The Wrestle to Forgive with Brandon Heath

… that would be my core wound. Just not feeling “good enough.”

Brandon Heath

In this one-of-a-kind Healing Out Loud video Brandon Heath discusses his struggles with depression and addiction and how forgiveness played a role in his healing journey. Through therapy, he learned to forgive his father for past wounds and how forgiveness is a continuous process that leads to healing.

View this video with Brandon Heath and other interviews with JOY FM artists videos on the JOY FM YouTube Channel.

Brandon Heath’s Healing Out Loud Transcript

Okay, Lord, I’m praying against attack because I want to tell my story, Lord, but I’m feeling the enemy showing up.

I stopped going to my men’s group, which I regularly would attend. I stopped going to counseling. I didn’t really talk to many people. I started to turn to places on the internet that I knew that I shouldn’t go. Social media all of a sudden became this place where I would compare myself to other people. I was allowing myself to watch movies that were dark in content.

So I felt myself going dark.

I felt myself retreating from my wife, from everybody, and then I felt secrets start to take over in my life.

In early July, I confessed to my wife that I had been hiding and that I was not really feeling like myself anymore. So we stayed up until the light came up and called my best friends and told them that I just needed them, I needed help. Nobody ran away from me. In fact, everybody only leaned into me.

But we started to decide, I don’t know if touring and recording is really the route for me anymore.

I have been incredibly blessed to have a long career, but now I’m a dad and I’m a husband and I want to be healthy in both of those roles. Those are more important roles to me than my career, which is hard to say. It felt extremely, extremely frail to say, maybe I need to hang that up to work on myself.

One of the things that I realized with the help of a therapist is that I needed to forgive my dad.

It’s hard to forgive someone who’s gone, who you can’t speak with.

I forgave my dad a long time ago when I was in college for some mistakes that he made when I was a kid. My dad was married four times. I loved my dad, and I grew to love my stepfamilies, my blended families, but I think I always felt the sting of him leaving when I was a kid. That’s one of the things that therapy really helped me open up is feeling the rejection of not being good enough that my dad decided to start a new life.

So I’ve had to really lean into that, and I’ve realized in the work that I’ve done with my therapist is that that would be my core wound is not feeling good enough.

I’ve found that that has filled a little bit of a void, but it can’t fill the void that only God is really meant for, that he is the one that tells me my worth and who I am.

I did forgive my dad when I was in college, but I think I made a mistake that it was a one-and-done kind of situation. I think maybe God is the only one-and-done forgiver out there. Jesus is the one and done.

For the rest of us, there is the seven times 70 times. So I’ve learned that there is a reason that Jesus said that because for me, even though I’ve forgiven my dad and when he passed away, we were in a really great place, but even beyond his death, I’m having to forgive him again and again because some of the wounds that I’ve had as a kid are coming up in different ways. The best way through those wounds is just to say, “I know what this is. Dad, I forgive you. God, I know that you forgive me,” and then to walk through that in light and in hope and know that there really is restoration on the other side of forgiveness.

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