How to Move On, Let Go of Past Mistakes, and Reinvent Yourself

KEYPOINTS

• 01

  You can only get so far on an untreated 'fracture'

  Carl Lentz, former pastor of Hillsong's New York church, compares unaddressed problems to an athlete playing on a broken ankle. You can numb it and get through a season or two while other parts of you overcompensate, but it shortens your career. 'Your problems don't go anywhere. You either fix them or they destroy you.' The only open question is what your life looks like when it cracks.

• 02

  Living a double life means the good parts keep working while the rest burns

  Mel describes the state Carl was in: parts of your life going brilliantly while something burns to the ground in the background. Carl admits his public success and his private dysfunction ran side by side for years. Mel adds that when you're in the middle of it, you assume everyone knows.

• 03

  Ask yourself what you're afraid to get checked out

  Carl's test for whether you have a dangerous 'fracture' is whatever you're avoiding looking at, like not going to the doctor because you don't want the diagnosis. He pushes back on men calling major trauma 'just being a man.' His point is that it's dysfunction, and it can be fixed.

• 04

  Dread builds on itself, so face it right away

  'Whatever's causing dread demands an immediate confrontation.' Carl says dread compounds: something dreadful today is twice as dreadful tomorrow, and two or three years of putting it off leaves your life 'suffocated.' Much of him back then, he says, was taken up with the 'maintenance of dread.'

• 05

  Putting off the truth 'to protect people' is a selfish story

  When a therapist asked why he didn't come clean sooner, Carl said he didn't want to let people down. She replied, 'Oh, isn't that sweet? So you've made yourself the hero.' He now sees delaying honesty as robbing both himself and the people who need the best of him.

• 06

  He takes full ownership and doesn't blame the marriage

  Carl says people assume an affair means a bad marriage, and in his case that wasn't true. He loved his wife, Laura, and had 'a phenomenal family'; he was 'extraordinarily broken.' He admits that when Laura sensed something, he lied to her by leaving things out, telling a different story, or overpowering her until she doubted what she saw.

• 07

  Rock bottom wasn't one moment; he 'moved into' it

  After the confrontation, telling his family and being kicked out of a friend's home, Carl calls it a place he lived for a while, not a single moment ('Rock Bottomville'). His story also set off a domino effect across a network of connected churches, and he accepts he was partly the trigger.

• 08

  You prove you've forgiven yourself by investing in who you are now

  Saying 'I forgive myself' is step one. The evidence, Carl says, is putting time and effort into the better person you're becoming. People who are stuck show lots of evidence of who they were and none of who they are now. For him, the turning point was faith: if God had forgiven him, it was 'ridiculous' not to forgive himself.

• 09

  Shame keeps the focus on you; healing is the alternative

  Carl calls 'You should be ashamed of yourself' a selfish idea, because it asks you to keep staring at yourself, and 'everybody loses.' He describes the body language of shame, shoulders and head down, and contrasts it with healing, grace, mercy and change. Some people want him to stay visibly broken, he says, but that says more about them.

• 10

  Forgiveness isn't 'fairy dust'; expect aftershocks

  Almost five years on, Carl says the light came slowly and has to be fed every day. Forgiving someone, even someone who abused you for years, doesn't mean the feelings disappear or that you have to have dinner with them. When the old feelings return, he suggests saying it honestly: 'Today is a day where I'm struggling to follow through with the forgiveness I've given.'