Faith and Forgiveness in Family: Start With Willingness
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- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
What if healing in your family doesn’t start with getting someone else to finally understand you but with a small internal shift: a willingness to hold the story differently?
In this episode of The Power of Family, Terry Willis and Dr. Sonia Toledo sit down with Reverend Melissa who is a spiritual life coach, interfaith minister, and spiritual leader of Rockland Centers for Spiritual Living in New York, to talk about faith, forgiveness, and what it really takes to heal family relationships. Not in a preachy way. Not as a religious argument. But as an honest conversation about patterns, pain, and the possibility of something new.
As host, Terry Willis grounds the conversation in the heart of The Power of Family: creating spaces where families can bridge generational gaps without imposing beliefs, fixing others, or repeating inherited patterns. Throughout the episode, Terry returns to a central question: how do we offer tools for healing while first doing the work within ourselves?
Rev. Melissa offers a grounding truth early on: faith isn’t only about religion. It can be the willingness to step out of what has been the condition, the story, the experience and take a first step toward what can be.
Faith as a Practice of Integrity and Choice
Dr. Sonia asks a question many families are quietly asking right now: how does faith play a role in family especially today?
Rev. Melissa shares how her relationship with faith changed across generations. She grew up in a religious environment shaped by fear and judgment where “God was watching” meant constant anxiety. Her daughters’ experience looked different. They didn’t grow up in church, but they grew up watching what their parents practiced: clarity about what they wanted to create, trust in their effort, and faith in themselves.
That’s where the conversation widens. Faith isn’t only something outside of you, as if someone is waving a magic wand. Rev. Melissa reframes it as something inside of you: faith in yourself, faith in your capacity to choose, faith in your ability to create your life and your relationships.
And that connects directly to family life, because so much of parenting and caregiving is tested when children make choices we don’t like, when they “pivot” in ways that challenge our preferences or our fears. It’s easy to slip into judgment, control, or the old scripts many of us inherited.
This is where Rev. Melissa’s definition becomes practical: faith is something you cultivate within yourself, and it shows up in the choices you make about how you hold your family within you.
Forgiveness Begins With the Relationship You Have With Yourself
When the topic shifts to forgiveness, Rev. Melissa doesn’t rush past pain. She names what many people feel but don’t always say out loud: some families start from a place of “I could never forgive them,” because the hurt is real and deep.
Her approach starts with the inner life. She often works with adults carrying pain, adult children, parents, family members who sense their past is still shaping their present, but aren’t sure what to do with it.
Before forgiveness becomes a conversation about someone else, she focuses on the foundational relationship: the one you have with yourself.
She asks people to engage themselves from a different starting point, not as broken, not as unworthy, not as unlovable but as already whole, already worthy, already complete. The work is learning how to return to that truth, especially when trauma and disappointment have taught your body to expect the worst.
As Dr. Sonia reflects, holding onto unforgiveness can poison the one who’s carrying it. The discussion returns again and again to a central point: healing is exhausting when you believe it starts “out there.” When you begin within, something changes. You gain freedom. You gain agency. You begin to feel what forgiveness might actually feel like in your body.
And for many people, that’s the missing link because we know what pain feels like. We know what resentment feels like. But we haven’t practiced the feeling of release.
“I Come to You in Peace and You Come to Me in War”
Rev. Melissa shares a moment with her daughter that stopped her in her tracks and opened a door to growth.
Her daughter needed gym clothes washed, and the request came late. Rev. Melissa responded the way many parents do: reminding her child that she had already warned her not to wait until the last minute. But her daughter responded with startling clarity:
She told her mother, “I come to you in peace and you come to me in war.”
It wasn’t the words. It wasn’t even yelling. It was tone.
Rev. Melissa stepped away, took a pause, and returned with a question: What was it about my engagement with you that made you feel that way? That pause mattered. Because in families, the default response is often defensiveness. We argue our case. We gather evidence. We pull out the past. We try to win.
Instead, she modeled something else: reflection, repair, and responsibility.
And the lesson was even deeper than laundry or parenting technique. It was about her. It was a reminder that family interactions often reveal what still needs healing inside of us. When we do that inner work, we stop blaming the moment and start listening to what the moment is showing us.
Bridging Generations Without Fixing Each Other
Terry brings the conversation back to a powerful and often overlooked truth: we cannot heal our families by trying to fix one another. He reflects on how often parenting and caregiving become an attempt to correct in our children what we were never able to resolve in ourselves.
He names this as the missing step in many family dynamics, the assumption that change happens outwardly, rather than internally. When adults carry unresolved resentment, victimhood, or unmet needs, those emotions shape how they show up with both their children and their parents. True connection, Terry emphasizes, begins when we are willing to look inward before asking anyone else to change.
This perspective reframes generational healing not as control or correction, but as self-responsibility. When adults commit to their own emotional growth, they create space for healthier, more honest relationships across generations.
Pain Points Families Carry in Faith, Forgiveness, and Family
If you’ve ever felt stuck in a family pattern you can’t explain, this episode puts language to it.
Families struggle when:
Old hurts keep resurfacing, even after years have passed
Conversations turn into defensiveness, judgment, or bringing up the past
You feel responsible for everyone, and resentful at the same time
You relate to a parent, sibling, or child from a younger version of yourself
You want closeness, but you don’t know how to get to the table without falling back into pain
You’re trying to help your children, while still carrying your own unresolved wounds
Dr. Sonia speaks openly about blaming her mother for childhood experiences, and how healing began when she chose to become “a good daughter regardless,” not because the past disappeared but because she decided to work on herself. That shift, away from control and toward self-work, becomes a thread through the entire conversation.
Key Takeaways You Can Apply Right Now
Here are a few lessons from the episode that families can reflect on and practice immediately:
Start with willingness, not perfection. If “faith” carries heavy religious weight for you, substitute it with willingness: I am willing to see this differently.
Come together with yourself first. Before you try to repair a relationship, build the relationship within you, the one rooted in worthiness, safety, and enoughness.
Use writing as an entry point. Stream-of-consciousness journaling is a simple way to release what’s looping in your mind and uncover deeper layers beneath the story you keep repeating.
Notice who you become in certain relationships. Ask yourself: Am I showing up as my adult self, or as my 10-year-old self? Awareness changes how you respond.
Create non-negotiable practices that support your healing. That might look like journaling, being still for five minutes, listening to your body, or spending time in nature, practices that bring you back to yourself.
Episode Summary
In this conversation, Rev. Melissa, Terry Willis, and Dr. Sonia Toledo explore how family healing begins with inner faith defined as willingness and how forgiveness becomes possible when we start with ourselves. Through real stories and practical tools, they show how changing your relationship with you can shift the way you relate to everyone you love.
A Warm Invitation to Listen
If you’re carrying a family story that still hurts, or if you’re ready to stop repeating patterns you didn’t choose, this episode offers a gentle place to begin.
Listen to the full conversation on The Power of Family.
Subscribe so you don’t miss future episodes, and share this with someone who’s trying, quietly, sincerely to heal their family from the inside out.
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