The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness Out of Blame, has been acclaimed by many therapists and clients as a powerful, compassionate and pragmatic tool for guiding recovery. Alice Miller, author of The Drama of the Gifted Child, wrote: “Pete Walker wrote a book about his own recovery from emotional numbness. The author passionately explores as thoroughly as possible the role of emotions in human life. The result is not only a moving, honest recount but also an informative guide for people who want to become more aware of their buried feelings. Walker’s well explained concept of ‘reparenting’ will help them go through this fascinating process in a safe, protected way.” The Tao of fully feeling: Harvesting forgiveness out of blame by Pete Walker – eBook Details Whether or not we unconsciously act our blame through scapegoating, most of us unfairly blame ourselves for the deficits we suffer from poor parenting. We scapegoat ourselves rather than consider that our parents might have seriously injured us, especially since complaining about bad parenting is one of our culture's ultimate taboos" (12). An adult child can be habituated to both hypervigilance and dissociation. These defenses coexist in the survivor whose body is hypervigilantly tense and contracted, but whose awareness is dissociated and not preoccupied with careful watching" (124). The imaginative reconstruction of our parents' childhoods sometimes stimulates us to grieve for their losses. We may experience a very profound healing by letting ourselves cry for them, and by allowing ourselves to feel angry about how their parents hurt them. This is sometimes difficult to do because many of us had grandparents who were kind to us in a way they never were with our parents.... Most of us hold a part of our parents' grief about their childhood abandonment. When we mournfully protest our mom and dad's unfair suffering, we are also championing the us in them that lost so much because of grandma and grandpa's poor parenting. When we grieve deeply for our parents, this feeling of sorrow for them sometimes expands into genuine feelings of forgiveness" (222-3). Others of us, however, are only able to feel forgiveness for our parents from a distance. Thus, while our grief work may bring us powerful feelings of forgiveness, it may still be impossible to feel relaxed or safe around our parents" (229).

The unvented pain of the past accumulates in layers in the unconscious. In this layering, memories of abuse and neglect appear to be sandwiched in between layers of grief. Each strata of painful memories emerges gradually, although not necessarily chronologically, over time" (105) Pete's first book, The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness Out of Blame, is now also an audio book. It has been acclaimed by many therapists and clients as a powerful, compassionate and pragmatic tool for guiding recovery. Alice Miller, author of The Drama of the Gifted Child, wrote: "Pete Walker wrote a book about his own recovery from emotional numbness. The author passionately explores as thoroughly as possible the role of emotions in human life. The result is not only a moving, honest recount but also an informative guide for people who want to become more aware of their buried feelings. Walker's well explained concept of 'reparenting' will help them go through this fascinating process in a safe, protected way."

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If we do not recognize the exact nature of our parents' transgressions, we risk tolerating similar kinds of hurtfulness in the present. Children who are not allowed to blame their parents' bad behavior often become adults who do not protect themselves from abuse" (13).

During my years of therapy, I have done the sorts that "expected" you to forgive parents ...but I never could, leaving me in a sea of guilt, assuming I am a bad person. The Toa of Fully Feeling explains that forgiveness only occurs when one places blame where it is due and feels the anger and loss around that. It reminds me that "taking the blame", as victims are trained to do (and is often implied in premature forgiveness practices) exacerbates the trauma. I am learning to place the blame where it is due and not to take the blame for anything that was/is not mine to take - I see it as part of the idea Brene Brown talks about of owning my story completely... if you take the blame for something not yours to own, you make your story a lie! It seems one may well harvest forgiveness out of blame. 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. have yet to acquire the full emotional, relational, and self-expressive capacities of mature adults.Most individuals, who choose or are coerced into only identifying with "positive" feelings, usually wind up in an emotionally lifeless middle ground - bland, deadened, and dissociated in an unemotional "no-man's-land." Moreover, when an individual tries to hold onto a preferred feeling for longer than its actual tenure, s/he often appears as unnatural and phony as ersatz grass or plastic flowers. If instead, s/he learns to surrender willingly to the normal human experience that: good feelings always ebb and flow, s/he will eventually be graced with a growing ability to renew the self in the vital waters of emotional flexibility.