How To Seek Forgiveness When Relationships Are On The Line: Peder Tellefsdal (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of Peder Tellefsdal’s talk titled “How To Seek Forgiveness When Relationships Are On The Line” at TEDxArendal conference.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

Understanding Responsibility and Actions

None of us want to hurt the people we love. However, we have a tendency to act against our best intentions, and we are not judged by our intentions, we are judged by our actions. We all know deep down that taking responsibility for our actions is the key to long-lasting relationships. But taking responsibility is hard, especially when we know we screwed up. So, how do we do it?

How do we take responsibility for our screw-ups when relationships are on the line? My mom used to call me an all-in kind of kid. I was actually the first person to binge-watch TV. I know that doesn’t sound impressive today, but in Norway in the 1970s, we only had one channel.

Lessons from Family

To be honest, I think I got my all-in nature from my dad. Well, he didn’t binge-watch TV. He did something way more impressive. My dad offered jobs to people who needed a new chance. He opened up our home when refugees moved into our community. He didn’t just believe in doing the right thing, he really did it. My dad was my idol. I wanted to make him proud.

So, 20 years later, I was all-in on my career. I got straight A’s in university and after school, I became a respected political advisor. My dad was proud of me, and I was proud to share my life with him. Outside of work, I was a lead guitar player in a rock band. I was in good shape and popular with the ladies. Life was good. My friends started to call me Party Peder, and I, I was all-in. But over the years, it got all-consuming, all-in on me.

The Downfall of Party Peder

Party Peder started to use other people as means to satisfy his own needs, screwing up work, relationships, and family ties. I came up with excuses for why I was late at work, creating cover stories for my friends. Shame led to lies, lies led to shame. I felt like two different people.

So, when I looked in the mirror, I didn’t recognize the person looking back. It was horrible. I started to despise myself. I was all-in, and I needed a way out.

Seeking Solutions

So, I tried to dull the pain by some of the classic go-to strategies. Self-pity, blaming others, drinking, and partying like there was no tomorrow. But those strategies don’t work because they don’t require you to take responsibility for your actions. And taking responsibility is necessary for change.

But taking responsibility is, well, scary. Because in a world where I am responsible for my own happiness, I am also responsible for my own salvation. Now, I chose the word salvation on purpose, and here’s why. According to a study at the University of Notre Dame, students today don’t know how to frame and think through moral issues because they literally don’t have the words.

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The Language of Morality

Words like virtue, sin, redemption, salvation, and so on have slipped out of common usage. This is the language of morality. But it’s not just students, it’s all of us. The problem isn’t that we’re worse people than we used to be. The problem is that we don’t know how to talk about our inner struggle to others and to ourselves.

Every single one of us has the capacity for good and for evil. Just like Donald Duck with a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other. So, this inner struggle is a basic condition of being human. It’s how we relate to others and understand ourselves. So when we don’t have the words to describe how we feel, it doesn’t mean those feelings are any less real, only less clear.

So, I’ve asked people, what words would you use today instead of virtue, sin, redemption, salvation, and so on? And no one can answer that question. It seems we’ve lost the language of morality, but we didn’t replace it with anything. So if we’re going to take responsibility for our screw-ups, we first need to be able to understand our capacity for evil and articulate our inner struggle to others. We must reclaim the language of morality.

But it’s not enough to merely reclaim the language of morality. You have to use it and practice it on a regular basis. After years of going all-in as Party Peder, I finally cracked. One night I was working late at the office, catching up on work because I’d been partying the night before and couldn’t make it to work on time. Everyone else had gone home hours ago.

It was quiet. I was alone. There was no one around to distract me from myself. I was so full of guilt and self-hatred that I couldn’t handle it anymore. The more I despised myself, the more I would behave like a jerk to others and to myself. The number of drinks increased. The lies multiplied. So where once I was proud to share my life with my dad, now I wanted to hide it from him.

He would be so disappointed in who I had become. So, I picked up the phone. I dialed the number I remembered from an ad. I said, “I don’t know if I’ve come to the right place, but I need help.”

So, I was invited to a support group the very next night, and they encouraged me to seek forgiveness. I had forgotten that asking for forgiveness was an option, and that’s when a stranger in a support group changed my life. He said, “Peder, you’ve spent years developing your capacity for evil. What if instead you used your all-in nature to develop your capacity for good?”

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The Forgiveness Road Trip

I decided to go on a forgiveness road trip.

So, on a piece of paper, I wrote down the names of all the people I’d hurt during my Party Peder phase. I was going to visit each of them in person, take responsibility for my actions, and ask for forgiveness. Finally, I started to own my screw-ups.

Actions speak louder than words. Simply talking about doing the right thing isn’t the same as doing the right thing. And like anything else, doing the right thing takes practice. Everett Worthington is a professor of psychology at Virginia University. He spent his career studying forgiveness. In a conversation, he said to me, “Why don’t we practice the skill of asking for forgiveness when it’s so crucial for maintaining our relationships?”

So, on my forgiveness road trip, I had a lot of conversations, and here’s one that sticks out. I poured out my guilt to my boss. I told him I’d been skipping work. I told him about fake sick leaves and cover stories. And he said, “Well, I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t know what it was. And you didn’t seem like you wanted to talk about it. But now I understand. Obviously, what you have done is not okay, but at least now we can find a way to move forward.”

But we shouldn’t save forgiveness only for the big moments. It’s also for the small moments. A few years ago, I had promised my wife to stay away from candy for some time. So, one afternoon, I was home alone, all-in on my third chocolate bar, and later my wife asked me, “Hi honey, how was your diet today?” And boom, there it was again. The devil and the angel on my shoulders.

“Oh great, honey, all good,” I said. Big deal. Chocolate? What, she doesn’t know won’t hurt her. But then again, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Like this, this is the inner battleground where you decide who you want to be, Peder. Not the big moments, but the small ones. Just like this.

So, after a while, I said to my wife, “Honey, I lied to you. I was really ashamed when you asked me earlier. Can you forgive me?” What we do in small, we do in large. We’ve all heard stories about firefighters who rush into a burning building and come out saving a kid, and we imagine that they became a hero in that moment. But that’s not when they became a hero. They became a hero through years of training. It’s all the small moments, and on the day when it really mattered, the heroic deed was their reflex.

We will never be prepared to do the right thing in the big, important moments if we aren’t consistently practicing in the small, daily moments. Just because you ask for forgiveness doesn’t mean you deserve it. Yeah, that’s right. And when you don’t deserve it, but someone grants you forgiveness anyway, you could get the most beautiful thing in the world. Grace.

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So today, I have a wonderful wife. I have two beautiful kids. Party Peder is long gone, but I am still an all-in kind of guy, and I can be a lot sometimes. I know that my wife loves me because of who I am, but what really binds us together is that I know that she also loves me in spite of who I am.

An old Norwegian woman was once interviewed about the keys to surviving a long marriage. The journalist asked her, “Have you ever considered divorce?” And she said, “No, never divorce, but murder.” Forgiveness doesn’t change the past, but it does change the future. The more authentically I can recognize that I am the person I am, the less I remain the person I was.

On my forgiveness roadtrip, the last person I visited was my dad. As I walked off to the house, I knew exactly how the conversation was going to go. My dad, my idol, was going to be disappointed in me. I needed him to forgive me, but I knew I didn’t deserve it. Instead, my dad commissioned two custom paintings for me, and when he presented them to me, here’s how he described them. “This Peder, this is you rowing alone, facing the darkness, unable to see the light that is in front of the boat. You tried so hard to prove your worth, even though we never needed more proof, and over time we lost the Peder that we used to know.”

And then he said, “This painting symbolizes when you finally stopped rowing. You found yourself. I had longed for you to return to us, and when you laid all the cards on the table, asking for forgiveness, I knew that my son was back.” We need to reclaim the words to describe the inner struggle between good and evil that we all experience. We need to focus less on what we say and more on what we do, and by using the language and practicing it, you open the door to the most valuable of all human experiences: grace. So, own your screw-ups, ask for forgiveness, go all in.