The Forgiveness Workshop
Learning to forgive and be forgiven in healthy ways.
Few topics have been subjected to as much misinformation and hurtful teaching as the issue of forgiveness. If you have been hurt deeply and intimately by another person, then the messages we have heard about forgiveness can often feel trite, unrealistic, and even offensive. Many of us were taught lessons on forgiveness that only compounded our hurt. The expectations of other people for us to quickly forgive have only added insult to injury.
This workshop will explore what forgiveness actually means, what it doesn’t mean, what conditions are required, how intimate injuries harm us, and what are involved in the stages of a forgiveness process. If you have found it difficult to reconcile previous teaching on forgiveness with your own personal journey and sense of justice, then this workshop will be helpful to you.
Your Instructor
Byron Kehler, M.S. is a Trauma Therapist in private practice in Milwaukie, Oregon. He has worked with survivors of physical, sexual, emotional, mental, and spiritual abuse for over 40 years. Byron has been certified by the American Academy of Experts in Traumatic Stress and is certified in EMDR with a specialization in Dissociative Disorders.
He has presented on various childhood trauma recovery themes around the country at churches, social services agencies, public and private schools, colleges, universities, and professional conferences. He has provided humanitarian relief services for natural disasters in Asia after the tsunami and the gulf coast post hurricane Katrina, training therapists in trauma recovery.
He is the author and developer of Story-Informed Trauma Therapy (SITT), for recovery from early childhood trauma. This evidence-based model has been taught to mental health therapists in agencies in New Orleans and the gulf coast following Hurricane Katrina, and has been proven effective in reducing PTSD symptoms for trauma survivors. In addition to understanding the impact of sexual abuse on the survivor, Byron is familiar with the motivations and thinking of offenders.
He has worked with the Morrison Center’s juvenile sexual offender program in Portland, Oregon for over 30 years teaching victim empathy awareness to offenders. He is the producer and director of a documentary called Speak Out which contains candid interviews with offenders and survivors brought together to talk about the abuse experience. This documentary is currently being used in a number of offender treatment programs around the country.
Byron brings extensive knowledge, understanding, sensitivity, compassion, practicality, and even humor to his presentations.