00:00Yeah, my first show. It was about adult survivors of child abuse who had forgiven their parents
00:05for the abuse, and I hadn't forgiven my father at the time. So I don't think it's any coincidence
00:12that the day I forgave him, not two weeks later, the show began to have success.
00:21Forgiveness is a huge part of your personal story, isn't it?
00:25Yes, for sure. I wish everybody had the ability to tap into because it's life-changing.
00:30What was your childhood like? The man you thought was your father, later found out he was not your biological father,
00:37but you certainly considered him a father, and he was your father figure, an authority figure, abusive when you were very young?
00:44Yeah, yeah. It wasn't a pleasant childhood. It wasn't one that Ozzie and Harriet by any stretch of the imagination.
00:50He was a functional alcoholic, and he had a lot of issues, but the thing that helped me to forgive him
00:55and to get over it and still take care of him today is I took a moment to find out more about him
01:00and his childhood and where he came from, and his was way more horrific than mine.
01:05So it kind of formed the person that he was.
01:08What was his life?
01:09Well, he was found at two years old in a drainage canal with his sister and his brother by a white man on a horse.
01:15This is a story that I'm told. It's in rural Louisiana, and he's brought to this young girl to raise.
01:21Her name was May. She was 14 years old. Her father was a slave, and every time they would do something wrong,
01:26she would tie them in a sack, hang them in a tree, and beat them.
01:28So the brutality that he suffered was extreme, so he had no tools in dealing with being a father,
01:35being compassionate, being kind. All of that, I feel, had been beaten out of him.
01:39So here I come along, and I'm of a different generation. I think it was very difficult for him,
01:44but the man never, to his credit, we were never hungry. He never left the family.
01:50He always, you know, bought every dime he made home to my mother.
01:54So in return for what he did then, I still do the same thing for him, even though we don't have a relationship.
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