Joe Loya

And I figured out the reason it was hard for me was I was always thinking, I'm going to forgive my dad.

And at the beginning of that is ego.

It's me.

And what it started sounding like in my ear was, I'm so magnanimous, which is already ego.

I'm so magnanimous that I'm going to bestow something on this lower person so that I can elevate them so that we're now fine.

We're good now.

But in order to make that happen, I have to bestow forgiveness on him.

And to me, that power dynamic does not feel, that didn't feel cool.

I was like, no wonder it doesn't work.

It always starts with I. And so I read about compassion in a way that blew my mind.

Because what compassion told me to do was, you don't forgive them.

You accept them for who they are.

And the reason they are who they are is because look at their childhood, right?

If you look at my dad's childhood, his father brutalized him.

He was so bad that sometimes he would make my dad sleep in the chicken coop outside.

I know this because his brothers and sisters told me.

He was raised in such a violent home that he watched his mother get brutalized all the time.

And he had to process that and the grief of that, right?

So I looked at my dad and I started seeing that the guy who's in our home doing what he did,

He wasn't a monster.