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Frederic Luskin, Ph.D.
Director, Stanford Forgiveness Project
About three years ago, when we first started to get publicity for this, a TV station called me and said, "What is Stanford doing research on forgiveness for? Don't you guys do more important things?" I said, "I have an idea. Go into your office and ask anybody if they have a grudge against anybody else in the office." He called me back ten minutes later and said, "Fred, everybody here hates each other." I said, "That's why I'm teaching them forgiveness."
I'm trying to get people to play nice with each other. When something in life hasn't worked out, many people out of lack of training, intelligence or effort become angry or bitter or withdraw from life. They stop playing nice. I've found in dealing with thousands of people who have been hurt some brutally and some from nothing that they crave some way to get peace back. It's a desire almost as powerful as the desire for food or sex or water or air.
It's not always big things. For me, driving to San Francisco, I remember all the times I've been stuck in traffic. I don't get onto the freeway with, "What a beautiful day." It's, "How much goddamn time will it take today?" That action of mine is unforgiving. It's not keeping myself open to this next day and allowing me the maximal opportunity to have a good experience in the next day. I do that with relationships; I do that with my job; I do that with anything in this past that I haven't resolved to bring myself back to peace. The consequence is a life of chronic, low-level discomfort, separate from the enormous injuries and wounds that some people have suffered.
We have done four research projects. Two of them have involved Catholic and Protestant people from Northern Ireland who have lost family members to political violence. We brought 18 people from Northern Ireland, each of whom had had an immediate family member murdered not just lost, but murdered. We brought sons and brothers and parents. This crucial life skill of learning how to live, knowing that you may not get what you want and sometimes something precious will be taken from you, seems to pose an enormous challenge to many people.
On the other hand, I meet people all the time who have had nothing happen to them, and yet they talk about it as if an atomic bomb had gone off in their backyard. I know a father who would not talk to his sister because she voted for the wrong person for president in 1952. There's got to be a statute of limitations on some level. But shutting people out for no reason is common.
The wonderful thing is that forgiveness can be taught; forgiveness can be learned, and it can even be measured. It has very powerful consequences. In the Irish study that we just completed, we measured levels of stress, anger, hurt, physical well-being and forgiveness. On each and every variable that we measured, the respondents improved, some significantly.
They became less depressed by learning forgiveness for a week at Stanford. They became less stressed, less angry; they became more forgiving. On two levels of physical well-being, they showed pretty remarkable improvement. On symptoms of stress backache, neck-ache, heart palpitations, dizziness, stomach ache they showed a marked improvement. We often don't take into account the pernicious effect of our bitterness. Every time our minds remind ourselves of one of those subjects, we dump certain stress chemicals and biophysical responses that have a corrosive effect.
A researcher in Michigan studied people who have a grudge. She measured, via bio-feedback, blood pressure, heart rate, and muscle tension, and saw that if you just imagined forgiving the person who had hurt you for a period of about 30 seconds, all the physical indicators became less stressed and more coherent. She found that there was an almost instantaneous mind-body response to grievance-forgiveness, grievance-compassion, grievance-empathy.
A researcher in Tennessee looked at that longer term and tracked blood pressure for people when they retold their forgiveness story. Their blood pressure showed distress. It rose while they were telling that story. But if they worked through part of that story and showed greater forgiveness, blood pressure didn't rise so much. A researcher in Wisconsin asked people to fill out questionnaires and saw that when they correlated the degree of forgiveness with symptoms of health, the higher the forgiveness, the fewer incidences reported of disease. They even saw forgiveness was able to mediate the effect of hostility on cardiovascular disease. Hostility is a proven risk factor for cardiovascular disease in particular, in people under 50.
The first study that I did was with Stanford students. They would get together once a week with me; the change was remarkable. We're not talking about individual psychotherapy. We're not even talking about me knowing why they came to the group. I didn't have time. I taught them the principles of forgiveness. If I had to listen to all their stories, I might still be there, because once people get started on a grievance story, it takes a truck to stop them.
These students' scores at baseline were in the average range; they had normal anger scores, normal optimism/depression scores but they didn't know how to forgive. Most psychological research is done on people to bring them back to normal. The people who went through this very small, fairly homogeneous sample showed a 15 percent decrease in the longer-term tendency to be angry. They showed about a 35 percent increase in hopefulness. They showed a 75 percent drop in the amount of hurt they felt. And they showed a four-fold increase in their willingness to forgive.
We replicated my study with adult community members from Silicon Valley and got the same kind of results. These were people in the normal range. Again, the levels of stress we measured this time went significantly down. The levels of anger went significantly down. Optimism and spiritual connectedness improved.
Each of us has forgiveness within ourselves. It's a part of being human, in the same way that we have a part of that gets angry, that gets upset, that sulks, and that fights with our spouse. To be fully human, we have to have all these parts. But we live in a culture that doesn't make accessing forgiveness as easy as it does accessing anger.
From this present moment, we can't change the past. We can forgive it if we want to be fully in the present. We can't demand a certain future. We don't have that kind of control. But if we want to stay in the present and not be paralyzed with fear, then we can have hope for the future. If you don't leaven it with a good deal of forgiveness and hope, then today can be a scary place. Our mortality is pretty certain, and each of us is absolutely going to meet the same demise. So at some existential level, anxiety is an absolute, and we can't stop that. We can't take away the bestiality and the horrors of the past. We can work hard to change things. We can be kind to ourselves. We can be kind to our neighbors. We can be kind to our families. But without some degree of forgiveness and hope, it's very hard.
Forgiveness now doesn't mean that you have to condone what happened to you. You can work hard to make sure that it doesn't happen again. But if you want a full life, you need to remove the negative damage that has done to you. And you need to stop blaming that past for why your present is not okay. That's the healing that forgiveness allows.
I have met people who have suffered enormous tragedies who are happy. I know somebody who was training for the Olympics and got hit by a car. Two years into a depression, she looked around and said, "Am I going to blame this guy for taking away my life forever?" How much time and how much sacrifice are we willing to make to blame something or someone else because we are not happy enough?
It is ironic that we give up parts of our life for people who were mean to us. You take the worst things that ever happened to you, and hold on to them and give up parts of yourself and your happiness for somebody who at some level didn't give anything about you. I would think that you'd want to give up parts of your life for the people who loved you, that you would want to make sacrifices for those people who were adoring and kind and who supported you and who gave.
Forgiveness hinges upon a shift from asking "Who hurt me and why did they do it?" to "At this very moment, who's worth sacrificing my peace of mind for?" It doesn't mean that there aren't things that I have to deal with. But it doesn't benefit anyone one bit at the age of 40 to say, "My life is ruined because of my mother." When I present it this way to people, forgiveness becomes a lot less esoteric. It becomes a survival mechanism in a hurtful world.
Forgiveness is a part of being human. It's imperative that we we know what it feels like. It doesn't mean that you have to do it in every situation with every person all the time. Love is the quality of forgiveness. We can't always love the people who did us wrong the way we love our spouses. Considering that 50 percent of marriages end in divorce, I'm not sure that that's such a well-practiced art either. But we can open our hearts to let the hurt go and to move on.
