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July 9, 2025 - Epoch Times
09:36
Adam Coleman explains the importance of forgiveness in the context of child abuse and abandonment
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We also have to look at the word forgiveness, or actually the meaning of forgiveness, because forgiving means for you to release your anger and animosity, right?
The forgiveness is for the person who is victimized, it's not for the person who's the perpetrator looking for some sort of clemency or something like that.
So ultimately, when I say I forgive my father, I forgive my father so I let go my anger, my depression, my feeling of rejection to let all that stuff go so I don't have anything dragging me back and I can move forward in my life.
And so if you were abused in some particular way, is it beneficial to hold on to anger, that feeling when you were a child that was abused?
Is it beneficial to hold on to that or is it beneficial to release it?
And so the forgiveness is to release that, right?
It's not to excuse their behavior.
It's not to rationalize their behavior, say it was fine.
Now from there, if they want to get into a new relationship with that parent despite them abusing them, then that's purely up to them.
In those situations, I would never say, no, you must take Ben back or anything like that.
These are very difficult extenuating circumstances.
So I would purely leave that up to the person who was victimized.
The forgiveness, the core of it, is for the person who was victimized.
Whether you choose to let the person who victimized you know this is completely up to you.
But I do think that forgiveness is the starting point if there is going to be some sort of reunification, abuse or not abuse.
Forgiveness is at the core of it.
You talk a lot about people or children recreating the trauma they see from their parents or their people in their lives.
And then there's this sort of chain.
And the idea is to break that chain.
And that makes an incredible sense to me.
There are also, you know, what we now call people with antisocial personality disorder.
It's not an insignificant portion of the population.
And that particular, those people get some sort of weird benefit from traumatizing people actively.
What about, how do those types of people factor in?
They're not that way because someone traumatized them necessarily.
Well, I'm not a psychologist.
We'll say, let's say, someone who's a legit narcissist, right?
That stems from insecurity.
And more often than not, that stems from childhood insecurity.
But it just gets exaggerated as they get older.
They don't believe anyone will look out for them.
And so they can't trust anyone.
They are highly insecure about anyone else.
So if you're insecure, it's going to come out in a particular way.
And the way that, specifically for narcissists, they lash out when you hurt their image.
So they usually are these type of people who want to get you before you get them because they're highly afraid of being vulnerable.
So one area that you seem to focus on in particular, even though you yourself were not in that setup, is the foster care system and significantly higher, I guess, rates of this abandonment or abuse or these chains of abuse being formed being in that system.
Someone recently has been talking to me about this.
I've just been learning about the levels.
I'm more familiar with incredible success stories of the foster care system, which there's some kind of unbelievable ones.
But actually, there's some huge, huge problems.
In some cases, people will bring more children in because there's a financial dimension to it and they don't actually care for the kids as much.
And so there are these success stories, but there's also a lot of trauma, generational trauma created.
So tell me about that.
And you have actually a specific interview that you decide, like this wasn't your experience, but you decided to feature it in your book.
Yeah.
And you're absolutely right.
When it comes to the foster care system, it's one of those things that we know is bad, but we don't know to what extent, right?
And a lot of people, either they don't tell their story, maybe they feel embarrassed, insecure, or something of that nature, or maybe it's just too traumatic to talk about, which I completely understand, especially publicly.
But I coincidentally came across someone who became a friend of mine by the name of Carrie Bartholomew.
And I featured her story.
I interviewed her.
So her mother hated her.
She treated her as such.
She was physically abusive.
She was grooming her to become a prostitute at one point.
She's mixed race.
You know, her mother is white.
Her father is black.
But she had a grandfather who was part of the KKK.
And so she basically had sex with a black man to piss off her father.
And she got pregnant.
So here she has this child.
She doesn't really like black people like that.
And so she sees her child almost like a dirty child.
And she treats her as such.
She's just a thing within the home.
She was subsequently raped at the age of five by her mother's friend.
Her stepfather was in the process of starting to molest her and was going down that route.
She describes having to hide in the basket from her mother because her mother was so physically abusive that she would hide.
She ultimately turned herself in to the authorities at the age of eight.
And she thanks God every day for giving her enough of a mental understanding to do such a thing.
And talk about courage of an eight-year-old kid to do something like this.
That is just astonishing and unbelievable.
But she had no family that she could really turn to.
Funny enough, her grandfather, who's part of the KKK, after she was born, he left the KKK because of her.
And he ultimately died when she was young.
So the one family member that actually loved her and she remembers Very fondly, was the former KKK grandfather.
Like, that's how weird the world is sometimes.
But she had no one.
She had no one.
So she had to turn herself in at the age of eight, and she stayed in the foster care system until she aged out.
And she talks about how, within the foster care system, you know, she was placed from house to house.
And yes, she had kids who were violent that she would live with or kids who were attempting to do something sexual with her, more than likely because something sexual was done to them, right?
Just repeating this type of behavior, having to hide in the bathroom because her foster brother is trying to do something to her.
Like, this is the type of stuff that she did have to go through within the foster care system.
She has no one to turn to.
And actually, the person that she gives the most thanks to is actually her social worker because the way she explained it was that most kids have cycling social workers and therapists and stuff like that.
But for a long time, she had the same one.
And so he gave her hope and who was actually looking out for her and seemed sincere.
And she remembers his name.
She remembers him fondly and everything.
So if you met her today, you would have no idea all these things that she went through.
You know, she has a child.
She's married.
She's a happy person.
She's a believer in God as a Christian.
And for a lot of people, they think to themselves, and I went through that when I was younger, like all these bad things are happening to me.
Why would God let this happen?
But for her, she's like, yes, these bad things happen to me, but God gave me enough intelligence and courage to get up at the age of eight and turn myself in.
You know, that's how she sees it.
So for me, she's remarkable in that and also because she worked through all the things that happened to her.
So when I'm talking to her and she's telling me all these things, she's not crying.
You know, she's not sobbing.
She's being very matter of fact because she did the hard work of actually resolving how she felt.
And that to me is beautiful to see that she was able to have reflection, self-reflection, but lean on God and improve herself because of it.
But the reason I talk about the foster care system within this book is because that's the ultimate child that's left behind, right?
They don't have extended family.
Or if they do, they don't want them.
They don't have their immediate family.
No one wants them.
And they're literally just put into a system that will take anything.
And so these are all forgotten children who are all experiencing abandonment issues.
At the very least, often their parents are drug addicts.
Molestation is happening, right?
All these different things.
Their parents are choosing drugs or choosing a partner over their kids.
The state takes them away.
So the state ultimately wants to reunify kids with their parents.
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