Forgiveness, Foster Care, and Faith

Girlfriends (A Podcast for Catholic Women)

Danielle Bean

Religion & Spirituality, Parenting, Kids & Family

4.9 • 810 Ratings

🗓️ 19 August 2025

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Forgiveness is never simple—but it is always transformative. In this week’s episode of Girlfriends, I’m joined by Los Angeles-based screenwriter, filmmaker, and speaker Erin Dooley. Erin’s work focuses on what she calls “the good F words”: forgiveness, family, and faith.

Erin shares the personal story behind her raw, heartfelt documentary A Way to Forgiveness, filmed during her pilgrimage along the Camino de Santiago after a painful divorce. She opens up about what it was like to document her own healing journey, the surprising ways God used her story to help others, and why forgiveness is a gift you give yourself as much as to someone else.

We also talk about her latest short film, Adopting Faith, which shines a light on the joys and challenges of foster care. Erin draws on her own experience as a former foster mom and current advocate to address common misconceptions, practical ways to support foster families, and how churches can step up to meet the needs of vulnerable children.

What you’ll hear in this episode:

* How Erin’s love for storytelling began and why she’s drawn to themes of reconciliation

* The unexpected encounter on her pilgrimage that shaped her understanding of forgiveness

* Why she decided to share her divorce journey on film—and the response she’s received

* The realities of foster care and how anyone can help, even if they’re not fostering

* How faith fuels Erin’s work in the entertainment industry and her commitment to telling hopeful, truth-filled stories

Links and Resources:

* Watch A Way to Forgiveness

* Watch Adopting Faith on YouTube

* Connect with Erin Dooley

* Subscribe to the Girlfriends newsletter for weekly encouragement

If you enjoy Girlfriends, please share this episode with a friend and leave a review wherever you listen. Your support helps us reach more women with hope and encouragement.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit daniellebean.substack.com/subscribe

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to girlfriends. I'm Danielle Bean. I'm a wife and a mom and I'm on a mission to help you.
0:08.4	Know your worth is a woman so you can find peace, balance, and joy and faithful living. This week,
0:12.3	we're talking to filmmaker Erin Dooley. Can't wait to get started. Let's go.
0:19.4	Hello, my friends. So glad you are here. Thank you so much for showing up. One of our themes
0:24.7	today is forgiveness. We're going to be talking to filmmaker Aaron Dooley, who's done some real work
0:29.6	on the subject of forgiveness as well as foster families. But this forgiveness topic is one that
0:35.2	comes up time and again. Some of my most popular episodes of the
0:39.1	Girlfriends podcast are the ones where we talk about forgiveness and how to forgive when it's hard.
0:46.0	I think we all have those kinds of experiences in our lives. Up until a few years ago,
0:51.7	I really honestly, okay, a few years ago, maybe it was like 10 years ago
0:54.6	the first time I really struggled with this topic. I think I led a pretty charmed life. There wasn't
0:59.4	anything major that I needed to forgive anybody for in my life. And then there was something that
1:05.4	happened and it didn't even happen to me. It happened to someone very close to me. And I struggled
1:09.2	to forgive that person who had so deeply hurt this person that I love.
1:14.6	And isn't that just the way sometimes, though, that sometimes the hardest things to forgive or the ways in which we're tempted to hold on to a grudge are when something is done against somebody that we love and that we want to protect. So I really,
1:29.5	you know, that was the first time I really grappled with that in an ongoing way. And I found
1:33.8	myself really wrestling with that idea of forgiveness in a very personal way. And it's taken years.
1:40.4	It's taken years of prayer. It's taken going to the sacrament of reconciliation to really get
1:45.9	to where I can feel like I am embracing forgiveness in that situation. And I've had a couple of other
1:52.2	ones since then. And one thing that I talk about frequently when it comes to the topic of
1:57.5	forgiveness is the fact that forgiving somebody doesn't mean you're saying it's
2:01.9	okay what that person did. And sometimes that's our real struggle. We don't want to forgive because we
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