Choosing Forgiveness By Dr. Tim Lock

This is a follow up to Episode 40 of Pre-Cana with the Pope

So, you heard the story about me coming home to find that the previous evening, in the middle of the night, my son woke up to find that the dog urinated on our couch. The specific element of the story that made it enraging was that my son, Miguel, did not clean it up. He simply went back to bed and eventually cleaned it up the next day at about noon when got out of bed. I went ballistic! How could Miguel do NOT clean up the mess right away??? I went ballistic and gave him a piece of my mind. I talked in the podcast about how I later had to walk through the four-step process of forgiveness to finally forgive Miguel.

But I forgot to tell you the rest of the story (Miguel, forgive me!). My going "ballistic" was way more hurtful than the dog peeing on the couch. A dog is a dog, and a kid not cleaning up a mess is...pretty common. So, that was all pretty common. What about my response? Anger is a normal emotion, but going ballistic? That's not acceptable about 99.9% of the time. I'm a grown man. I'm a professional. I am a clinical psychologist - and Catholic clinical psychologist for crying out loud! I know a thing or two about anger. I know a thing or two about virtue. All that went out the window and I should have had greater dominion over my emotions.

So, Miguel had to forgive ME for going "off" on him and I frankly think that was harder than me forgiving him. One was about "stuff" (a couch); the other was about a person (my wonderful and really awesome son). Even the most expensive stuff isn't worth anything compared to a human person (let alone one of your children).

Miguel did forgive me. I also took responsibility for my behavior. We worked through that and are solid today, but only because he forgave me. If he had not, he would have been swimming in bitterness and resentment - which would have been horrible for him. God bless him. God bless us all!

So, yeah, Miguel is the real hero of that story.

Dr. Timothy Lock

Check out Dr. Lock’s new book: Choosing Forgiveness