April 6, 2026 • 38 mins
Forgiveness might sound simple, but it's hard to let go of the anger that comes with being deeply hurt. Grudges, bitterness, and frustration with life’s unfairness can quietly build up over time and take a real toll on our mental and physical health.
As The Happiness Lab kicks off a new season on spring cleaning your wellbeing, Dr. Laurie sits down with psychologist Dr. Fred Luskin, director of the Stanford University Forgiveness Project, to explore what research says about forgiveness. Why is letting go of resentment so much harder than it sounds? And what does it really mean to forgive someone?
Plus, we revisit a powerful story from the archives that shows what forgiveness can look like in the face of profound loss and why it might be the most radical act of self-care we can take.
Experts Referenced:
- Dr. Fred Luskin, psychologist and director of the Stanford Forgiveness Projects
- Miroslav Volf, Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School and founder of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture
- Katy Milkman, Professor at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
Resources Mentioned:
- "Put Your Imperfections Behind You: Temporal Landmarks Spur Goal Initiation When They Signal New Beginnings," by Hengchen Dai, Katherine L. Milkman, and Jason Riis (Psychological Science, 2015)
- Forgive for Good: A Proven Prescription for Health and Happiness, by Fred Luskin (2002)
- “Effects of a Group Forgiveness Intervention on Forgiveness, Perceived Stress, and Trait-Anger” by Alex H. S. Harris, Frederic Luskin, Sonya B. Norman, Sam Standard, Jennifer Bruning, Stephanie Evans, and Carl E. Thoresen (Journal of Clinical Psychology, 2006)
- “Forgiveness and Conflict Resolution in Marriage” by Frank D. Fincham, Steven R. H. Beach, and Joanne Davila (Journal of Family Psychology, 2004)
- Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace, by Miroslav Volf (2006)
Related Episodes:
- "Happiness Lessons of the Ancients: Forgiveness" (The Happiness Lab, 2021)
- "A New Hope" (The Happiness Lab, 2020)
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin Hey, Happiness Lab listeners, It's finally spring, a season
that's all about renewal and new beginnings and of course
spring cleaning. As the weather gets a little warmer, we
naturally get the itch to begin rejuvenating. This is the
(00:36):
time of year when we say yes to clearing out
our closets and refreshing our homes. It does feel great
to freshen up our physical spaces, but could we take
a similar approach to refreshing our well being? Could we
turn that spring cleaning urge towards proving our junkie habits
or sweeping out our negative thought patterns. We usually think
of January first and the start of the new year
(00:57):
as the time for goals like these, but studies have
shown that the beginning of spring is also a great
time for a happiness restart. Take one of my favorite
studies by my friend, the psychologist Katie Milkman, cruited a
group of people who said they had a personal goal
that they'd been putting off for a while. She then
offered them the chance to receive a formal reminder that
it was finally time to get started. Half the participants
(01:20):
were offered this formal reminder on some random day of
the year, but the other half was offered that reminder
on a day that felt like a new beginning, the
first day of spring. What did Katie find Well, more
than three times as many people wanted to tackle their
goal on the first day of spring rather than on
some random day. I love these results because they show
that our minds are always on the lookout for what
(01:41):
Katie calls temporal fresh starts, those special moments during the
year when our motivation to make positive changes gets a boost.
So in this new season of the Happiness Lab, we'll
be harnessing the motivational power of springtime. We're going to
apply the spring cleaning energy that we take to our
closets to all the stuff that's cluttering up our minds.
Over the next few episodes, we'll be exploring how you
(02:03):
can freshen up your happiness strategies, tidy up your busy schedules,
and purge all your harmful belief. Yes, and in honor
of true spring cleaning, we'll be doing a bit of
our own closet refresh as we go back into the
Happiness Lab archive to find old school episodes and insights
that you might have missed. And in this first episode
of our new spring cleaning season, I'm going to recommend
(02:24):
that you start out by airing out your resentments. Today
we're going to hear about the mental cleansing power of
forgiveness right after the Happiness Lab returns from these quick
words from our sponsors. Grievances, they're pretty much part of
(02:50):
human nature. When people hurt us or say mean stuff,
the pain they cause tends to stick around, often for
a long while. We might even spend years feeling angry
or betrayed. But in the spirit of spring cleaning our happiness,
what if you chose to drop each and every one
of your painful grievances through the power of forgiveness. Luckily
(03:10):
we have just the guest to help you get started
on that journey.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
Well, Hi, I'm Fred direct to Stamford Forgiveness Projects, and
I Todd at Stamford for decades.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
Fred is doctor Fred Luskin, a psychologist and counselor who
spent decades studying the psychological effects of forgiveness. Fred studies
people who've survived bitter relationship breakdowns, physical assaults, and violent conflicts,
as well as people who've had the usual tiny sorts
of fights with their neighbors or coworkers, and in all
(03:41):
these cases, he finds that forgiveness can be an unexpected
path to peace. But Fred's not just a scholar of forgiveness.
He's also experienced the positive effects of this practice firsthand.
It's often said that all research is mesearch. Fred admits
that this adage is definitely true.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
In his case, a very close friend betrayed and abandoned me. Oh,
I'm so sorry. I simply did not have the skills
to cope with it. I developed an agitated depression. I
kept busy, I moved, I became so much less hopeful.
I had a wife at that time and a child,
(04:22):
and I could no longer see the beauty of that.
And I functioned. I mean, I was in the world.
I was working, but not well. One day my wife
came to me and she said, Fred, I love you.
I just like you less. And it was a kick
in the ass. And I started to look at what
the hell was I doing ruining years, And I stumbled
(04:46):
upon two very simple things. One, I could be grateful
for what I had or complain about what I don't.
And second, I had been trained as a cognitive therapist,
but I didn't use it on myself until that moment,
and those two things helped me let go and developed
the Stanford Forgiveness Project.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
And what's the Stanford Forgiveness Project?
Speaker 2 (05:10):
I did my dissertation unforgiveness. We got a big grant
from the Templeton people to research forgiveness. I did work
in Columbia and Sierra Leone. We brought people from Northern Ireland,
I mean just all over the place. Because I'm at
Stanford and Stanford has such a good name, my work
(05:34):
was publicized in a way that I had an opportunity
to talk about forgiveness literally all over the world. And
now I'm back again at the very end of my career,
trying to do a little more research to show that
this stuff has value.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
To prepare for my interview with Fred, I read up
on the Stanford Forgiveness Project and all of Fred's work
with people who were caught up in the brutal conflicts
in Northern Ireland. I found one story particularly moving. It
involved a woman named Patrician McGee. Patrician's brother was beaten
to death in the early nineties. His killers were caught,
but soon freed from jail. They wound up living not
(06:12):
too far from Patrician's home. Could you imagine having your
brother's murderers living up the street from you, just going
about their daily life as if nothing had happened. That
level of perceived injustice took a huge psychological toll on Patrician.
She felt isolated and depressed. She couldn't even talk about
the situation without falling apart. At first, she was reluctant
(06:33):
to join Fred's forgiveness class. She feared having to talk
about her brother's killers, but that's not what Fred's program required.
In class, Patrician met other Irish women who had also
lost loved ones to violence, and together they worked through
their feelings. Afterwards, Fred measured the women's levels of depression, anger,
and perceived stress. He also surveyed the degree of pain
(06:55):
they felt over their loss. He found that the women's
scores improved dramatically, and they weren't just feeling better. They
reported having fewer headaches, less back pain, and even better sleep.
Patrician was initially worried about the act of forgiveness, but
the process of airing out her pain transformed her. She
was even able to talk about her brother without being
(07:15):
reduced to tears. Examples like these are so powerful, But
what does Fred's process entail. What's the kind of forgiveness
Fred is recommending that we all pursue.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
There's a couple of definitions of forgiveness, one more webster like,
you know, to give up resentment and to forswear holding
on to bitterness. Our definition is making peace with the
word no. And this came from literally years of working
(07:50):
with so many people and hearing so much suffering and
so much angst that we tried to look for what
was the common denominator of all the suffering that we heard,
and what we came to with everyone there was saying
I didn't get something I wanted, and sometimes what I
(08:13):
wanted I wanted desperately and I got no. And I
am unwilling to let go of that no to make peace.
I am going to complain till hell freeze is over
that I deserved a Yes, we watched and realized that
that was kind of a unifying thing around all the
(08:38):
variety of stories and complaints that we heard. So by
evolution of that is that forgiveness I now define is
simply being at peace with your life right now, right
here in total I can be okay.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
I think misconception we have about forgiveness is that you
have to connect with the person that you're forgiving. Can
we have forgiveness without that moment of reconciliation with the
person that roberta.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
The way we went through that was very simple. Can
you forgive a dead person? The answer is yes. So
that's the answer to your question. You can be married,
your partner can have an affair. You can reconcile and
you can go home to them every day and hate them.
(09:29):
Or they can have an affair. You can completely release
them from blame and bitterness. You can open your heart
back up to life and tell them we're done. So
you can have complete forgiveness with no reconciliation. They're not
the same concept.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
I've also heard you talk about how forgiveness is about
a change in your story. What do you mean by that?
Speaker 2 (09:54):
That's another I guess learned clinical kind of thing. I mean,
I started so long ago as a boring academic, and
I had these ideas about what forgiveness and wasn't and
then talking to likexillions of people who had horrible things happened,
(10:16):
and others who got bent out of shape because someone
had built a fence an inch and a half onto
their property line. What I came to see that they
actually brought was not what happened, but their story. They
brought a story about forgiveness or unforgiveness, and what we
(10:40):
were trying to do was help them create a different story.
So many people came into forgiveness with this sense of
you forgive and forget. What we understood was you forgive
by remembering differently. You don't forget. You can't forget. We've
(11:02):
I've dealt with many, many people who have had family
members murdered or you know, people shocked by ken year
olds with machine guns. You don't forget. But if you're
lucky and good, you can remember it differently. You reframe
it enough, and you quiet down your arousal so that
(11:23):
you tell a different story and you believe a different story.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
I love that you brought up this idea that forgiveness
isn't forgetting, because I think that's a misconception that people
have right that you need to forget the wrong or
maybe trust the person.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
Can I tell you something that you may find peculiar
at this point, if I work with people, groups, individuals
at least a third of what we do is helping
them understand what forgiveness is and is not. But there
is so much wrong understanding, and even so much hostility.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
Yeah, it almost feels like sometimes I hear this idea
that forgiveness is for suckers. Yeah, it's weak. You know why?
Explain why that's wrong to the listeners.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
Well, if you view forgiveness as condoning bad behavior, then
it seems weak. But if you view forgiveness and I'll
give you two simple streams around this. One is fully
grieving your wounds so that at the end of the
(12:29):
grieving process you can release that suffering, then you see
that forgiveness is not such a weak thing. It takes
real strength to feel the pain of being the human
being and releasing that pain when appropriate. That takes real strength.
(12:50):
The other thing is I mean, having been a meditator
or even as a therapist for decades, most people don't
get better by avoiding pain. There are a lot of
people stuck in perseverative anger and endless none of them
(13:11):
are appropriately feeling it, holding that suffering, knowing that something
wrong has happened, and letting go and moving on. That's
not weakness.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
That's braf.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
That's the right word. It's brave. So when we teach
that's what we do, you're being brave, You're not being
weak at all.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
But it is hard, right, And I think the fact
that it's hard means we need to talk about the
benefits of forgiveness or maybe what are the bad things
that happen when we don't forgive?
Speaker 2 (13:45):
So what's the value of it? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (13:47):
Or so what are the consequences for our mind and
our body if we don't forgive?
Speaker 2 (13:51):
The first part is just because something is hard, at
some level, we might benefit from growing up, yes, and
not resisting everything that's hard. It's hard in part because one,
we have untrained minds which do not know how to
(14:15):
separate wheat from chef, between the chatter and maybe more
centered contemplative thinking. So anything that asks us to do
that is hard. Secondly, forgiveness is hard because we're acknowledging
a world where painful things can happen and that we
(14:38):
are vulnerable. We are absolutely vulnerable, and so instead of
opening to that vulnerability, we create this massive complex of no,
stop it, it's wrong. I can't take it all the distortions.
But it is very hard. For a human being to
(15:01):
admit that they can't protect themselves or their loved ones
from certain things. So that's the hard part, the forgiveness
piece of moving through it without coming at the end
with bitterness, and maybe even a story that talks about
the growth. That leads to less stress, it leads to
(15:25):
more hopefulness. We've shown that in our research for people
who have been really badly wounded. It leads to less depression,
it reduces pain, and that's in part because the pain
systems between emotional pain and physical pain. Once that becomes chronic,
(15:46):
that joined. So forgiveness is a release we stop making
our life worse.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
And so you mentioned in your origin story this kind
of awful story of being betrayed, but it seems like
you also came to forgiveness more of a spiritual practice too.
You talk about being an old hippie, and so I
want to see how that fits into the forgiveness story.
Speaker 2 (16:08):
I started the project, but my advisor, he was very
helpful because he had decades of contact and I was
just a graduate student. We had a discussion as to
whether we wanted to do only a secular training or
a religious training as well, because we didn't know enough.
So I went around. I started to talk to religiously
(16:32):
oriented people, and they were almost impossible to engage with
because they were so rigid on their religion being like
the only religion. So I would give talks a little
bit to Christian places and then say, we like what
you do. There's not enough Jesus. And I give talks
(16:53):
to Buddhist places and that's great, but there's not enough Buddhias.
Why are you talking about other people. I went to
yoga centers. It was like, wonderful, but yoga says this,
and you said that. So we dropped the religious thing
pretty quickly. It was like living in the United States
now between Red states and blue states, where there's such
(17:13):
a mistrust and such a righteousness in any way. I personally
and my mentor had a meditation practice when we started,
and a very simple spiritual belief that there's something essential
(17:34):
and unchanging and similar that joins everything. I don't teach
that directly, but it informs how we see things.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
I found Fred's point about religion really interesting. Many religious
faiths recommend that their followers practice forgiveness, but hardly any
of us think deeply about what that act really means.
After the break, Fred will share some examples of real
world forgiveness. He'll also give us some tips on how
we can start forgiving right away. The Happiness Lab will
be right back. Doctor Fred Luskin has run workshops as
(18:21):
part of the Stanford Forgiveness Project for decades. He says
it takes quite a mind shift to truly understand what
forgiveness entails and the benefits it can offer us, but
he does have a few practical tips for getting there.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
One is, start small practice on your own before you
do anything, like when you're in the shower, just talk.
Can I forgive them? What might that look like? What
would that mean? And Third, the best place to start
is where it really matters with people who you love
and love you, because that's the most important work you
(18:58):
have to do, is to build your relationships and maintain them.
And there's good research that forgiveness is at the heart
of marriage maintaining itself. Okay, that's the first stream. The
second is the practices are very easy. Probably the first
and most important practice is gratitude. If you can not
(19:23):
just look at what the world didn't give you, but
balance it with what the world did give you. Then
maybe you can see things more clearly. So that's one.
Second is some kind of cognitive piece. The simplest is
just to repeat to yourself the rolling stones. I can't
always get what I want. I mean that, as simple
(19:47):
as you can make it. I can't always get what
I want. Third is what we talked about before, simply
try out different stories. One of the ways I kept
myself miserable was telling the same story over and over
and over and over, and then you think it's like
(20:09):
your Moses carrying up the tablets rather than just a
cranky pain in the butt. And the fourth piece is
in understanding that forgiveness is about the past or the
grievance is about the past. Your life is in the present,
so you need to have more of your stories, your focus,
(20:31):
your awareness on your present and creating a future than
about what didner didn't go right in the past. Those
are four incredibly simple practices. When we combine that with
what forgiveness is and isn't, many people take that and
make improvement.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
You've also talked about how forgiveness is embodied, like using
the breath to forget. Oh absolutely, So what are some
strategies we can pick up on there.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
I mean, I'm sure we're in alignment with disconsidering what
you teach and what I teach. It's hard to fully
separate the mind, the body, whatever the soul is our emotions.
You know there's a brain and the guy. We don't
have accurate words to understand all the linkages, but we
(21:22):
know that there is a link between mind and body
and between thoughts and emotions. So the two things that
we have found really help people to forgive is to
remind them that when europeset come down or calm down,
for at least me had two pieces to it. One
(21:44):
is the simplest anchor in your center. Take a couple
of breadths, activate a different thing than the flight or
flight response, and learn some ability to manage your breathing.
Second is touch something positive, love or kindness, goodness, whatever,
(22:05):
and hold it, just hold it inside. And when when
you practice that, as your body arouses, you can counter
condition the stress response. So it's simple, but that's often
how we start. So let me tell you one story
about that. We brought men and women from Northern Ireland
(22:27):
who had had family members murdered in their violence. We
brought Catholics and Protestants, and they came and about I
don't know how long into it they were telling their story,
and we took a break and we brought them over
to the window at one of the buildings at Stanford
on the fifth floor. And these people, you know, they
(22:49):
had all had horrible things and they had just flown
in from Belfast. And what we had them do is
open their arms, pulled over the windows, open and said,
feel the sun's rays and welcome it. Welcome that warmth,
welcome it. Open to yourself to it, and just recognize
(23:09):
that you can do this at any time. And when
you do that, your nervous system quiets and in gentles
and you're not the same aggrieved person. It's a body
experience too.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
You mentioned your experience in the Origin story about feeling betrayed.
During that period of feeling betrayed, what was going on
for you physically mentally? You talked about how your wife
are noticing asshole.
Speaker 2 (23:39):
I would like rope in people from the street and
say you wouldn't believe what this jerk did, always talking
about how bad he was. Regularly. I sat my wife
down and said, you wouldn't believe what this jerk did.
Poor me. She would tell me things about how life
(24:00):
is not that bad. I would rebuck them. I took
my friends that were loyal and took them for granted.
I would go into places of beauty and miss it.
So those actions created in me a sense of alienation,
(24:24):
a inability to experience that much joy, and demanded of
my wife and my friends who could still tolerate me
great forbearance.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
And I think everybody who's listening right now can relate
a little bit right because when you're in your own
head and you're feeling so aggrieved, you don't treat the
people around you very well.
Speaker 2 (24:47):
Do you know. One of the reasons that I could
do this was when I started teaching forgiveness. And at
that point there were maybe three studies in the field,
so it barely existed. I could sit with people who
had the most awful things happened to them. I couldn't
(25:09):
relate to what had happened, but I could relate to
the suffering that they were causing themselves, and that empathy
and whatever. That's how the Forgiveness project flourished because I
wasn't interested in the content, like I knew that there
(25:30):
was so many ways that people can be hurt, but
the content wasn't the issue. What I saw was the
process because I had done it myself. So I was
like one of the sponsors in AA where I knew
every piece of bullshit that people would put out. I
knew every crevice of denial and lying and self absorption.
(25:57):
I had been to everyone and milked it for all
it was worth. That's where my empathy and that's where
my strength came in.
Speaker 1 (26:07):
And so what's on the other side you can get
to forgiveness? What's the opposite of being an asshole? For
you and maybe for everyone you've taught to forget it?
Speaker 2 (26:14):
If I can do it, they can do it. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
No, just like what emotions are on the other side
of getting past it.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
Whether emotions are on the other sign, They're not just emotions.
There's cognitions with the emotions. The biggest is efficacy is
a sense of peace on the one side and less
fear on the other because I no longer was so
(26:43):
frightened about what people could do to me. I recognized
that I had been through a crucible and I had
come out the other side. So there was less fear
and more peace. But there was also a cognitive thing
a friend. You can do this so you don't have
(27:04):
to run away from people. I had developed mistrust and
bitterness with Fred. You don't need that so much because
you're not so weak. The second was a deeper appreciation
for what was good because once you've handled what is
(27:25):
a for me at that time, a devastating wound. This
was my closest friend, almost a brother. I mean, good
news is we're the best of friends again. One hundred
percent forgiveness, one hundred percent reconciliation. It's now water under
the bridge. It means nothing. There's not a ripple of anything.
(27:49):
But it took quite a bit to get there. But
I became more thankful and more appreciative of when people
do good to me. But I realized that that was
what forgiveness facilitated, because I could now respond to all
(28:12):
that was there that my wound had obscured. So the
metaphor created for that was a grievance. Was like in
eclipse of the sun. So you have the sun it's shining.
All of a sudden, I put my friend there. There's
no sunshine anymore. I blame my friend. Even though the
(28:36):
sun didn't go anywhere. All I have to do is
walk a mile and the sun's there. That's how I
defined what forgiveness is. You take your clips away, you
move away, and the sun never went anywhere. So the
beauty never went anywhere, the love never went anywhere. All
(28:56):
the world's goodness still intact, but you can see it again.
Speaker 1 (29:01):
I absolutely love Fred's metaphor here that forgiveness can give
you the opportunity to see all the hidden warmth and
beauty that never really went anywhere. But what does it
really look like to find that warmth and beauty in practice?
To find out, We'll turn to the Happiness Lab archives
and one of my favorite stories of just how tough
and rewarding true forgiveness can be. You'll get a chance
(29:23):
to rehear that powerful story when the Happiness Lab returns
from the break.
Speaker 3 (29:41):
I can hear you. Yeah, that sounds good.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
This is my Yale colleague Miroslav Wolf, so.
Speaker 3 (29:47):
I think we are on we are recording.
Speaker 1 (29:51):
Miroslav is a theologian at the Yale Divinity School and
the author of Free of Charge, Giving and Forgiving in
a Culture Strip of Grace. Miroslav joined me on the
Happiness Lab a few years ago for an episode on
the power of forgiveness and his experience growing up in
the former socialist federal republic like Yugoslavia. I still find
(30:11):
myself regularly thinking back to his family story. So in
the spirit of our new spring cleaning season, I decided
to pull out his interview from deep in the Happiness
Lab closets and we share this whole family tale of
both awful tragedy and the healing power of forgiveness.
Speaker 3 (30:28):
My older brother was five at that time, was one
of the liveliest kids in the neighborhood. He loved to
connect with people, and in the vicinity of where we lived,
the soldiers were stationed, and he befriended those soldiers. They
loved him. They were his soldiers, and he was so
proud of them. And often what would happen is that
(30:50):
they would play with him. And at one point they
took him driving in the coarse drone carriage who have
a ride with them, And as they were driving under
a door post, his head got stuck between the door
posts and that that priage. My father carried him for
(31:12):
about fifteen twenty minutes, ran with him to the nearby
ambulance and by the time they arrived he had died.
Speaker 1 (31:20):
I mean, I'm sure it was awful, but what was
that moment like for your family?
Speaker 3 (31:26):
A kind of utter devastation. Obviously, especially for my mother,
they were the kind of sense of almost a rage
about what had occurred. And I think one of the
most significant things that happened in that story is that
after my brother was killed, both my mother and my father,
(31:50):
independently of each other, decided to forgive the soldier. They
sought also the soldier and to talk to him so
that it doesn't remain simply something that happened within their
own selves, but became a gifted that they offered to him.
It was most incredibly freeing for them at the same time,
(32:14):
especially for my mother, to transcend the inner rage, to
transcend this deep sorrow that ripped her. It was one
of the most difficult things that she had done.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
One of the biggest insights I remember from my initial
conversation with Miroslav was the way his family's experiences helped
him to fully rethink the way he defined the act
of forgiveness.
Speaker 3 (32:39):
Forgiveness has a structure of a gift. Somebody gives something
to somebody else. Now the one who gives is the
one who has been injured. In this case, the one
who receives is the injurer. And what one gives is forgiveness,
and the content of forgiveness is not counting the wrongdoing
(33:03):
that a person has committed against them. You can put
it this way, to unstick the deed from the door.
That's what forgiveness does. Forgiveness is this very arduous process,
at the end of which there is a sense of release,
release from the burden of the internal turmoil, a sense
(33:26):
of having done something that deep down within us many
of us feel is the right thing to do, but
that it is very difficult to do, a kind of
release into new possibilities for the future that precisely this
wrongdoing has robbed us from. I mean, if I think
(33:50):
of my mother's example, it turns us completely backward. We
are fascinated, we are captured. We are held captive by
that which has happened in the past. We returned back
to it, and pretty soon we start living our lives
in such a way that we look not ahead but
through rear view mirror, so that this kind of colonization
(34:12):
of our present, end of our future by the past
is a very troubling and difficult experience, and I think
one of the things that forgiveness does it makes it
possible for us to open and have wide horizon and
not always look into the future filtered through the past.
Life becomes better when we are able to forgive, when
(34:35):
we are able to transcend preoccupation with the self, which
injury often understandably causes. And so this moment of self transcendence,
of transcendence of the self that has been injured and
growing into something that is beyond that which the injured
self is, is a therapeutic as an act itself, and
(34:58):
it has this important positive consequences for the rest of
our lives.
Speaker 1 (35:03):
And so talk about how that's helped your family heal
after your brother's death.
Speaker 3 (35:06):
Well, for my mother in particular, but for both of
mine parents, there was a sense of being able to
turn from the injury to the life it's bits being lived.
And very early in the experience, she was mourning, and
mourning of course closed her within her own world, nothing
(35:28):
else matter than the loss that she had just suffered.
But at the same time she had two kids who
needed her attention, and forgiveness made it possible for her
to shift and to recognize the good which was around her,
to invest herself into the good which was around her,
(35:50):
you know. And in some ways this is really a
strange and a little bit burdensome to think of it
that way. That I, who was then one years old
when that occurred, I have probably benefited from the attention
that was given to me, both by my nanny and
by my other after my brother's death. But it was
(36:12):
for her release into the future, giving of the hope
and possibility to invest herself in something that matters and
that affirms the good. But her experience and my experience
and my study of forgiveness always says that it forgiveness
(36:32):
isn't one time event. You forgive and then you start
moving forward. You always return to it. You forgive, and
then you take back what you have forgiven at moments,
and then you forgive again. You forgive some parts of it,
but not the whole of it. It's a messy process
of forgiveness, and if we're not happy with the messiness
(36:53):
of it, we want to have it clean. We probably
won't ever get to forgiveness. And it's in this messiness,
in this gradual character of forgiveness, that we actually grow
into forgiveness, and forgiveness ends up not being so much
an act as it ends up being a practice.
Speaker 1 (37:13):
What an important insight. Like so many of the other
happiness strategies we talk about in this show, forgiveness is
a practice, a skill that we can build up over
time if we're willing to put the work in. But
as you've heard from our two guests today, the benefits
of airing out all our leftover aggrievances are much more
powerful than we usually expect. Let's face it, we're all
(37:34):
going to get hurt by somebody at some point, but
we only make that hurt worse when we hold onto
our pain, letting grudges blot out all the good things
we still have in life. So this springtime, why not
take a look at the grievances big and small that
might be sitting there in the back of your emotional closet.
Why not ask yourself how much lighter you'd feel if
you cleared out all that unnecessary junk suffering. Why not
(37:57):
give yourself the gift of forgiveness. In our next episode
in this new season on Spring Cleaning your well Being,
we'll turn back again to the Happiness Lab archive. We'll
get some throwback insights about six sucessful strategies for clearing
out our bad habits, and we'll here's some evidence based
tips to make new space for the healthier kinds of
goals that we all want to pursue.
Speaker 4 (38:18):
When you observe people when they are being effective at
controlling their behavior and doing the right thing, they're not
exerting willpower. What people do is they set up the
situations around them to make it easy to repeat the
desired behavior. We don't realize how much of that we
(38:43):
really could harness if we just knew how it worked.
Speaker 1 (38:48):
That's all next time in our special spring cleaning season
of the Happiness Lab with meet doctor Laurie Santos
Pushkin Hey, Happiness Lab listeners, It's finally spring, a season
that's all about renewal and new beginnings and of course
spring cleaning. As the weather gets a little warmer, we
naturally get the itch to begin rejuvenating. This is the
(00:36):
time of year when we say yes to clearing out
our closets and refreshing our homes. It does feel great
to freshen up our physical spaces, but could we take
a similar approach to refreshing our well being? Could we
turn that spring cleaning urge towards proving our junkie habits
or sweeping out our negative thought patterns. We usually think
of January first and the start of the new year
(00:57):
as the time for goals like these, but studies have
shown that the beginning of spring is also a great
time for a happiness restart. Take one of my favorite
studies by my friend, the psychologist Katie Milkman, cruited a
group of people who said they had a personal goal
that they'd been putting off for a while. She then
offered them the chance to receive a formal reminder that
it was finally time to get started. Half the participants
(01:20):
were offered this formal reminder on some random day of
the year, but the other half was offered that reminder
on a day that felt like a new beginning, the
first day of spring. What did Katie find Well, more
than three times as many people wanted to tackle their
goal on the first day of spring rather than on
some random day. I love these results because they show
that our minds are always on the lookout for what
(01:41):
Katie calls temporal fresh starts, those special moments during the
year when our motivation to make positive changes gets a boost.
So in this new season of the Happiness Lab, we'll
be harnessing the motivational power of springtime. We're going to
apply the spring cleaning energy that we take to our
closets to all the stuff that's cluttering up our minds.
Over the next few episodes, we'll be exploring how you
(02:03):
can freshen up your happiness strategies, tidy up your busy schedules,
and purge all your harmful belief. Yes, and in honor
of true spring cleaning, we'll be doing a bit of
our own closet refresh as we go back into the
Happiness Lab archive to find old school episodes and insights
that you might have missed. And in this first episode
of our new spring cleaning season, I'm going to recommend
(02:24):
that you start out by airing out your resentments. Today
we're going to hear about the mental cleansing power of
forgiveness right after the Happiness Lab returns from these quick
words from our sponsors. Grievances, they're pretty much part of
(02:50):
human nature. When people hurt us or say mean stuff,
the pain they cause tends to stick around, often for
a long while. We might even spend years feeling angry
or betrayed. But in the spirit of spring cleaning our happiness,
what if you chose to drop each and every one
of your painful grievances through the power of forgiveness. Luckily
(03:10):
we have just the guest to help you get started
on that journey.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
Well, Hi, I'm Fred direct to Stamford Forgiveness Projects, and
I Todd at Stamford for decades.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
Fred is doctor Fred Luskin, a psychologist and counselor who
spent decades studying the psychological effects of forgiveness. Fred studies
people who've survived bitter relationship breakdowns, physical assaults, and violent conflicts,
as well as people who've had the usual tiny sorts
of fights with their neighbors or coworkers, and in all
(03:41):
these cases, he finds that forgiveness can be an unexpected
path to peace. But Fred's not just a scholar of forgiveness.
He's also experienced the positive effects of this practice firsthand.
It's often said that all research is mesearch. Fred admits
that this adage is definitely true.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
In his case, a very close friend betrayed and abandoned me. Oh,
I'm so sorry. I simply did not have the skills
to cope with it. I developed an agitated depression. I
kept busy, I moved, I became so much less hopeful.
I had a wife at that time and a child,
(04:22):
and I could no longer see the beauty of that.
And I functioned. I mean, I was in the world.
I was working, but not well. One day my wife
came to me and she said, Fred, I love you.
I just like you less. And it was a kick
in the ass. And I started to look at what
the hell was I doing ruining years, And I stumbled
(04:46):
upon two very simple things. One, I could be grateful
for what I had or complain about what I don't.
And second, I had been trained as a cognitive therapist,
but I didn't use it on myself until that moment,
and those two things helped me let go and developed
the Stanford Forgiveness Project.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
And what's the Stanford Forgiveness Project?
Speaker 2 (05:10):
I did my dissertation unforgiveness. We got a big grant
from the Templeton people to research forgiveness. I did work
in Columbia and Sierra Leone. We brought people from Northern Ireland,
I mean just all over the place. Because I'm at
Stanford and Stanford has such a good name, my work
(05:34):
was publicized in a way that I had an opportunity
to talk about forgiveness literally all over the world. And
now I'm back again at the very end of my career,
trying to do a little more research to show that
this stuff has value.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
To prepare for my interview with Fred, I read up
on the Stanford Forgiveness Project and all of Fred's work
with people who were caught up in the brutal conflicts
in Northern Ireland. I found one story particularly moving. It
involved a woman named Patrician McGee. Patrician's brother was beaten
to death in the early nineties. His killers were caught,
but soon freed from jail. They wound up living not
(06:12):
too far from Patrician's home. Could you imagine having your
brother's murderers living up the street from you, just going
about their daily life as if nothing had happened. That
level of perceived injustice took a huge psychological toll on Patrician.
She felt isolated and depressed. She couldn't even talk about
the situation without falling apart. At first, she was reluctant
(06:33):
to join Fred's forgiveness class. She feared having to talk
about her brother's killers, but that's not what Fred's program required.
In class, Patrician met other Irish women who had also
lost loved ones to violence, and together they worked through
their feelings. Afterwards, Fred measured the women's levels of depression, anger,
and perceived stress. He also surveyed the degree of pain
(06:55):
they felt over their loss. He found that the women's
scores improved dramatically, and they weren't just feeling better. They
reported having fewer headaches, less back pain, and even better sleep.
Patrician was initially worried about the act of forgiveness, but
the process of airing out her pain transformed her. She
was even able to talk about her brother without being
(07:15):
reduced to tears. Examples like these are so powerful, But
what does Fred's process entail. What's the kind of forgiveness
Fred is recommending that we all pursue.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
There's a couple of definitions of forgiveness, one more webster like,
you know, to give up resentment and to forswear holding
on to bitterness. Our definition is making peace with the
word no. And this came from literally years of working
(07:50):
with so many people and hearing so much suffering and
so much angst that we tried to look for what
was the common denominator of all the suffering that we heard,
and what we came to with everyone there was saying
I didn't get something I wanted, and sometimes what I
(08:13):
wanted I wanted desperately and I got no. And I
am unwilling to let go of that no to make peace.
I am going to complain till hell freeze is over
that I deserved a Yes, we watched and realized that
that was kind of a unifying thing around all the
(08:38):
variety of stories and complaints that we heard. So by
evolution of that is that forgiveness I now define is
simply being at peace with your life right now, right
here in total I can be okay.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
I think misconception we have about forgiveness is that you
have to connect with the person that you're forgiving. Can
we have forgiveness without that moment of reconciliation with the
person that roberta.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
The way we went through that was very simple. Can
you forgive a dead person? The answer is yes. So
that's the answer to your question. You can be married,
your partner can have an affair. You can reconcile and
you can go home to them every day and hate them.
(09:29):
Or they can have an affair. You can completely release
them from blame and bitterness. You can open your heart
back up to life and tell them we're done. So
you can have complete forgiveness with no reconciliation. They're not
the same concept.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
I've also heard you talk about how forgiveness is about
a change in your story. What do you mean by that?
Speaker 2 (09:54):
That's another I guess learned clinical kind of thing. I mean,
I started so long ago as a boring academic, and
I had these ideas about what forgiveness and wasn't and
then talking to likexillions of people who had horrible things happened,
(10:16):
and others who got bent out of shape because someone
had built a fence an inch and a half onto
their property line. What I came to see that they
actually brought was not what happened, but their story. They
brought a story about forgiveness or unforgiveness, and what we
(10:40):
were trying to do was help them create a different story.
So many people came into forgiveness with this sense of
you forgive and forget. What we understood was you forgive
by remembering differently. You don't forget. You can't forget. We've
(11:02):
I've dealt with many, many people who have had family
members murdered or you know, people shocked by ken year
olds with machine guns. You don't forget. But if you're
lucky and good, you can remember it differently. You reframe
it enough, and you quiet down your arousal so that
(11:23):
you tell a different story and you believe a different story.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
I love that you brought up this idea that forgiveness
isn't forgetting, because I think that's a misconception that people
have right that you need to forget the wrong or
maybe trust the person.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
Can I tell you something that you may find peculiar
at this point, if I work with people, groups, individuals
at least a third of what we do is helping
them understand what forgiveness is and is not. But there
is so much wrong understanding, and even so much hostility.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
Yeah, it almost feels like sometimes I hear this idea
that forgiveness is for suckers. Yeah, it's weak. You know why?
Explain why that's wrong to the listeners.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
Well, if you view forgiveness as condoning bad behavior, then
it seems weak. But if you view forgiveness and I'll
give you two simple streams around this. One is fully
grieving your wounds so that at the end of the
(12:29):
grieving process you can release that suffering, then you see
that forgiveness is not such a weak thing. It takes
real strength to feel the pain of being the human
being and releasing that pain when appropriate. That takes real strength.
(12:50):
The other thing is I mean, having been a meditator
or even as a therapist for decades, most people don't
get better by avoiding pain. There are a lot of
people stuck in perseverative anger and endless none of them
(13:11):
are appropriately feeling it, holding that suffering, knowing that something
wrong has happened, and letting go and moving on. That's
not weakness.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
That's braf.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
That's the right word. It's brave. So when we teach
that's what we do, you're being brave, You're not being
weak at all.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
But it is hard, right, And I think the fact
that it's hard means we need to talk about the
benefits of forgiveness or maybe what are the bad things
that happen when we don't forgive?
Speaker 2 (13:45):
So what's the value of it? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (13:47):
Or so what are the consequences for our mind and
our body if we don't forgive?
Speaker 2 (13:51):
The first part is just because something is hard, at
some level, we might benefit from growing up, yes, and
not resisting everything that's hard. It's hard in part because one,
we have untrained minds which do not know how to
(14:15):
separate wheat from chef, between the chatter and maybe more
centered contemplative thinking. So anything that asks us to do
that is hard. Secondly, forgiveness is hard because we're acknowledging
a world where painful things can happen and that we
(14:38):
are vulnerable. We are absolutely vulnerable, and so instead of
opening to that vulnerability, we create this massive complex of no,
stop it, it's wrong. I can't take it all the distortions.
But it is very hard. For a human being to
(15:01):
admit that they can't protect themselves or their loved ones
from certain things. So that's the hard part, the forgiveness
piece of moving through it without coming at the end
with bitterness, and maybe even a story that talks about
the growth. That leads to less stress, it leads to
(15:25):
more hopefulness. We've shown that in our research for people
who have been really badly wounded. It leads to less depression,
it reduces pain, and that's in part because the pain
systems between emotional pain and physical pain. Once that becomes chronic,
(15:46):
that joined. So forgiveness is a release we stop making
our life worse.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
And so you mentioned in your origin story this kind
of awful story of being betrayed, but it seems like
you also came to forgiveness more of a spiritual practice too.
You talk about being an old hippie, and so I
want to see how that fits into the forgiveness story.
Speaker 2 (16:08):
I started the project, but my advisor, he was very
helpful because he had decades of contact and I was
just a graduate student. We had a discussion as to
whether we wanted to do only a secular training or
a religious training as well, because we didn't know enough.
So I went around. I started to talk to religiously
(16:32):
oriented people, and they were almost impossible to engage with
because they were so rigid on their religion being like
the only religion. So I would give talks a little
bit to Christian places and then say, we like what
you do. There's not enough Jesus. And I give talks
(16:53):
to Buddhist places and that's great, but there's not enough Buddhias.
Why are you talking about other people. I went to
yoga centers. It was like, wonderful, but yoga says this,
and you said that. So we dropped the religious thing
pretty quickly. It was like living in the United States
now between Red states and blue states, where there's such
(17:13):
a mistrust and such a righteousness in any way. I personally
and my mentor had a meditation practice when we started,
and a very simple spiritual belief that there's something essential
(17:34):
and unchanging and similar that joins everything. I don't teach
that directly, but it informs how we see things.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
I found Fred's point about religion really interesting. Many religious
faiths recommend that their followers practice forgiveness, but hardly any
of us think deeply about what that act really means.
After the break, Fred will share some examples of real
world forgiveness. He'll also give us some tips on how
we can start forgiving right away. The Happiness Lab will
be right back. Doctor Fred Luskin has run workshops as
(18:21):
part of the Stanford Forgiveness Project for decades. He says
it takes quite a mind shift to truly understand what
forgiveness entails and the benefits it can offer us, but
he does have a few practical tips for getting there.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
One is, start small practice on your own before you
do anything, like when you're in the shower, just talk.
Can I forgive them? What might that look like? What
would that mean? And Third, the best place to start
is where it really matters with people who you love
and love you, because that's the most important work you
(18:58):
have to do, is to build your relationships and maintain them.
And there's good research that forgiveness is at the heart
of marriage maintaining itself. Okay, that's the first stream. The
second is the practices are very easy. Probably the first
and most important practice is gratitude. If you can not
(19:23):
just look at what the world didn't give you, but
balance it with what the world did give you. Then
maybe you can see things more clearly. So that's one.
Second is some kind of cognitive piece. The simplest is
just to repeat to yourself the rolling stones. I can't
always get what I want. I mean that, as simple
(19:47):
as you can make it. I can't always get what
I want. Third is what we talked about before, simply
try out different stories. One of the ways I kept
myself miserable was telling the same story over and over
and over and over, and then you think it's like
(20:09):
your Moses carrying up the tablets rather than just a
cranky pain in the butt. And the fourth piece is
in understanding that forgiveness is about the past or the
grievance is about the past. Your life is in the present,
so you need to have more of your stories, your focus,
(20:31):
your awareness on your present and creating a future than
about what didner didn't go right in the past. Those
are four incredibly simple practices. When we combine that with
what forgiveness is and isn't, many people take that and
make improvement.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
You've also talked about how forgiveness is embodied, like using
the breath to forget. Oh absolutely, So what are some
strategies we can pick up on there.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
I mean, I'm sure we're in alignment with disconsidering what
you teach and what I teach. It's hard to fully
separate the mind, the body, whatever the soul is our emotions.
You know there's a brain and the guy. We don't
have accurate words to understand all the linkages, but we
(21:22):
know that there is a link between mind and body
and between thoughts and emotions. So the two things that
we have found really help people to forgive is to
remind them that when europeset come down or calm down,
for at least me had two pieces to it. One
(21:44):
is the simplest anchor in your center. Take a couple
of breadths, activate a different thing than the flight or
flight response, and learn some ability to manage your breathing.
Second is touch something positive, love or kindness, goodness, whatever,
(22:05):
and hold it, just hold it inside. And when when
you practice that, as your body arouses, you can counter
condition the stress response. So it's simple, but that's often
how we start. So let me tell you one story
about that. We brought men and women from Northern Ireland
(22:27):
who had had family members murdered in their violence. We
brought Catholics and Protestants, and they came and about I
don't know how long into it they were telling their story,
and we took a break and we brought them over
to the window at one of the buildings at Stanford
on the fifth floor. And these people, you know, they
(22:49):
had all had horrible things and they had just flown
in from Belfast. And what we had them do is
open their arms, pulled over the windows, open and said,
feel the sun's rays and welcome it. Welcome that warmth,
welcome it. Open to yourself to it, and just recognize
(23:09):
that you can do this at any time. And when
you do that, your nervous system quiets and in gentles
and you're not the same aggrieved person. It's a body
experience too.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
You mentioned your experience in the Origin story about feeling betrayed.
During that period of feeling betrayed, what was going on
for you physically mentally? You talked about how your wife
are noticing asshole.
Speaker 2 (23:39):
I would like rope in people from the street and
say you wouldn't believe what this jerk did, always talking
about how bad he was. Regularly. I sat my wife
down and said, you wouldn't believe what this jerk did.
Poor me. She would tell me things about how life
(24:00):
is not that bad. I would rebuck them. I took
my friends that were loyal and took them for granted.
I would go into places of beauty and miss it.
So those actions created in me a sense of alienation,
(24:24):
a inability to experience that much joy, and demanded of
my wife and my friends who could still tolerate me
great forbearance.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
And I think everybody who's listening right now can relate
a little bit right because when you're in your own
head and you're feeling so aggrieved, you don't treat the
people around you very well.
Speaker 2 (24:47):
Do you know. One of the reasons that I could
do this was when I started teaching forgiveness. And at
that point there were maybe three studies in the field,
so it barely existed. I could sit with people who
had the most awful things happened to them. I couldn't
(25:09):
relate to what had happened, but I could relate to
the suffering that they were causing themselves, and that empathy
and whatever. That's how the Forgiveness project flourished because I
wasn't interested in the content, like I knew that there
(25:30):
was so many ways that people can be hurt, but
the content wasn't the issue. What I saw was the
process because I had done it myself. So I was
like one of the sponsors in AA where I knew
every piece of bullshit that people would put out. I
knew every crevice of denial and lying and self absorption.
(25:57):
I had been to everyone and milked it for all
it was worth. That's where my empathy and that's where
my strength came in.
Speaker 1 (26:07):
And so what's on the other side you can get
to forgiveness? What's the opposite of being an asshole? For
you and maybe for everyone you've taught to forget it?
Speaker 2 (26:14):
If I can do it, they can do it. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
No, just like what emotions are on the other side
of getting past it.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
Whether emotions are on the other sign, They're not just emotions.
There's cognitions with the emotions. The biggest is efficacy is
a sense of peace on the one side and less
fear on the other because I no longer was so
(26:43):
frightened about what people could do to me. I recognized
that I had been through a crucible and I had
come out the other side. So there was less fear
and more peace. But there was also a cognitive thing
a friend. You can do this so you don't have
(27:04):
to run away from people. I had developed mistrust and
bitterness with Fred. You don't need that so much because
you're not so weak. The second was a deeper appreciation
for what was good because once you've handled what is
(27:25):
a for me at that time, a devastating wound. This
was my closest friend, almost a brother. I mean, good
news is we're the best of friends again. One hundred
percent forgiveness, one hundred percent reconciliation. It's now water under
the bridge. It means nothing. There's not a ripple of anything.
(27:49):
But it took quite a bit to get there. But
I became more thankful and more appreciative of when people
do good to me. But I realized that that was
what forgiveness facilitated, because I could now respond to all
(28:12):
that was there that my wound had obscured. So the
metaphor created for that was a grievance. Was like in
eclipse of the sun. So you have the sun it's shining.
All of a sudden, I put my friend there. There's
no sunshine anymore. I blame my friend. Even though the
(28:36):
sun didn't go anywhere. All I have to do is
walk a mile and the sun's there. That's how I
defined what forgiveness is. You take your clips away, you
move away, and the sun never went anywhere. So the
beauty never went anywhere, the love never went anywhere. All
(28:56):
the world's goodness still intact, but you can see it again.
Speaker 1 (29:01):
I absolutely love Fred's metaphor here that forgiveness can give
you the opportunity to see all the hidden warmth and
beauty that never really went anywhere. But what does it
really look like to find that warmth and beauty in practice?
To find out, We'll turn to the Happiness Lab archives
and one of my favorite stories of just how tough
and rewarding true forgiveness can be. You'll get a chance
(29:23):
to rehear that powerful story when the Happiness Lab returns
from the break.
Speaker 3 (29:41):
I can hear you. Yeah, that sounds good.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
This is my Yale colleague Miroslav Wolf, so.
Speaker 3 (29:47):
I think we are on we are recording.
Speaker 1 (29:51):
Miroslav is a theologian at the Yale Divinity School and
the author of Free of Charge, Giving and Forgiving in
a Culture Strip of Grace. Miroslav joined me on the
Happiness Lab a few years ago for an episode on
the power of forgiveness and his experience growing up in
the former socialist federal republic like Yugoslavia. I still find
(30:11):
myself regularly thinking back to his family story. So in
the spirit of our new spring cleaning season, I decided
to pull out his interview from deep in the Happiness
Lab closets and we share this whole family tale of
both awful tragedy and the healing power of forgiveness.
Speaker 3 (30:28):
My older brother was five at that time, was one
of the liveliest kids in the neighborhood. He loved to
connect with people, and in the vicinity of where we lived,
the soldiers were stationed, and he befriended those soldiers. They
loved him. They were his soldiers, and he was so
proud of them. And often what would happen is that
(30:50):
they would play with him. And at one point they
took him driving in the coarse drone carriage who have
a ride with them, And as they were driving under
a door post, his head got stuck between the door
posts and that that priage. My father carried him for
(31:12):
about fifteen twenty minutes, ran with him to the nearby
ambulance and by the time they arrived he had died.
Speaker 1 (31:20):
I mean, I'm sure it was awful, but what was
that moment like for your family?
Speaker 3 (31:26):
A kind of utter devastation. Obviously, especially for my mother,
they were the kind of sense of almost a rage
about what had occurred. And I think one of the
most significant things that happened in that story is that
after my brother was killed, both my mother and my father,
(31:50):
independently of each other, decided to forgive the soldier. They
sought also the soldier and to talk to him so
that it doesn't remain simply something that happened within their
own selves, but became a gifted that they offered to him.
It was most incredibly freeing for them at the same time,
(32:14):
especially for my mother, to transcend the inner rage, to
transcend this deep sorrow that ripped her. It was one
of the most difficult things that she had done.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
One of the biggest insights I remember from my initial
conversation with Miroslav was the way his family's experiences helped
him to fully rethink the way he defined the act
of forgiveness.
Speaker 3 (32:39):
Forgiveness has a structure of a gift. Somebody gives something
to somebody else. Now the one who gives is the
one who has been injured. In this case, the one
who receives is the injurer. And what one gives is forgiveness,
and the content of forgiveness is not counting the wrongdoing
(33:03):
that a person has committed against them. You can put
it this way, to unstick the deed from the door.
That's what forgiveness does. Forgiveness is this very arduous process,
at the end of which there is a sense of release,
release from the burden of the internal turmoil, a sense
(33:26):
of having done something that deep down within us many
of us feel is the right thing to do, but
that it is very difficult to do, a kind of
release into new possibilities for the future that precisely this
wrongdoing has robbed us from. I mean, if I think
(33:50):
of my mother's example, it turns us completely backward. We
are fascinated, we are captured. We are held captive by
that which has happened in the past. We returned back
to it, and pretty soon we start living our lives
in such a way that we look not ahead but
through rear view mirror, so that this kind of colonization
(34:12):
of our present, end of our future by the past
is a very troubling and difficult experience, and I think
one of the things that forgiveness does it makes it
possible for us to open and have wide horizon and
not always look into the future filtered through the past.
Life becomes better when we are able to forgive, when
(34:35):
we are able to transcend preoccupation with the self, which
injury often understandably causes. And so this moment of self transcendence,
of transcendence of the self that has been injured and
growing into something that is beyond that which the injured
self is, is a therapeutic as an act itself, and
(34:58):
it has this important positive consequences for the rest of
our lives.
Speaker 1 (35:03):
And so talk about how that's helped your family heal
after your brother's death.
Speaker 3 (35:06):
Well, for my mother in particular, but for both of
mine parents, there was a sense of being able to
turn from the injury to the life it's bits being lived.
And very early in the experience, she was mourning, and
mourning of course closed her within her own world, nothing
(35:28):
else matter than the loss that she had just suffered.
But at the same time she had two kids who
needed her attention, and forgiveness made it possible for her
to shift and to recognize the good which was around her,
to invest herself into the good which was around her,
(35:50):
you know. And in some ways this is really a
strange and a little bit burdensome to think of it
that way. That I, who was then one years old
when that occurred, I have probably benefited from the attention
that was given to me, both by my nanny and
by my other after my brother's death. But it was
(36:12):
for her release into the future, giving of the hope
and possibility to invest herself in something that matters and
that affirms the good. But her experience and my experience
and my study of forgiveness always says that it forgiveness
(36:32):
isn't one time event. You forgive and then you start
moving forward. You always return to it. You forgive, and
then you take back what you have forgiven at moments,
and then you forgive again. You forgive some parts of it,
but not the whole of it. It's a messy process
of forgiveness, and if we're not happy with the messiness
(36:53):
of it, we want to have it clean. We probably
won't ever get to forgiveness. And it's in this messiness,
in this gradual character of forgiveness, that we actually grow
into forgiveness, and forgiveness ends up not being so much
an act as it ends up being a practice.
Speaker 1 (37:13):
What an important insight. Like so many of the other
happiness strategies we talk about in this show, forgiveness is
a practice, a skill that we can build up over
time if we're willing to put the work in. But
as you've heard from our two guests today, the benefits
of airing out all our leftover aggrievances are much more
powerful than we usually expect. Let's face it, we're all
(37:34):
going to get hurt by somebody at some point, but
we only make that hurt worse when we hold onto
our pain, letting grudges blot out all the good things
we still have in life. So this springtime, why not
take a look at the grievances big and small that
might be sitting there in the back of your emotional closet.
Why not ask yourself how much lighter you'd feel if
you cleared out all that unnecessary junk suffering. Why not
(37:57):
give yourself the gift of forgiveness. In our next episode
in this new season on Spring Cleaning your well Being,
we'll turn back again to the Happiness Lab archive. We'll
get some throwback insights about six sucessful strategies for clearing
out our bad habits, and we'll here's some evidence based
tips to make new space for the healthier kinds of
goals that we all want to pursue.
Speaker 4 (38:18):
When you observe people when they are being effective at
controlling their behavior and doing the right thing, they're not
exerting willpower. What people do is they set up the
situations around them to make it easy to repeat the
desired behavior. We don't realize how much of that we
(38:43):
really could harness if we just knew how it worked.
Speaker 1 (38:48):
That's all next time in our special spring cleaning season
of the Happiness Lab with meet doctor Laurie Santos
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