at his own treatment, if we look at his own trauma, if we look at his own relationship with his father, if we look at how much better your father was than his father, I promise you, in many ways, your dad is better than your grandfather and your grandfather was better than his father.
00:14:47:27 – 00:15:16:11
Brad Singletary
And we’ve been improving. And so now here’s the opportunity for you, the person who needs to forgive your dad. Here is your opportunity to mature and grow and evolve past whatever hurt what happened to him? Why did this happen? Some people feel like they were abandoned by their fathers, and that may be the case. And we’re just now beginning to understand parental alienation.
00:15:16:11 – 00:15:36:25
Brad Singletary
And we don’t know what mom did, the things that mom said or did to dad in order to make it difficult for him to be involved with you. And that’s just one of the things that I hear. You know, my mom and dad got divorced and my dad disappeared. A very common thing. It’s not always the case, but many times there’s there could be alienation going on.
00:15:36:25 – 00:16:02:29
Brad Singletary
There’s he’s got a mental health problem that no one knows about. We know that he drinks. Let’s just say. But nobody’s considering the fact that he has some trauma. He’s got some, you know, a mood disorder. He’s got anxiety. He’s trying to make ends meet. He’s sending child support. He’s trying to find some love in his life. And he’s preoccupied with dating in order to forgive.
00:16:03:00 – 00:16:33:13
Brad Singletary
You’ve got to consider the dignity of the offender and that he is more than his mistakes. Look at yourself. Are you more than the mistakes that you’ve made? Of course you are. Joyce O’Neill said, We judge others by their actions and ourselves, by our intentions. We need to offer grace to all because we all need a little grace.
00:16:33:19 – 00:17:02:16
Brad Singletary
So if we can look at why this was happening, what was going on in your father or the fatherly person in your life? If we can understand their background, if we can understand what was happening for them that day, their vulnerabilities, what was going on, they were raised by someone who was raised during the Depression. Let’s just say there’s family stories, there’s skeletons in the closet.
00:17:02:16 – 00:17:17:14
Brad Singletary
There are things that we can’t even imagine. Oh, and they didn’t have any of the distractions. They didn’t have porn to chill out with. They didn’t have the electronics and the ability to get information. They didn’t have any of those things like we have now.
00:17:19:15 – 00:17:44:07
Brad Singletary
One of the most important things I’ve ever learned about the human condition is that and I believe it’s true at any given time, people are doing their very best if you’re a father. I believe that right now and in the past, every day that you’ve been a father, you’ve been doing your very best and you can do better.
00:17:45:00 – 00:18:11:06
Brad Singletary
So that applies to you and that applies to your father or the men in your life who may have harmed you in that may need your forgiveness, not because they deserve any forgiveness, but because you deserve the peace that comes with that. So I don’t know. It’s Father’s Day. I’m just thinking about there are some really solid, stellar dads out there, but most have done some boneheaded stuff to you.
00:18:11:23 – 00:18:41:25
Brad Singletary
But most guys have had problematic situations. Uh, I have a scar on my head, and now that I’m balding and I buzz my hair and I’ve done that for a decade or so, there’s a scar on my head that comes from my dad. And what was going on. My dad was so let’s just say a 38 year old man who was trying to raise six children.
00:18:43:08 – 00:19:19:12
Brad Singletary
Things were very tight. We were on a crabbing boat. Our family, our family’s income was based out of our crabbing business in the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of Florida. And one day, I wasn’t moving fast enough. One day I wasn’t with it. It was a rainstorm. I remember I had this yellow slicker like rain jacket on, and my dad just reaches up with the little pole, the little hook that you grab the traps out of the water with and just tap me on the head to say, tighten up.
00:19:20:12 – 00:19:42:26
Brad Singletary
But the leverage of the long pole at the end of his extended arm in a boat on the waves in the ocean. Anyway, it hit me kind of hard and it split my head and there’s blood coming down off of my head. We’re on this boat in this rough, stormy water. And so he shuts the engine down and he says, Come here.
00:19:42:26 – 00:20:02:20
Brad Singletary
And he’s trying to fix it. He’s trying to patch up this this thing in my head, applied direct pressure. My head’s bleeding. And, you know, if you get a head injury, it really bleeds a lot. It’s raining. I felt like Rocky Balboa. I’ve got this yellow rain jacket on with the hood, but underneath it, it’s just blood coming down my face.
00:20:03:25 – 00:20:29:12
Brad Singletary
It’s quite a small, little cut there, but that kind of hurt me. It was a scary situation. It wasn’t malicious on my dad’s part. It wasn’t some extreme thing that set me way back. It was kind of a small, little cut on my head, but it was the kind of thing where I knew that he couldn’t take me to the emergency room because he just hit me in the head with a stick and now I’m bleeding.
00:20:30:20 – 00:20:56:00
Brad Singletary
And so he takes me into the bathroom when we get home. And you know this I’m talking about a little three quarter inch cut, one inch maybe on my head, and it probably needs a couple of stitches. But he knew we couldn’t do that. That would have the authorities getting called out. Dad had hit his son in the head and I was bleeding.
00:20:56:22 – 00:21:41:29
Brad Singletary
Well, I have long ago forgiven that I. I know that it wasn’t this intentionally harsh, intentionally abusive thing, but it hurt me, hurt my feelings, hurt me that my dad would cause me to bleed. And so why would that happen? Well, my dad, shortly after that, began to have heart attacks. He actually had three heart attacks. Who knows what was going on with his system, with his blood pressure, were crabbing, not because it was a cool, awesome thing, because it was a way for poor folks to make money.
00:21:43:05 – 00:22:07:08
Brad Singletary
And so there’s just fish out there and you can sell them, you can sell the crabs. And so we went and basically harvested seafood out of the ocean in order to sell, in order for us to eat. So there’s a lot of stress and nothing ever really came of that. We never we didn’t talk about that very much.
00:22:07:11 – 00:22:44:07
Brad Singletary
But I just know that my my anger and heard about that didn’t didn’t last very long. But I see men all the time who and maybe there are other things and in my life or things that hurt me in the past. But I promise that your father did something to hurt you. And I wonder if this Father’s Day we could do some pondering, we could do some reflection, we could do some consideration of the circumstances and work through a process of forgiveness.
00:22:44:07 – 00:23:11:20
Brad Singletary
Now, if this is going to bring up, you know, some seriously old wounds that are still fresh and still get inflamed, when you think about these things, you may want to do this with an advisor, with a mentor, with an agent of some kind of friend, a professional, maybe a therapist. I’d be happy to talk with you about it in order to face life with the kind of energy that is required of us.
00:23:11:20 – 00:23:37:00
Brad Singletary
If we’re hanging on to resentments, that’s going to weigh us down, and that’s going to muddy our vision and muddy our view. And so my challenge to you, brothers, is to take a look and see if there are any resentments that you have. List those things out with your father and for that matter, for anyone. But maybe this is a time that you can do that.
00:23:38:22 – 00:24:05:28
Brad Singletary
In 2006. I was newly I had just newly moved to Las Vegas. And I don’t even know if I had a cell phone at the time. Everybody’s alarm now, you know, it’s a cell phone. But the alarm clock, the little AM FM radio alarm clock was set to this country. Radio station. And for three or four days in a row, they must have been playing the same tapes.
00:24:05:28 – 00:24:32:27
Brad Singletary
It seemed like it was Groundhog Day. Remember the movie with the same song kept coming on every morning. The song that came on was Live Like You Were Dying by Tim McGraw. It’s I think it’s a 24 song, excellent song, where he talks about this guy who gets this diagnosis of cancer and it talks about his process. And his friend said, man, what did you do?
00:24:32:28 – 00:24:56:17
Brad Singletary
What do you do when you get that kind of news? And he said, Well, I went skydiving. I went Rocky Mountain climb, and I went 2.7 seconds on a bull named Fu Manchu. I loved deeper. I spoke sweeter, and I gave forgiveness that I’ve been denying. And he said, Someday I hope you get the chance to live like you were dying.
00:24:56:17 – 00:25:18:16
Brad Singletary
So that just I woke up three days in a row to that. I really felt like that kind of forgiveness. I didn’t want to have to do that kind of forgiveness that someone is dying or I’m dying. And this was last chance. Forgiveness. And so I kind of became a student of that. I was already working in therapy and as a counselor.
00:25:18:16 – 00:25:53:15
Brad Singletary
That’s what brought me here to Las Vegas, my job and I definitely have gone through periods of time where I didn’t do very well with that. I had resentments that had been stacked up some of them for decades. And it wasn’t until probably I reached 40 years old myself and I was a failing father that I recognized how difficult fatherhood is, how difficult it is for me to keep my shit together, for me to keep my cool.
00:25:54:26 – 00:26:22:04
Brad Singletary
So if I can’t keep my cool and I’ve got an excuse for myself when I’m upset with my kids and I’m angry, should I not extend that same grace to my own father? And how did he get that way? Well, probably from his father. And how did he become that way? And so we have this long, continuous line of human beings hurting other human beings.
00:26:22:26 – 00:26:47:24
Brad Singletary
And I think it might be time if you’re listening to this right now, you’ve got something to forgive. I don’t mean reconcile. I mean forgive. Your father may have passed away. There may not be an opportunity even to reconcile. That may not be in your best interests, even if it is possible. But are you holding on to something, man?
00:26:47:24 – 00:26:59:28
Brad Singletary
Are you holding on to resentment? What if you could write down all of the things that you’re resentful about? What if you could work through that list with someone?
00:27:02:13 – 00:27:40:06
Brad Singletary
I think you’ll find that that process can be very healing and helps you really get to the bottom of the real problem. Many times is our self, our expectation. See, I was hurt because I believed that fathers must be perfect, fathers must be skilled, fathers must maintain their emotional state. Fathers must never be abusive. Fathers must never lose their cool.
00:27:40:06 – 00:28:11:25
Brad Singletary
And look, he lost his cool. So this must be something’s wrong with me. So the whole cognitive processing of the things that you’ve experienced with your dad might be weighing you down. Maybe you are a father who has made mistakes yourself. You’ve got to forgive yourself for your own bad fathering. Maybe you got to forgive your dad. You guys, I hope there’s something I’ve shared here today is helpful for you.
00:28:13:07 – 00:28:37:29
Brad Singletary
I hope that you enjoy Father’s Day. My assumption about every dad out there is that he’s doing the very best that he can. If you’re a dad, I believe you’re doing the very best that you can. And I also know that you can do better. Who you are is good enough for today. Good enough? Okay. Makes sense. It’s not going to be good enough in a year.
00:28:39:11 – 00:29:12:10
Brad Singletary
So if you’ve been the person who has harmed someone else, especially your child, if you’ve been the person who’s abandoned someone, if you’ve been the person who has held grudges and resentments and avoided a person like your father or a fatherly figure in your life, get that forgiving man. Reach out to me. Taco Mike, Jimmy Durbin, any of us that you’ve talked to us, you can just message me and I’ll get in touch with anybody you need.
00:29:12:26 – 00:29:41:15
Brad Singletary
If you want help to do that, it’s just a sacred purifying process. You deserve the peace that comes from that. So forgive your father and be a better one yourself. If you don’t have children, look around you and there are young men everywhere screaming for attention. They’re screaming to be recognized. They’re screaming to be believed in. They’re screaming to be supported.
00:29:41:15 – 00:30:10:29
Brad Singletary
Even grown men, grown children. Men need men. Reach out to the men in your life. Try to open yourself and be a little bit more sharing of what’s inside you and more willing for them to share what’s inside them. Appreciate you guys. I hope you have a great Father’s Day as always. No excuses, Alpha.
00:30:10:29 – 00:30:17:04
Speaker 2
Gentlemen, you are the alpha. And this is the alpha Quorum.