IONS Review #65 • May 2003

Red-Hot Rock

Barbara McNeill | IONS Noetic Sciences Review | IONS Review #65 |

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Research shows that forgiveness correlates with physical and emotional health. Spiritual traditions encourage the practice of forgiveness. It seems likely that "positive" emotions such as forgiveness nurture a path toward greater health and a deeper consciousness of connection, while other emotions such as resentment block or forestall movement along that path. Even so, many individuals clutch the rock of unforgiveness. How is it possible to forgive if one feels mistreated? In this article, we examine some highly charged situations of abuse in which brave people demonstrate that forgiveness is indeed possible. --ed.

Tug-Of-War

Everett Worthington is an experienced, respected leader in the emerging field of forgiveness practice. Ten years after initiating this work, he was severely tested when his mother was brutally murdered in her own home on New Year's Eve in 1995.

Worthington recalls the event:

Mama had been struck three times with a crowbar. Blood was everywhere. The assailant had also violated her with a wine bottle and then completely trashed the house. Rage spewed forth. I heard myself say "I'd like to have him alone in a room with a baseball bat for thirty minutes. I'd beat his brains out."

I knew the arguments in both the do-forgive and don't-forgive stories. As I paced the bedroom [that night], though, I didn't know which story to listen to. Lots of thoughts flashed through my mind. . . . I didn't evaluate them like Mr Spock or Data [of Star Trek]. I considered point and counterpoint, but my thoughts were jumbled. On the whole, I thought that I ought to forgive. Even the mental picture of a blood-soaked carpet couldn't dislodge that conviction.

Honestly, though, I did not want to forgive. Even if I came around to wanting to forgive, I did not know if I could forgive.

At the emotional crest of that difficult, dark night, I wanted relief from my anger. I needed a rock that would steady my reeling views of the world and myself. I wanted to forgive if it would help me deal with my pain, anger, hurt, and sadness. If only I could forgive, I thought, I could have peace in my heart. I wanted a powerful emotional chemical that could neutralize the acid of hate and rage that gnawed at me.

Worthington went through his own forgiveness process, drawing on all he had learned in his ten years of helping others, as a clinical psychologist and researcher. Here he shares some thoughts on the "surprise of forgiving":

All our positive emotions, such as love, affection, empathy, compassion, pity, and sympathy, are in a huge tug-of-war with the negative emotions such as unforgiveness. To win the tug-of-war requires hard emotional work. We cannot see how close we are to the precipice of forgiving. When we step over the edge, though, our momentum pulls the negative emotions into a cool bath of forgiveness. We are surprised by joy. Love is possible again.

When we're tortured by unforgiveness and finally are able to grant forgiveness, a transforming surprise occurs. Forgiving is like a flood of light at sunrise. Darkness has covered the sky, but the sun suddenly peeks over the horizon, illuminating giant clouds that stretch above the horizon. Billowy clouds are lit with orange, red, and purple. The sky is afire with colors. This is the relief of forgiveness after wrestling with unforgiveness.

Everett Worthington, PhD, is Chair of the Department of Psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is the executive director of "A Campaign for Forgiveness Research" (www.forgiving.org), which, in collaboration with the John Templeton Foundation, has raised funding for 29 research projects on forgiveness.

An Experience Of Peace

Fred Luskin is director and cofounder of the Stanford University Forgiveness Project, which has conducted the most extensive interpersonal forgiveness-training research to date. The project replicates on a larger scale an earlier study that established the effectiveness of a forgiveness process that Luskin himself had developed. He offered an overview of this process, as well as research results, at a recent IONS symposium. Fred will be a presenter at our biennial conference September 17-21, 2003. Specifics of the process are detailed in his recent book Forgive For Good. (HarperSanFrancisco, 2001)

Over the years, I have seen many people who have trouble forgiving, and most tell me the major problem was that no one showed them how. After working with thousands of people who have been hurt and have struggled to forgive, I am convinced that the ability to get over these wounds is crucial to health, both emotional and physical. For me, forgiveness means much more than the end of a grievance. Forgiveness has become my life's work.

I define forgiveness as the experience of peace and understanding that can be felt in the present moment. You forgive by challenging the rigid rules you have for other people's behavior and by focusing on the good things in your life as opposed to the bad. Forgiveness does not mean forgetting or denying that painful things occurred. Forgiveness is the powerful assertion that bad things will not ruin your today even though they may have spoiled your past.

Four Stages Of Healing

I have observed people going through four stages on the journey to becoming a forgiving person. In the first stage, you experience a loss in your life, feel angry or hurt, and tend to justify your negative emotions. At this stage you are filled with self-justified anger or hurt. At some point in your life you were wounded, and still feel mad or hurt by the person who wronged you. You blame the person committing the wrong for how you are feeling. It is their action and not your choice of response that you determine to be the cause of your distress. There is usually both active and submerged anger as well as a great deal of pain.

The second stage emerges when, after feeling upset with someone for a while, you realize that your hurt and anger do not feel good. You become concerned about your emotional balance as well as your physical health. Some people, after feeling upset for a while, begin to think about how to repair the damage to the relationship. Others simply decide that they have thought about a past grievance enough and it is time to move on.

Whatever the motivation at this second stage, you take steps to lessen the impact the grievance has on your life and relationships. You may try to see the problem from the other person's point of view, or you may decide to minimize the problem by saying it was no big deal. In any case, after an extended period, you are no longer actively aggrieved.

In the third stage of becoming a forgiving person, you remember how good it felt that last time you were able to forgive. That forgiveness experience could have taken place fifteen minutes ago, when you felt peaceful after a meditation, or two years ago. In this third stage when you notice a grievance forming you employ some useful practices [such as the PERT or HEAL methods detailed in Forgive for Good]. This third stage comes after you have seen the results of forgiveness in action and choose to let go of the new interpersonal grievance quickly. You are aware that the length of time you experience a situation as a grievance is primarily up to you.

The fourth stage of becoming a forgiving person is the most difficult and possibly the most powerful. At this stage, you simply become a forgiving person. It comes as you make the decision to forgive first and let many troubling things go. At this point forgiveness means you take the opportunity to forgive whenever you can. You understand how common it is to be hurt. You look to make peace. You look to give people the benefit of the doubt. You become a person who actively understands the power of forgiveness.

At all stages you have the choice to forgive. At the second stage you choose forgiveness once in order to hurt less. At the third you choose it daily to hurt less. At the fourth stage you become forgiving so your choice is already made. At all stages you choose forgiveness to experience more peace and healing.

Forgiveness, like other positive emotions such as hope, compassion, and appreciation, is a natural expression of being human. They exist within a deep part of us. Like many things, they require practice to perfect. When you practice these positive feelings they become stronger and easier to find.

Loss Of A Child

Part of my research involved a small group of people, both Catholic and Protestant, from NorthernIreland. We view this work as a way of helping people in strife-torn countries make peace and begin a dialogue with each other. This project began with a contact from Reverend Byron Bland, a minister who knew firsthand of the deep need of victims in Northern Ireland to recover from their personal tragedies. He knew these tragedies were the result of years of religious and politically motivated violence. He saw with his own eyes the damage that hurt and grievances were doing to individuals, families, and communities.

I accepted Byron's invitation to try my forgiveness training, on a pilot basis, with five deeply hurt women from Northern Ireland. Each had lost a son to murder; for some, that murder had taken place as long as twenty years ago. But we found that no matter how much time passed since the murder, the women still suffered tremendous pain. To make matters worse, these women felt that their need to heal had been ignored.

In January 2000, the women arrived at our workshop facilities on the Stanford University campus in California. On arrival, their stories of loss were heartbreaking. One woman described how her son had been kidnapped on his way to work. He was ushered to a shallow grave with his hands tied behind his back and shot in the head. His body was then hidden for twenty-one years. I can only imagine the horror a mother must feel knowing how her child's life was taken.

Another mother told how her son worked in a restaurant fixing platters of fish and chips. One day a gunman walked up to the takeout window and started shooting. Her son was shot seven times, and died on the spot. A third woman said that her son was fatally shot while with his childhood best friend. The woman and her son were Protestants while the friend was a Roman Catholic. The two friends were sitting in a pub when a Protestant Loyalist rushed in and shot both men dead. A fourth woman's son was a policeman and was killed in the line of duty.

Each of the women's stories is gruesome and sickening. Listening to them, one could only wonder how people could be so cruel. I sat with these mothers and saw firsthand how devastating the loss of a child is.

A Cause For Hope

Each participated in a week-long process of forgiveness training that had proven effective with individuals suffering from less severe trauma. Results were evaluated by scientific measurements developed through previous workshop experiments. Outcomes from this initial HOPE project speak to the efficacy of this approach to forgiveness training. The proof is seen not only in the positive results from the scientific measurements, but also in the changed stories the women told about their loss and their lives. Each learned how to tell a different story, one that allowed them a degree of peace and a renewed sense of hope.

Unlike most other studies, we did not use a comparison group. We did not want these brave participants to feel their suffering was being used primarily for the advancement of science. By scientific standards my results are, therefore, considered less robust. However, even with that caveat the results we achieved are remarkable.

Feelings of hurt measured at the beginning of the week registered a score near 8.5--on a scale of 1 to 10. At the end of the week of training, their hurt registered a bit over 3.5. When the questionnaires were returned at the six-month follow-up, their hurt score still stood below 4. The change in hurt scores is similar to those obtained in my earlier studies. This is gratifying because these women's wounds were much more grievous than those of earlier participants in this process.

On a second measure, stress, the women showed reductions by almost half from the beginning of the training to the follow-up study six months later. They showed an increase in forgiveness toward the person who committed the murder, about 40 percent at the end of the week of the training. This positive result remained constant at the follow-up evaluation. Depression scores also improved, and they registered significantly more optimism on follow-up assessment.

The positive effects of the Northern Ireland HOPE project exceeded our expectations. We started with women who understandably felt extremely hurt and very angry in their grief. We ended with women who mourned the loss of their children but, through forgiveness, gained a measure of strength with which to cope. As one participant reminded herself, "Life is for the living "Another participant said, "We must move on with the memory of our sons in our hearts."

I still marvel that on each variable, these women showed improvement. I marvel that the forgiveness training worked and the positive effects lasted, even after they returned to Northern Ireland, with a political climate pitting culture against culture.

I do not want to make any claims that these women are completely over their loss. I make no claim that I can heal every person who has suffered tragedy. A child is irreplaceable. After a grievous loss, one's life will never be the same. But each of us has a choice of how to react to the tragedies of our lives. These Irish women were able to calm their emotional distress so that they could find life choices that they may have missed. Each, in her own way, chose to focus on the living and to honor the memory of her dead son by being more hopeful and less angry. They demonstrate the incredible power of human beings to heal from even the most blatant horrors. They reinforce my belief that people can learn to forgive.

Forgiveness is needed not just in the harshest of political environments but in the safest as well. That people who have seen family killed in a bitterly divided society and learned to forgive should give us all hope.

Fred Luskin, PhD, is senior fellow at the Stanford Center on Conflict and Negotiation, and serves as a codirector of the Stanford-Northern Ireland HOPE Project, an ongoing series of workshops and research projects that investigate the effectiveness of his forgiveness methods on the victims of political violence. His website can be found at learningtoforgive.com

Organs Of Forgiveness

K E Y

1. Love, joy, happiness; heart (fire; summer)
2. Openness, fairness; spleen (earth; Indian summer)
3. Courage, righteousness; lungs (metal; autumn)
4. Gentleness, stillness; kidneys (water; winter)
5. Kindness, generosity; liver (wood; spring)

The "Universal Tao System" is a practice of body, mind, and spirit. Its creator, Master Mantak Chia, comments on how our inner organs contribute to a physiology of forgiveness and transformation.

Perhaps the primary key to any process of self-transformation is the willingness to forgive oneself, as it opens the heart and sets in motion and frees the flow of ch'i both from within and from outside.

Yet, forgiveness is not an act for once and for all, but a primary key in a continuous process of turning inward and practicing inner observation.

The refusal or inability to forgive, and thereby to love oneself and others, may be said to affect all our internal organs, affecting their chemistry and inhibiting cooperation and balance. Frequently this refusal is rooted in a victim consciousness, which sets into motion negative emotions that tend to reinforce each other. This victim consciousness often has its roots in a presumption of betrayal that results in the heart closing, as others are made accountable for one's own negativity and suffering.

As a result there is a refusal even to consider looking inward, as the source of misfortune is placed outward. Thus the heart's natural tendency towards love and compassion is obstructed, and the wound is cultivated to legitimize one's withdrawal from life. All traumas first of all settle deeply in our organs from where they affect our energy flows. They can be dissolved only with patience and gentleness towards oneself. Only when internal energy is accumulating can it flow outward.

In the Taoist tradition, the strengthening of the organs has a vital role to play in mitigating and achieving control over the negative emotions. Forgiving does not mean that the wound needs to be closed. It may remain, but it is no longer active in generating toxins and preventing positive emotions from growing. Also, forgiving does not mean that one forgets.

That may be too difficult and is not necessary. Only the charge, which activates to toxins, needs to be defused.

--Adapted from Cosmic Fusion (Universal Tao Publications, 2002) by Mantak Chia. © Copyright by North Star Trust. All rights reserved.

Truth And Reconciliation

The establishment of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a pioneering international event. Never before had any country sought to move forward from despotism to democracy both by exposing the atrocities committed in the past, and achieving reconciliation with its former oppressors. Chairman of the Commission Archbishop Desmond Tutu comments:

Forgiveness is not being sentimental. The study of forgiveness has become a growth industry. Whereas previously it was something often dismissed pejoratively as spiritual and religious, now--because of developments such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa--it is gaining attention as an academic discipline studied by psychologists, philosophers, physicians, and theologians. In the United States, there is an International Forgiveness Institute attached to the University of Wisconsin, and the John Templeton Foundation--with others--has started a multimillion- dollar Campaign for Forgiveness Research. Forgiving has even been found to be good for your health.

Forgiving means abandoning your right to pay back the perpetrator in his own coin, but it is a loss that liberates the victim. In the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, we heard people speak of a sense of relief after forgiving. A recent issue of the journal Spirituality and Health had on its front cover a picture of three US ex-servicemen standing in front of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC. One asks, "Have you forgiven those who held you prisoner of war?" "I will never forgive them," replies the other. His mate says: "Then it seems they still have you in prison, don't they?"

Does the victim depend on the culprit's contrition and confession as the precondition for being able to forgive? There is no question that, of course, such a confession is a very great help to the one who wants to forgive; but it is not absolutely indispensable. Jesus did not wait until those who were nailing him to the cross had asked for forgiveness. He was ready, as they drove in the nails, to pray to his Father to forgive them; and he even provided an excuse for what they were doing. If the victim could forgive only when the culprit confessed, then the victim would be locked into the culprit's whim, locked into victimhood, whatever her own attitude or intention. That would be palpably unjust...

[When] the wrongdoer [does confess] and the victim [does forgive], it does not mean that is the end of the process. Most frequently, the wrong has affected the victim in tangible, material ways. Apartheid provided the Whites with enormous benefits and privileges, leaving its victims deprived and exploited. If someone steals my pen and then asks me to forgive him, unless he returns my pen, the sincerity of his contrition and confession will be considered to be nil. Confession, forgiveness, and reparation, wherever feasible, form part of a continuum...

To work for reconciliation is to want to realize God's dream for humanity--when we will know that we are indeed members of one family, bound together in a delicate network of interdependence.

--Adapted from No Future Without Forgiveness by Desmond Tutu, copyright © 1999 by Desmond Tutu. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.Archbishop

Desmond Tutu won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for working toward ending apartheid, and creating a democratic and just society in South Africa. From 1996 to 1998, he led SouthAfrica's Truth and Reconciliation Committee which investigated human rights crimes, and considered amnesty for those who confessed participation in atrocities.