The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness Out of Blame

Pete Walker is a licensed marriage and family psychotherapist with degrees in social work and counseling psychology. He has been working as a counselor, lecturer, writer, and group leader for thirty-five years; and as a trainer, supervisor and consultant of other therapists for twenty years. Pete lives and luxuriates in family life with his wife and nine year old son in the San Francisco Bay Area. He enjoys his art work, gardening, hiking, and reading to his son. Pete also holds certificates in supervision from The California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists and from The Psychotherapy Institute in Berkeley. Pete is a "general practitioner" who specializes in helping adults recovering from growing up in traumatizing families, especially those whose repeated exposure to childhood abuse and/or neglect left them with symptoms of Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD). He has a great deal of recovery from his own CPTSD, and his professional approach is highly enriched by his own forty-year journey of recovering. Pete's articles on a multi-modal approach to treating CPTSD have been published in a number of therapy magazines and websites. His therapeutic approach is eclectic and Relational (Intersubjective). He guides the therapeutic process with values that include empathy, vulnerability, authenticity, and mutuality. Pete's first book, The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness Out Of Blame, has been acclaimed by many therapists, recovery websites, and clients as a powerful, compassionate, and pragmatic tool for guiding recovery.

The price of emotional renunciation is a constant, wasteful expenditure of energy that leaves us depressed and taciturn, imprisoned in the apathy and ennui of the Seen-that-Been-there-Done-that syndrome. When we surrender and soften to our feelings, we reconnect with our inborn vitality, and with the invaluable instinct and intuition that our feelings naturally carry. The Tao of Fully Feeling describes the middle ground of emotional aliveness that lies between emotional deadness and emotional explosiveness. It helps us to soften and relax into our feelings without exiling them or enshrining them. It guides us to be emotionally expressive in benign, intimacy-enhancing ways. The Tao of Fully Feeling teaches us to respond to our painful and potentially disruptive feelings in healthy ways. It illustrates the enriching aspects of the so-called negative emotions, and helps us achieve the emotional flexibility whereby sadness easily mellows into solace, anger unfolds into laughter, fear evolves into excitement, jealousy opens up into appreciation, and blame gives way to forgiveness. The Tao of Fully Feeling refutes the black-and-white notion that blame is never justifiable. It describes safe, non-destructive ways of feeling and expressing blame--ways that ironically enhance our capacity to feel genuine forgiveness. When we authentically forgive our parents, we know what we are forgiving them for, and what specifically was blameworthy about their behavior in the first place. When we forgive before we blame, we risk dragging the full weight of our childhood hurt and anger around forever, like an exhausted backpacker who is too dulled and over-trusting to notice that someone has put a boulder in his/her pack.