Sister Wives’ Kody Brown Still Hopes for ‘Friendship in the Future’ with the 3 Women Who Left Him (Exclusive)

Kody Brown wants to focus his energy on moving forward in his relationships with his three former wives.

The Sister Wives star, 55, tells PEOPLE that he’s on a “journey” of both “forgiveness” and “understanding” when it comes to his relationships with Christine, Meri and Janelle Brown, all of whom he separated from within a 14-month span.

“I’ve got to find that space of grace and love for myself,” Kody says as he admitted he wanted to “forgive” himself for “being angry about what has happened” and “move on.”

“It’s a journey that goes inward and it’s a journey that’s outward,” he explains of his ever-evolving relationship with each of his ex-wives. “You have to express forgiveness to the people you’ve been involved with. You have to express understanding and hope that at the end of an era for us as a family, we still have hope of a friendship and a loving or kind relationship with each other in the future because we’re bound forever through our kids.”

Indeed, the “experience has been painful,” he says of the end of three of his four spiritual unions, but it’s also been a “process” to get to more solid ground with his family.

“Really I just look forward to a future of a lot of forgiving and a lot of … just more understanding,” he adds.

Now, though, he feels like his “confidence is coming back,” as a “few things have happened recently that have really, I guess you could say, built my confidence back, because it destroys your confidence when you go through a divorce or a family breakup.”

While Kody remains hopeful about a platonic reconciliation with Christine, Meri and Janelle, he’s also focusing his energy on his remaining marriage to Robyn Brown, which he previously told PEOPLE has been permanently changed.

“We are not recovering from this,” he said. “I mean, it’s not clinical depression, but we’ve been a bit depressed about what the experience did. That’s an understatement. But we’ve been through a very hard experience and our reaction to it has changed us. We are not the same.”

He’s also admitted that he’s been sabotaging their relationship “out of frustration and anger.”

“I thought of myself leaving Robyn and having another lover and looking at this lover and going, ‘I don’t love you. I’m in love with another woman. I’m in love with a woman that I left because I was too much a piece of s— to manage the relationship.’ And what it was was just anger and I’m embarrassed,” he said during the Sister Wives: One on One special.

As for Robyn, 45, she told PEOPLE that the dissolution of Kody’s other marriages left her disappointed. “There is a weird feeling of, ‘This was the agreement — to be together and end up together and always be a family.’ And I just feel like people left,” she explained.

“Meri’s situation [is] different than maybe Janelle or Christine’s. She hung on for a really long time,” she continued. “So it’s a very different way that I look at that than I do maybe Janelle or Christine. But, yeah, I feel kind of abandoned.”

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