My grandmother and I loved each other very much. We still do. She’s passed on now, yet she’s still very present to me.

She had a controlling side. As a child, she faced some very real challenges and threats, and she learned to control her environment to protect herself. I believe she had those experiences to help her learn to trust and put her faith in God. Her intention was always to be loving. She seemed to believe that being loving meant being controlling. She was a big sister to boys and there were parts of her life that were very scary.

One day, when I was a teenager, we got into a fight. She started talking about all the things she’d done for me.

I snapped right back. “Nobody asked you to do those things. You did them for YOU. You did them because they’d make you feel good about yourself. Don’t put that on me.”

She had a real martyr pattern happening, and I wasn’t taking it on. I was very happy to receive all the gifts she gave me, except for one: the gift of guilt, I wasn’t happy to receive that one.

I rejected it. Good for me.

I’ve long since forgiven every bit of it. There’s simply no need to judge her. She was doing the best she could and I Love and respect her completely.

I share this because the pattern of manipulating people with guilt is so common. Many of us have someone in our lives who made it clear how much they sacrificed for us. Many of us have held our own choices that way too.

A Course in Miracles names what’s hiding underneath every form of this kind of guilting and manipulation:

“Each form will be recognized as but a cover for the one idea that hides behind them all; that love demands sacrifice, and is therefore inseparable from attack and fear. And that guilt is the price of love, which must be paid by fear.”

Guilt as the price of Love. That’s the belief.

When we hold a sacrifice in our mind, we keep guilt alive.

It’s the opposite of healing. It’s the opposite of awakening. It’s the opposite of freedom.

It’s imprisonment.

Here’s the invitation.
Where have we been holding the idea that someone sacrificed for us?
Where have we held our own choices as sacrifices for someone else?

If there’s any anger or resentment toward the people who told us they sacrificed for us, forgiveness is the way. They didn’t comprehend what they were doing. They were probably doing what their elders taught them, because these patterns get passed down from generation to generation.

We’re the ones who are interrupting these patterns of fear.

We’re the ones choosing anew, infusing our mind, our conversations, and our choices with Love and compassion. When we release the guilt, we liberate the very people who handed it to us. We relieve them of the burden through true forgiveness, which is true non-judgment.

We can receive what they gave us now as Love rather than as sacrifice.

If we’ve made others feel guilty, we can forgive ourselves too. Forgiving ourselves is non-judgment of our path of learning. We take responsibility for any effect our choices have made, and we see if there’s any course correction to make. That might even become a beautiful conversation to have with our loved ones.

It’s powerful how much family healing and ancestral healing become possible this way. All healing is at the level of the mind, so the healing we do reaches the generations that came before us and the generations still to come.

If you’d like to release the guilt that’s been handed down through your family, I’d love to have you join us for my FREE Forgiveness Workshop tomorrow. We’ll untangle Love from sacrifice together.

Guilt was never the price we had to pay for Love. Love is our liberation.

TOMORROW: FREE Forgiveness Workshop this Monday holiday to clear out some blocks to Love. We’ll work on it together and have a miraculous healing.  Click here now to learn more.  We’re entitled to miracles – and to guidance!

October Deep Dive Workshop: Trust & Follow Your Intuition – Trust is the #1 characteristic of God’s Teachers according to A Course in Miracles, and after 26 years counseling spiritual students, I’d say it’s also the #1 issue we have. Trust is a skill we can learn, and learning it changes the quality of every day of the rest of our lives!  Saturday, October 24 Click here to learn more.

LATEST PODCAST EPISODE: Trusting the One That Knows. In this episode of A Course in Miracles: Walking the Talk, Living the Love, I explore what I’ve learned about trust—not the kind where you white-knuckle your way through life hoping things turn out, but the kind where you actually let go and listen. I share a moment from Hawaii when I had to choose without understanding first, and a chipmunk encounter that revealed something I couldn’t have learned any other way. Most of us spend our lives convinced we need to figure things out first, then act. But I discovered something different. Through forgiveness practices and honest conversations about resistance, I’m uncovering why the ego’s need to know is so costly—and what becomes available when you stop insisting on proof. This episode reveals what a genuine trust in the Holy Spirit actually looks like in real life.