0:00

Hello, forgiver. What are you grateful for?

0:03

In today's conversation with Amy Latino, we talk about gratitude and how it

0:09

can relate to forgiveness. Before we go on, I want to just extend a content warning for this episode.

0:16

If you have youngins in the house, please make sure that you listen to this

0:21

episode when they are not around or wear a headset.

0:25

I also want to thank Thank everyone who has been sharing my podcast and listening to it around the world.

0:32

Please go to Apple Podcast and write me a review.

0:36

The more reviews we get, the more we are noticed, and the more we spread the word of forgiveness.

0:43

This is what Uncharted Entrepreneurs stated on May 11th, 2024.

0:50

In our journey through life, there will be a time when we have to say,

0:54

I'm sorry. And there will be times when we have to forgive those who have hurt us.

0:59

Dr. Karen helps us make those times easier.

1:02

I found her episode on who you are is how you forgive fascinating.

1:08

Friends, it's that simple. Two short sentences and your review is complete.

1:15

I look forward to seeing what you have to say about Forgiveness is for You.

1:21

Hello, forgiver. Welcome to the Forgiveness is for You podcast.

1:25

I'm Dr. Karen Silva, forgiveness guide and Catholic mindset coach.

1:29

I've spent 30 years in therapy for sexual, physical, emotional,

1:33

and racial trauma, but therapy could only take me so far.

1:38

I believe that there's freedom in forgiveness, but we cannot do it alone.

1:42

Do you struggle forgiving yourself or others? Are you ashamed of what happened to you in the past?

1:48

Do you harbor unforgiveness toward the adults who are supposed to protect you

1:53

but didn't? Do you resent a whole class of people because you were discriminated against?

1:58

On this podcast, we talk about all things forgiveness, what it is,

2:03

what it's not, and how you can begin to forgive yourself, others, and God.

2:08

Allow me to be your forgiveness guide. Let's begin.

2:12

Hello, forgivers. Today I have with me Amy Latino, a mom, a wife,

2:19

and a generous forgiver.

2:22

I'm so excited to have this conversation with Amy, but Amy, tell us about yourself.

2:30

Thank you so much, Karen. I am so honored to be here and I'm really excited

2:35

about sharing this part of my life with you and with your audience.

2:40

I am a wife to an incredible husband.

2:43

He's rocked my world and I his.

2:47

We have six beautiful children this side of heaven, three in heaven,

2:51

so nine children all together.

2:54

I'm a homeschooling mom and an entrepreneur.

2:57

I I also have a business on coaching for wholeness and health for women who

3:02

struggle with eating disorders and yo-yo dieting and accepting themselves for

3:09

where they are right now, but also wanting to be a better person in the future.

3:13

So I coach women into that type of mentality and that type of health as well.

3:18

So that's what I do. That's wonderful. Wonderful. You reached out to me because you believe that you have this, a compelling story.

3:27

And I want to hear so much more about your story. Can you tell us more?

3:31

Sure. Sure. So growing up, you know, back in the eighties, and this is definitely

3:36

one of those stories of daddy issues that I've grown up with.

3:40

I grew up with a dad who had four girls and one boy that that's the,

3:45

the order in which we were me being the last girl.

3:50

So it was the baby girl. I was told growing up pretty headstrong.

3:54

So I clashed a lot with him because he was pretty headstrong as well,

3:59

but he also came from a very, very wounded background himself.

4:03

He, when he was little, I think at the age of five, he saw his mother die right in front of him.

4:09

Like she just fell on the, yeah. So, um.

4:13

Those issues never resolve. How does a five-year-old process that?

4:17

He brought that into his teenage years, he brought that into his adult years,

4:22

and he brought that into his parenting. Having girls was hard for him.

4:28

There was never a connect. There was never a, you know, I usually tell,

4:33

like, he passed away in 2003 of melanoma cancer.

4:36

And when people asked me about him, I was like, well, our relationship was dead long before he had died.

4:42

There was just nothing there. There was a lot of tension. There was a lot of

4:46

hurt. A lot of words said.

4:48

Yeah, more of, like, the emotional abuse and more the emotional disconnect that we had.

4:55

And it hit, like, a pinnacle point, too. when I was 23, I was violated by a

5:01

man and he couldn't deal with that. He didn't even talk to me.

5:04

And I didn't need a wounded father then. I needed a father.

5:08

And he couldn't provide that for me. And all these years, and especially since

5:13

he had passed away, there was a desire for me to be, I was like, I want to forgive him.

5:20

I want to forgive him. I just don't know how. And so from 2003,

5:23

I want to say till 2022, I had the intention to forgive.

5:28

But every time I thought of the conversations we had or the lack of fathering

5:35

that I had and all of these other issues, I was like, I couldn't.

5:40

I was like, gosh, what's wrong with me?

5:43

Why can't I forgive him? What is wrong with me? So I was searching and searching.

5:47

It was that April 2nd of 2022 that I was sitting down doing my journaling in the morning.

5:54

And, you know, I was just like, because I haven't gratitude journal.

5:58

I was writing out my journal and I was like, okay, well, today's April 2nd. Thank you for coffee.

6:04

Thank you for my husband. Wait a minute. It's April 2nd. Would have been my dad's 80th birthday.

6:11

Okay. Thank you for my dad. And Karen, that's when it hit. A floodgate of just tears started.

6:19

I'm probably going to get emotional now. Just flowed from me. And this overwhelming sense of forgiveness and peace just

6:32

descended upon me like nobody's business.

6:36

And I was just crying because it occurred to me, it hit me.

6:41

Had it not been for my dad who had said yes to my mom or vice versa,

6:47

my mom saying yes to my dad in the act of conceiving me, I would have never,

6:51

ever have met my husband and I would have never have had my children.

6:56

I would have never have, you know, be living in Italy. I would,

7:00

all of these things culminated on this one gratitude of being thankful for the man who gave me life.

7:08

And it was so powerful and so moving.

7:13

That it wasn't so much forgiveness that was the key to set me free,

7:18

but the gift of gratitude that set me free.

7:21

So that was what I really wanted to share with you.

7:25

And I love sharing that particular story, hoping that it will be like,

7:30

wait a minute, there's gratitude in everything.

7:35

And that forgiveness is that choice to forgive someone, not so much that feeling.

7:40

Yes, forgiveness is a choice. It is a decision that we make.

7:44

What I want to ask you here is in the 20 so years that you had this desire to forgive,

7:53

what were your thoughts about your relationship with your dad that were holding

8:00

you back from making that decision to forgive? give?

8:04

It was the anger that I was holding against him, just not being that dad that I needed.

8:11

And especially at that pivotal moment of my time of being raped,

8:18

it was me being angry at him.

8:21

He literally turned his back on me and just left the room.

8:24

Now, what he was thinking, I have no idea. I don't know his heart.

8:28

But again, I didn't need a wounded dad at that point. I needed a father.

8:32

I needed a man to step up to the plate and to do what he needed to do.

8:38

Hug me, hold me, tell me it was okay. Tell me, you know, I'll be okay or whatever.

8:43

I needed that reassurance that my sexuality shouldn't have been violated like that.

8:50

So there's a lot of anger. Yes.

8:53

And anger is a feeling, but being in that is a thought.

8:58

And that's what I'm trying to comment here is

9:01

what was that thought the thought was

9:05

you're really thinking about thought it was

9:08

abandonment i thought i was being abandoned yeah i'm

9:12

being abandoned yes and then

9:16

from there what did you do with that anger because we have the thought and then

9:21

we have this emotion and this person doesn't have the capacity right to to give

9:26

us what we need in that moment right So what did you do with that in your relationship

9:31

with your dad? What did you do? We know he walked away.

9:36

Yeah. What did you do? Well, I mean, in that thought of abandonment,

9:42

it was just a matter of just crying even more and crying.

9:47

You know, my mom trying to soothe it over with, oh, well, you know,

9:51

he or give excuses of which just my anger just build towards him.

9:57

I was a lot more snappier towards him. And he lost my respect as, you know, somebody who could step up to the plate.

10:07

So there was you know definitely a

10:10

pushback from me or is like hey you

10:15

know that wasn't that wasn't okay to do that i mean i never voiced that part

10:19

i didn't know how to actually but when i look back on it now it was definitely

10:25

a an act of in acting out because i was still relatively i mean i was still relatively young, 22,

10:32

23, about that time. It's a tender age for us, 22, 23. It's a tender age.

10:39

People, I think, expect us to be quote-unquote adults at that age,

10:44

but it really is a very tender age because we're making so many important decisions about our future.

10:52

I believe that as As women, especially, you know, in college for a lot of us,

10:59

or even if we're not in college, that is a very vulnerable time, a very uncertain time.

11:06

And if we've had an experience where we did not feel that connection,

11:14

that safety, that belonging in our home from someone like a parent or a caregiver,

11:20

then we take that with us. And I can see that playing out in your story that, you know,

11:28

you were, you experienced what you thought was this betrayal by your father

11:33

in that he didn't step up to the plate.

11:35

Yeah. And that has made me a lot more conscious in my parenting while I still

11:40

fall short in many other different ways.

11:43

One of the things is it brings me back to, okay, how does this child need me right now? out.

11:50

It's interesting because some of the things like when my children come to me

11:53

with some certain problems that they're having with friends or with,

11:57

with emotions that they have, or no more, more like friends,

12:00

it's, it's more of a social thing for them. If they come to me with the problems, you know, I'm like, all right,

12:04

do you want me to just listen? Do you want me to listen and have advice? Or do you want me to give advice?

12:10

Or do you need me to run somebody over? Because I I can do that for you.

12:15

It gives them that safety that I'm there. I'm here.

12:19

I'm going to hear you out and let me know what you need.

12:23

Yes. So I want to go back to this thought. You had this thought, I'm being abandoned.

12:30

You have this anger and then you actually create more distance by withdrawing, not expressing.

12:37

And in coaching, in mindset coaching, what we look at is how we actually create

12:43

what we don't want by our beliefs that we form around the relationship that

12:49

we have with this person. And what I'm seeing here is an adult who was wounded as a five-year-old child.

12:56

So if you look at this generationally, this is a generational wound that you

13:03

carried forward, and yet you are now breaking. You're breaking the pattern.

13:10

Of being available to your child. Yeah.

13:14

And again, if we're talking about gifts of gratitude and gifts of points in

13:19

our life, I could look at that and say, well, my dad was still a jerk and da-da-da.

13:24

But I look at it now and I say, wow, that was a gift. Thank you.

13:27

Thank you for doing what you couldn't do so I can do it, so I can see it.

13:34

And it is. One of my other sisters, because my dad had. He did not have a good

13:40

relationship with any of us girls. With my oldest sister, actually, she had the hardest time and she's still kind of in that mindset.

13:49

At least the last time I talked to her the last couple of years is dad's a jerk and blah, blah, blah.

13:55

Now with my other oldest sister, she actually came to the realization well within

14:02

her own, I think, later 20s.

14:06

She had forgiven dad for his just not being, you know, he was only a body at the house.

14:13

And that's pretty much it. There was just nothing else given from him.

14:18

What happens in families is we want to protect ourselves.

14:23

And so we form these beliefs around who that person is, we can actually create

14:30

coping mechanisms that help us to deal with that person based on those beliefs, right?

14:37

And in that way, we create a bubble within which we can be safe.

14:42

So if I say, I want nothing to do with you because you're being a jerk,

14:48

I'm actually protecting myself here versus I'm really curious why you're behaving like a jerk. Right.

14:56

What is it that made that piece of you be broken?

15:01

And if we drill way back and if you try to zoom what I call zoom out and see

15:08

the whole story instead of just this tiny piece.

15:12

You're going to be able to start filling in those blanks.

15:17

Oh, here is a person who watched a woman die in front of his eyes.

15:23

Right. An instant abandonment that is not his, that he takes on as,

15:29

oh my gosh, could it be something that I've done?

15:33

What are all the thoughts that are going through his mind? And I don't ever

15:37

want to do that to anybody else. Right, right. And it's interesting too, because like, When his mom did pass

15:44

away, apparently my grandfather, now I never knew any of them.

15:48

They had all passed away by the time I was born.

15:50

But his father had married the wicked stepmother of the East.

15:56

She was locking him in closets, throwing rocks at his head, whipping him with sticks.

16:01

There was a lot of abuse in his family. He never went to that extreme with us

16:06

as far as sticks or anything like that. I mean, we got spanking,

16:10

but it wasn't like abuse, abuse, you know.

16:14

I don't know how else to say that.

16:17

Yes, I understand. He didn't go to that degree of being physically violent with

16:23

you, but there was neglect, distance, emotional neglect is what I'm hearing you say.

16:31

Yeah, and also emotional abuse, you know, calling names and being mean.

16:37

He was mean. So some of us, when we are traumatized, the only way we know how

16:42

to deal with that is to continue the pattern.

16:46

Some of us, like you now, can see the pattern and say, I don't want that. That's not for me.

16:54

And so for you, for 20 years, you sat with this pattern, wrestling with this pattern.

17:00

I mean, I really want to forgive this man.

17:04

I don't know how. I don't know what to do. And with your gratitude practice,

17:09

and it's interesting how this episode is turning into an episode about gratitude

17:14

because I've been contemplating this myself lately.

17:19

How in this gratitude for the gift of life,

17:23

how does that gratitude for just the gift of life help you to release your father

17:32

from his responsibility as a daddy? Mm-hmm.

17:36

That it's really difficult to put in

17:39

words how it how I just landed in that

17:43

position because had my father

17:46

been physically there there would have been a

17:49

lot of arms wrapped around him like just I would have held him and yeah I would

17:56

have held him and told him that I loved him and that he did the best that he

18:00

could with what he had which wasn't much but he still gave me life And that

18:06

I will be forever grateful for.

18:08

It really is a, it was a powerful, it was, it was so powerful. It was handable.

18:13

I mean, I called my mama and I was just bawling.

18:17

I'm like, mom, I can't believe this, you know, and it was just the overwhelming

18:22

sense of letting go of everything and anything and that part.

18:27

And, you know, you can attest it to Christ and how He is with us, just letting it go.

18:34

You know, in confession, just letting that go, that unraveling of our own shortcomings

18:40

and our own sins, you know. So it just makes me go, oh, my goodness.

18:47

It makes you go to church on all fours and just thank you, Jesus,

18:53

that prostrate, that, oh, gosh, thank you for that gift to be able to free my own dad.

19:01

In his death, there hasn't been a mass that I have never given up for my dad

19:06

during the consecration.

19:09

So, you know, was that a release from purgatory?

19:12

I don't know. Was that, I don't know. It was so weird.

19:17

It was one of those spiritual weird moments where you're like, wow, that was powerful.

19:22

Yes, yes. A gift, right? A gift from the Holy Spirit. So I want to just stop

19:27

here and explain because we're doing some Catholic speak here.

19:31

So I just want to explain that in Catholicism, we refer to our service or our mass as the Eucharist.

19:42

And the Eucharist, the word Eucharist means Thanksgiving.

19:47

And at every mass, we believe that Christ is truly present there in the wine and the bread.

19:54

And we literally can surrender whatever it is in our hearts to Christ at that

20:04

moment where the priest consecrates the bread and the wine and they become to us the body, blood,

20:13

soul, and divinity of Jesus Christ.

20:16

And so what Amy is saying here is that since her father died,

20:21

she has been bringing this relationship, that she had with him.

20:26

This man who abused her, who was unjust towards her and her sisters,

20:33

she brings him to Christ.

20:35

And that is an offer, an offer of thanksgiving. It's a sacrifice.

20:42

And it's beautiful. Your thoughts, Amy? Oh my gosh, that was beautiful. Yes.

20:47

That's exactly what I've been doing ever since he had passed away.

20:53

So there was that active part that I had, that I was given the grace to say,

21:00

Jesus, I offer my dad and I offer my sister Lynn because she had passed away too.

21:05

So I go through this whole litany of people that have passed away that I give

21:09

to our Lord, being able to have a grace to be able to pray for him rather than staying in that anger.

21:15

And honestly, if I look back at it now, oh, that's such a feeling of,

21:21

I don't like that, to sit in that anger, because it doesn't do anything for

21:25

anyone, but just makes us bitter and resentful.

21:27

So seeking that out, I felt was a gift in of itself, was a grace from God,

21:34

from the Holy Spirit, just to be able to seek out the will of the Father in

21:39

light of that forgiveness. Again, it wasn't so much that forgiveness that I had, it was more the gratitude

21:45

that set me free. Yes. Yeah.

21:48

And I was able to then say, wow, that's beautiful.

21:53

And that's forgiveness now, you know, that kind of a snowball effect.

21:57

That's beautiful. I want to go back to what happened to you.

22:01

And this is something I think that happens when we are being treated very unjustly

22:08

by someone outside of our family, which in your case,

22:12

you had something that happened to you as a 22-year-old, 23-year-old.

22:16

And we take this event, and instead of focusing on the actual perpetrator in

22:23

that event, we find the person actually who we are safest to blame,

22:29

and we blame that person. You know, interestingly enough, I had forgiven my perpetrator before I had forgiven

22:37

my dad, now that you say that. Yes. I want to probe that a little bit. Why was it easier for you to go there?

22:45

Because I didn't hold a relationship with that other person.

22:49

And I held on while I had a relationship with my dad. And I knew him. You're right.

22:54

And it's like that. It's like our feelings. We're comfortable in what we know. And I knew my dad.

23:01

So it was so much easier to hold on to the pain and the angst and the resentment

23:06

and the hurt and the blame because I knew him.

23:10

Whereas the other person, I didn't know him and I'm not justifying anything

23:14

at all, but I don't know what his life was like.

23:16

And so for me, I want to say, I don't know, I would say within seven to 10 years

23:22

of that whole thing playing out, there was definitely that, okay,

23:28

I can definitely forgive him. And part of the reason why is because I was a little wild child during that

23:34

18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23-year-old partygoer.

23:39

And when that had happened, it was such a pivotal moment of my life that I reverted

23:46

back to my Catholic roots.

23:48

And I went back to adoration. I went back to the church. I went back to her

23:52

sacraments. I started questioning, who is this Jesus really?

23:55

And 10 years forward, I would be like, because people don't understand it coming

24:01

from the perspective of one who has been in the position of being raped and then being able to live,

24:07

but also to be able to say, wow, if that hadn't happened, I know that Jesus

24:12

would never want me to go through it again. That hadn't happened again, I wouldn't have met my husband.

24:18

I wouldn't have, which is he's an incredible man. Like I said earlier,

24:22

I wouldn't have had my children. I wouldn't have like all the events had that had happened, made me the person

24:29

I am today. And would I change it? No.

24:32

So you could see how this event was your wake up moment.

24:37

It was definitely a wake up. It was a result of the choices that I was making.

24:42

So What do you want to say to the people who say, but it wasn't your fault at all?

24:49

You don't have any culpability.

24:51

It's never a woman's fault that she gets raped.

24:55

I think every situation is very different. You know, if a woman was walking

24:59

down the street and all of a sudden she got raped, yeah, I mean,

25:01

no, that would be like saying, oh, gosh, I don't know.

25:05

You got up, went down the street, got onto an airplane, and the airplane went

25:09

down. Like, those were the choices that you made. So that's why the airplane, no.

25:13

However, in my situation, I was putting myself in dangerous situations.

25:18

I was allowing myself to be taken advantage of and looking for love.

25:24

I mean, because I wasn't getting it. I didn't get it from my dad.

25:28

You know, those, all the issues that I had as a young, impressionable girl,

25:33

I had to look a certain way. I had to act a certain way for me and my situation. Hmm.

25:39

I'm not saying I deserved it. That's not what I'm saying at all.

25:42

I just put myself in a very dangerous situation.

25:45

If you're going to walk on a train track and you don't hear the train coming,

25:49

like, hey, don't walk on train tracks. Yeah. And these are very, very hard sayings. I've wrestled with this myself

25:57

and I don't think it's black and white.

26:00

I think that there's such a range here, right?

26:03

That we each make our own decisions.

26:07

And we're so unique. You know, it goes back to that kind of comparison.

26:11

Let's not even do that. Every person is so different.

26:16

And how I responded to it, how I walked my path through it, how I healed from it is going to be very,

26:22

very different from somebody who had a similar experience because their upbringing

26:29

was different. Their genetic makeup is different.

26:32

Their thoughts and their beliefs surrounded by environment is different.

26:36

Yes. And their forgiveness. I always talk about how each person comes to this

26:43

place of deciding to forgive in a different way.

26:46

That's where I am. What insights or hope can you give to those of us who were

26:53

born into families where one or both parents didn't give us what we needed?

26:59

A lot of that falls back to that. Every person is unique and very different.

27:03

And even within the family dynamic, I never stopped pursuing forgiveness for

27:10

the sole purpose of, it sounds selfish, but freeing myself from just the anger that I was holding.

27:17

That would be the one thing is never stop pursuing forgiveness.

27:21

And again, this podcast is called Forgiveness Is For You, and it is to free ourselves, right?

27:28

Because the opportunity for criminal justice might present itself.

27:33

For example, if you were in a position where you could press a charge against

27:39

the person who raped you, I think that that should definitely be pursued at all costs.

27:45

And I did. And at the time, the law was a he said, she said issue.

27:49

And I couldn't, they didn't want me to pursue it.

27:52

So then there's another layer of forgiveness, right, against a system.

27:57

Yeah. Maybe I need to work on that one. I never really thought of that.

28:00

Yes yes we we

28:03

tend to think about forgiveness as a one-on-one thing

28:06

or or it's me against my family but we live in systems and oftentimes it's the

28:14

system that creates the injustice yeah so then we have to look at the event

28:21

through the through the lens of that injustice that is created in the system.

28:26

And even then, as an individual, it's very difficult to change the system by ourselves.

28:33

You're right. And then we have to work through a process yet again of how do

28:38

I forgive when it's a systematic problem?

28:43

And that's for me, growing up in a system of political terror,

28:47

working Working through a process of racism has been a lifetime of work.

28:54

How do you look at the entire system? Do you identify individuals in that system

29:01

that you interacted with that you now have to go one by one and go,

29:05

can I forgive this person? Or do you globally think of the system and go, well, I'm powerless against this system.

29:14

Do I want to go on? Do I want to hold on to the anger that I feel towards it or am I ready to let go?

29:22

Yeah. I never really thought of the system as something that I needed to forgive,

29:27

but I understand your point. Definitely. I remember sitting there, you know, and the lawyers and or the prosecutors

29:34

were across the table from me just kind of explaining about what what was going to happen.

29:38

And so I remember being angry.

29:41

They were like, oh, you know, sucks being you kind of thing,

29:44

which I think the laws are different. Yes.

29:47

And thank goodness for thank goodness.

29:50

DNA evidence. Now we can collect DNA evidence and there's so much more we can do.

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Yeah yeah he definitely had the dna evidence they

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they had all the dna evidence it was just a

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matter of whether or not he had drugged me so that was kind of the question

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like they didn't know and but you know it's also i think we've also swung to

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the other side of the pendulum where you know a woman's like wow he looked at

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me that's right you know it's like no and i know i'm hyperbole this,

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but I think we've now swung over to the other side in the local sphere of that Me Too movement.

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Not to say that there wasn't truth to some of that, but there was also some

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women who are out there that are manipulative too.

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So we're just a broken society of broken people that need Jesus.

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Amy, is there anything else that you want to share with the listeners that we haven't touched on yet.

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That sometimes in that pursuit forgiveness, you might find it in something else such as gratitude.

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Maybe you'll find it in a different way to just never stop pursuing forgiveness,

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no matter how much it hurts. That's a beautiful message to end this conversation with.

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Friends, I hope that you found something to take away from this conversation.

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And until next time, Much love.

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Or unforgiveness toward the adults who are supposed to protect you but didn't?

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Do you resent a whole class of people because you were discriminated against?

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On this podcast, we talk about all things forgiveness, what it is,

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what it's not, and how you can begin to forgive yourself, others, and God.

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Allow me to be your forgiveness guide. Let's begin.