Welcome to better today with your host Shawn Maguire and with over 25 years of counseling experience, this is the podcast. It inspires you to create both an amazing family and marriage. This is the podcast that helps you to navigate the challenges of modern life. In this podcast, you will be given the same tools, techniques, and stories that Sean and his team have used to help thousands of people to transform their lives. If you’re ready to make real progress, that will change your marriage, your family, and your life. Then get ready because better today starts now.
Hi. Welcome back. I’m so glad that you could join me again because we are talking today about how to forgive, to live in the present, forgive to live in the present. Now, if you’ve listened to the last four podcasts, then you know you’ve talked a lot about the power of forgiveness. We’ve talked about the Best Premarital Counseling Oklahoma City to be authentic and really understand what things in your life you need to forgive, how to figure some of those things out. We talked about the letter of confrontation, where you confront those people that have offended, hurt, wounded, destroyed you. And today we’re gonna continue that conversation, but in a little bit different way. I think about in your own life, have you ever met anybody that was divorced? And they start telling you about how awful their ex spouse was and how they ruined the lives of the kids, how they’ve taken them through what their financial meat grinder and their life has completely destroyed in your heart starts to get just heard and you get maybe a little bit teary eyed because you’re such a compassionate, caring person.
And then they, you say, Oh, I’m so sorry. When did you get divorced? And you’re thinking, oh, like last week, last month, you know, two months ago, 15 years ago, my kids are all in college. And then as you process what they just said, he’s a, I’m so sorry, what did you say? Ah, 15 years ago? Yeah, we got divorced 15 years ago. My, my first one, uh, he’s, he’s actually 35 now and my other one’s a doctor and my other one is a 22 so you’re telling me for 15 years you’ve carried it around just as fresh as the day that when the guy walked out in you. Yes, that’s exactly right. So I want to propose to you guys that that’s a choice that you don’t have to live that way. You can actually and truly be set free. If you take the advice from the podcast I’ve given you from the really, which is based on biblical principles of the power of forgiveness, that God really commands all of us to not just forgive once, but like Jesus told Peter 70 Times seven, which is the number of infinite forgiveness.
Now, one distinction I do want to make is forgiveness is not the same as reconciliation. What you’d say, are you kidding me? I’m actually not kidding you. Forgiveness is is different than reconciliation. Now, reconciliation always includes forgiveness. A L, w a s always includes forgiveness, especially in our Edmund marriage counseling outfits. It always, always, always includes forgiveness. But forgiveness does not always include reconciliation. How inappropriate would it be for a little boy that was molested by a grown uncle to be forced to reconcile with that uncle while the uncle is still a pervert and why the uncle is still dangerous, completely inappropriate, not acceptable. So there’s a lot of situations where reconciliation is not the move. The move is you forgive that person to let them go so that you can move on with your life so that they are not occupying real estate in your mind for free.
That is destroying your mind, that is destroying your life and you are having to pay this huge rent on space that’s killing you. And that’s called unforgiveness. So just be aware that as we go through this, people have experienced physical, emotional, and spiritual healing in the process, which if you’re Shawn Maguire, you’ve been able to see that for 25 years as a marriage counselor. And it’s amazing, amazing, amazing to see God work through the power of forgiveness. And here’s the other thing. It’s completely not fair, like forgiving somebody is not saying that what they did was right. It’s not saying that it’s okay to no way letting them off the hook. It’s simply saying, God, I trust you to be big enough to take, take care of them and the justice that needs to be served, and I know that you’ve come in and meet it.
Forgive, and that’s the mode. That’s the move for me to start walking in freedom today. All right, so without further ado, I just hope that makes sense. I hope you’re invested. I hope you want to know more about how to walk in forgiveness because it’s a place that you can live. It’s not just a place that you should visit. It’s a place that you can live and not just a place that you can visit. Forgiveness in our society is like the bad f word. You used to be back in the 70s and sixties it’s something that people, only crafts people would say, and the real for the feminist today is, is even if somebody is offensive weeks, it’s still forgive. If you are not a fan of president Trump, you’re still called by God to forgive him. If you’re not a fan of the past President Obama, you are called to forgive him.
If you’re not a failing of anybody, you are called to walk in a state of forgiveness because that keeps you clean and free to experience God’s abundance, his love in his life, and it keeps you available for new in healthy relationships moving forward. Because when you forgive, you stop living in the past of what you cannot change. Think about this. Think about your past. What can you really change about your past? Nothing. Now we can, through counseling, through marriage counseling, through trauma counseling, we literally can go in and rewire your in ways to experience those emotions and those those thoughts differently, in less toxic ways and start your to bleed out. Draw out the pain that is wired in your body and widen your heart so that you’re not having such huge triggers are huge reactions and that’s one of the PTSD moves as well is to help people release the trauma that’s associated with the memory.
But you can’t change the past. I mean, no matter what politicians will tell you and what they are doing in the history books today, the Ur denial of the Bass will not change the reality of what happened. But the great news is when you stop living out of the past hurts, then you are free to only respond to what happens in the present with the lessons and the experience that you’ve learned and that you’ve gained because you don’t want to forget those. You can use those to make better decisions, to use that experience as a platform, as a foundation to build a better life on without the extreme cost of those unforgiving, bitter emotions towards your dad, towards somebody that you used to be in relationship with or towards a business partner. I remember one lady came in and we started working on, you know, the issues that she was going through and she talked about a business in town that I knew about all over the radio.
It’s all over TV. And she said, yeah, and she was struggling to pay her counseling hill and she said, you know what really stinks? She used a different word. I said, what? She said, have you heard of such and such? She named the company. And I said, yeah, I think they’re really prominent. Right? And she’s like, yeah, I used to own that. But when we divorced, uh, he took everything and he totally wrote the papers in a way. And I was still in the mode of trusting him and he just took everything. And now I’ve been struggling for money ever since. And he’s living in a, I don’t know, it was Nicholas Nichols Hills Gloria, but, but a mansion, huge house, no worries with money. And this poor single lady had to walk through the process of forgiveness because she could not get the money. She could not change the story from the past, but she certainly could start changing the story of the present in the future by letting go of the past and giving that to God so God can give her the next steps to the future that she wants to create.
So what does that for you think about what it is for you that you need to let go? Is it a previous job? Is that the fact that you got fired from somewhere that somebody else got a promotion over you, that you got cut from. Maybe you are an NFL guy and you got cut from the team or maybe you were cut from a marriage that you wanted to last but your spouse wasn’t committed. Maybe it was one of your kids that you raised as best as you could and they chose to do drugs and now their mind is fried and you’re spending your days trying to figure out how to keep them off the streets and alive without enabling them in the same time. Whatever this is for you, please as I share, put yourself in the position to receive because that’s how you’ll most effectively get the maximum out of what I’m sharing today.
So process, process, process, all the Best Premarital Counseling Oklahoma City feelings and they’re going to come up as we go through this and there might be really intense and if you need to, you might want to come into counseling if you live around here or if you are able to make the commute or call in. Then we can either do consulting or we can do counseling. If you’re in our state and what that looks like is we have a team of Christian counselors that Mary Biblical principles to cutting edge counseling techniques to join you in your story today because I know there’s some of you listening. You said, Sean, there is no way a podcast is going to get me through what I need to get through. I cannot do this alone. I’ve tried, I’ve tried and I cannot do it, so glad that we have a team of therapists that would love to join you and your story.
Just go to New Vision counseling.live. That’s New Vision counseling that live and I’m sharing that now because I want you to note, you don’t have to do this alone. You can schedule an appointment by emailing or by calling in and we can get that set up for you depending on your insurance, depending on your pay cash, depending on your commitment level and willing to prioritize it. We can get you in within a week oftentimes. So just mentioned you listened to the Best Premarital Counseling Oklahoma City podcast, heard it, and that will be a great start to the next phase of your healing journey. All right? I just wanted to say that to make sure you knew you had a place to go if this gets really intense for you. So here’s some steps to forgiveness and I’m going to do this and I’m going to start by using a person that I had saw years ago who was on the other end of an affair and not just one affair, but multiple, multiple, multiple affairs.
And listen, if there’s more than one in fidelity occurrence, if they cheat more than one time, he got to know it’s not about you, it’s about them. And it’s always their fault for cheating. There’s never an exception to that rule ever. Now there’s situations where you put somebody in a position where they’re tempted because you’re not having sex because your marriage is terrible because you’re not communicating. All those factors contribute to the amount of temptation, but the reality is the Best Premarital Counseling Oklahoma City person that cheats is 100% always. And only the one responsible for their choices. So this, this, this poor lady was cheated on multiple, multiple times and she was not only cheated on, she was abused and she was accused of cheating on her husband. Now we’ll call her Joan because Joan of arc was powerful, right? We’ll call her Joan. And Joan came in and she was bitter, angry week, stunted in her gross dungeon in your relationship, stunted in her friendships, done it with being a parent, had these kids to take care of.
And yet Joan was bitter and stuck and needed to forgive and, and had to get over the process of, it’s not fair. It’s not fair. It’s not fair. Why do I have to forgive? He’s got all this money. I’ve got all these kids. I’m in a little house. He’s in a big house. He’s the one that’s mean everybody knows it. Why? Why, why, why, what, man? It took a while to process that out and value her enough to get her to the point where she was able to see something different than through the Lens of red to see through the red of anger. To see through the red of love that God wanted to love her in the median was this process. So first we had to give a voice and that’s what I did. I gave her the power to have a voice, which he did not have in her marriage.
And so I had to ride out the feelings that she was having. I had to write out the Best Premarital Counseling Oklahoma City atrocities that he had done and like he had come back from being out at bars all night and then accused her of the one being the one cheating, waking her up, wanting to have sex and crazy things like that that are completely wrong and sinful. And so first we had to acknowledge, hey, this is wrong. These things that were done, you are wrong. She just wrote it out. Just journalists kept a separate journal just for this. It was her vent journal. And as she did, she understood that she was going to cry, she was going to get angry, she was going to scream, she might need to go exercise, call a friend. It was part of the process of healing. The next is we had to acknowledge her, her depth of hurt and pain, the sadness, the disappointment of losing the dream marriage that every little girl has when they’re little, they used, they used to have it.
They had this ideal of how they’re going to be treated, how a man will be noble and kind and faithful and loving and a great parent. And the reality is something drastically different for this lady. She had agreed that then she had to accept that she was afraid. She was afraid, afraid that she wasn’t gonna make it on her own because he was the, she had a job full time, but she taught and she was master’s level professor, teacher, and she didn’t make much money because you know the Best Premarital Counseling Oklahoma City world’s flip, the NBA players are millionaires and the teachers who should be millionaires are not. So she made very little money compared to him and she was afraid that she would not be able to take care of her kids on such limited seller. Here’s how wrong her situation was. Just another thing to let you know that a lot of people can get through these issues that are completely wrong is, I don’t know, she made 35,000 a year, something like that.
And he was making maybe a couple, two to 300,000 a year and she had to pay him child support because she could not afford a good lawyer and his lawyer dominated, dominated, dominated her and she had to pay him child support because there was a time where he did not have a job but somehow his family, cause they were really well off, was paying for everything just to get her just to, just to get his screws in her a little bit tighter. So she had to forgive this guy and work through the Best Premarital Counseling Oklahoma City fear and then fear that he’d come back and abuser again and that she would be weakened cave in and all these were things that she had to acknowledge and say, man, these are tough and I’ve got to get through these because I don’t want to live in this. And then acknowledge the past, the past behaviors that her parents, her parents, her mom and dad led her to a position of not realizing that she was valuable and beautiful enough to be worthy of true love, to be worthy of being cared for in a way that she was valued and she was chosen and not disregarded and abandoned.
That’s a huge deal guys. That’s a huge deal for her. For you, for me. And then acknowledging some of the issues that she had of why she chose him. F Why that she chose this guy that was awful of why she stayed for you know, a few decades instead of leaving him earlier. Why she just believed his lies and she’s a Christ follower, loved God, but she wanted the marriage to succeed. And that’s part of like looking at her issues of, of starting to identify what needs to change in her and then really just give a voice to hear, given a voice a lot. Cause it’s really important that you are not solid anymore and give a voice to your conscience and begin to tap into maybe the Best Premarital Counseling Oklahoma City unconscious beliefs too that are driving your behaviors and your repeated patterns. But giving a voice to that she didn’t get what she want.
She wanted it a great marriage. She wanted a dad that would fight for the heart of her kids that would Pfeiffer heart, that would pursue her and be pure and faithful. What she got was an abusive verbally, physically, mentally, spiritually man in every way to her and her kids. What she got was drastically different than what she committed to you and so she needed to take that time to verbalize that because that would open the door for the next phase for her, a forgiving of then even after that would be grieving the loss of a dream because she never had that marriage, but she did have the ideal dream that she tried to force into on top of the marriage that she really in real life had. And the Best Premarital Counseling Oklahoma City last thing is choose to let it go through the process of forgiveness. Now, forgiveness is a cold blooded one time decision that you validate every day.
And for a lot of us, it’s been every moment of every day. It felt like, at least at first, whether you get a wristband that reminds you of forgiveness because it’s got a scripture on it, or you get something on your phone that’s a screensaver that reminds you of the faithfulness of God, that, um, if we asked for forgiveness, he is faithful and just to cleanse us and forgive us from all unrighteousness because holding bitterness in our heart, even through this injustice, man, as righteous as it may feel, it’s still sin because the Bible says judgment is God’s not ours. Now that doesn’t mean run wise and we let people take advantage of us, but it’s more of a freedom experience of we’re called to not hold onto the Best Premarital Counseling Oklahoma City judgment. We’re called to not hold onto the things that will hurt us and make us bitter towards them.
So think about that person in your life to go through these steps. And if you haven’t written a letter, go listen to the previous podcasts. If you haven’t taken the time to write out, that would be a great process to go back and listen to those previous podcasts. To do that. And a good start is maybe write out a list of people that you’re holding a grudge against, your you’re not forgiving are currently hurting you and your life. And then on a scale of one to 10 rate, then 10 being they’re the Best Premarital Counseling Oklahoma City most severe offenders, one being, ah, they probably shouldn’t even be on the list and go through and just, you know, for the ones that are like seven and above eight and above you, we’re going to want to write it out and really take your time to get out all the emotions.
And I really give specifics on how to do that in earlier podcasts, like the one right before this, the last, I think four before this and that will help you to practically navigate through and let them go. And you’ll have steps along the way that you can like key in on to do this. Well guys, I hope this was amazingly helpful. And again, if you’re listening to this and you think, I’ve got a friend, this would help. Please share it with them. This is why we do this so that we can get the Best Premarital Counseling Oklahoma City word out, that God can change people’s lives if you simply start taking the steps and follow the principles he’s given us. And for those of you that say, Shawn, this is a great start, like I said before, but I need more. And if you need more, go to New Vision counseling.live.
That’s nuvision counseling dot. L. I. V. E. And in our Edmund Marriage counseling, we do a great job of marrying biblical principles with cutting edge counting techniques to join you in your story. We don’t just sit on the couch, we don’t just listen and take notes. No Way. We jump in there, we help you, we serve you, and we find where God is calling you to move towards. We identify the areas you’re stuck in and then together we invite, God ain’t impractically walked through steps to see you get free. Well guys, thank you so much for listening. I really, really enjoy sharing these resources that we use in counseling to daily see people’s lives changed eternally. And if this was good, please go to Google radius. Greatest on Google, right? New Vision counseling on Google. It helps get the word out, helps draw more attention, and that’s kind of how it works today. So that would mean a lot to me. And until we meet again, create a great day, one decision at a time, talk to you soon.