Forgiveness: It's Good for Your Health, with Dr. Fred Luskin, by Wynn Free

Forgiveness is a spiritual activity supported by all major religions and wisdoms. But scientific evidence now shows that forgiveness is just plain practical. It improves our health and the quality of our lives.

At Stanford University, Dr. Frederick Luskin has been conducting pioneering studies on forgiveness, where participants are trained to think and feel in new ways about interpersonal hurt. The ultimate goal of the Stanford Forgiveness Project is to develop duplicatable protocols that can be implemented in acute and chronic healthcare programs to assist people in handling these kinds of issues.

According to Luskin, we go through four stages in learning to forgive. To begin with, we focus on what others are doing to us. We blame outside people and situations for what happens, and do not see that the anger response is a choice we are making. In the second stage, we turn our focus on what we are doing to ourselves. We realize that anger does not "feel good," and take steps to release it and forgive. In the third stage, we start to notice our anger responses even to simple, everyday situations, "such as being cut off by another car on the expressway." We become aware of anger's discomfort, and realize that the length of time we spend in this state is a choice we can make.

In stage four, Luskin says, we have realized that not only is anger uncomfortable and a waste of "precious life," it is something that hurts other people. At this stage, we decide to stop reacting to life with anger.[*]

We interviewed Dr. Luskin concerning his work on forgiveness.

Wynn Free: What is your official position at Stanford?

Dr. Luskin: For the past year, I've been a research associate at the School of Medicine. Before that I was a pre-doctoral and then a post-doctoral fellow at the School of Medicine.

WF: And you initiated a project to determine how to deal with forgiveness?

Dr. Luskin: Yes. In 1996, we started a series which is now six research projects. All of them were just to prove that forgiveness is a helpful experience and good for you. If you learn how to forgive, it will be good for you, physically and emotionally. That quality is very useful to have in your bag of tricks.

WF: Are there others who are studying this same topic?

Dr. Luskin: Yes, there is a very small fraternity of people who are doing research to show that if you learn to forgive, your physical and emotional well-being improves.

WF: Let's suppose somebody doesn't forgive. Let's suppose somebody carries a lot of resentment and contempt. How would that manifest negatively?

Dr. Luskin: It depends how intense and obsessive it is.

Even if it's just one little thing, or two little things — or five little things — that we've filed away, resentment has some impact on our day-to-day life. However, if the victim mentality is a major part of our description of ourselves, as in, "I'm someone who was screwed over by my ex-husband," or "I'm someone whose parents didn't love me," then it's very destructive — because then we are characterizing ourselves that way.

So the degree of negative effect depends on the degree to which we bring it up, day to day, in terms of defining our lives.

WF: Scientifically, have you found a correlation between those intense feelings and physical symptoms?

Dr. Luskin: Yes. What we try to do is teach people how to forgive (see 9 Steps to Forgiveness) and then measure the changes.

In this way we have shown that whatever reduces anger, hurt, and depression can lower blood pressure and may make people more optimistic, energetic, physically vital, and even reduce the symptoms of stress — the backaches and stuff like that, not just the subjective experience of stress.

So we take people who are hurt, teach them the forgiveness process, and show what happens when you learn about forgiveness: "This is what forgiveness is. Practice it if you wish."

WF: Okay. If you were going to share with our readers just one basic, quick technique for getting over their lack of forgiveness, what would you suggest?

Dr. Luskin: Basically, there are three things we can do. The first and easiest approach is to change the kind of stories we tell when we describe our experiences and our coping responses.

In other words, people tend to describe their experiences as awful, and their coping responses as weak. And we suggest they do it the other way around. That they basically not talk so much about the terrible things that happen to them, but instead talk about what they can do, how they are learning to cope, and how they are growing.

Shifting the model is probably the most important thing people can do.

Second, you need to have a stress management practice. You need to have some kind of meditation, visualization, breathing technique, martial art — something you can practice to dissolve the stress response when it hits your body. That is crucial and needs to be practiced whenever the "grudge" arises.

Stress management practices like diaphragmatic breathing, or shifting our attention to the heart and practicing compassion, or praying for the person — the Christians teach us to pray for people — reduce the arousal of the nervous system and get us in tune with our higher selves. If we don't reduce the arousal of the nervous system when we think of something unpleasant, it's very hard to overcome the effect.

It's almost a mindfulness practice. "Oh, here I am experiencing the grudge again," and you do some kind of spiritual, stress management discipline to work it through at the moment.

And the third thing you need to do is to think more clearly. Most people are filled with really distorted thinking about how the world should be and what's owed to them. And there are very simple things you can say to remind yourself, as the Rolling Stones song goes, that "you can't always get what you want."

So if you change your story, practice stress management, and remind yourself over and over again, "You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you may get what you need," that's shorthand for a cognitive change that allows you to deal more judicially with the way life happens.

WF: What measurable changes occur in people after going through the program?

Dr. Luskin: We did a big project where we found that the average person who went through the training saw their physical vitality — their appetites, sleep patterns, and energy level — go up by about 15 percent over the course of the six-week training.

WF: When the person comes in, what's the process they go through?

Dr. Luskin: It's educational. Because nobody's ever taught us how to forgive. People have taught us how to get angry, how to become depressed, even how not to react with rage when life doesn't turn out as we want it to. But nobody has taught us how to forgive.

So now we are saying "Here's a process by which you can learn to forgive."

WF: Is this a program that other therapists are going to be studying?

Dr. Luskin: It appears that way. I do teach therapists now. Tonight I'm going to New Jersey to do a therapist training. I'm doing them around the country for seminar leaders, and it's an aspect of therapy that can easily be incorporated, although therapists usually teach these practices to people one on one, while I primarily teach them in groups.

WF: A friend of mine wrote a paper called "Healing the Original Wound." It's about people who are mad at God.

Dr. Luskin: Yes. That is the original wound. All of us, no matter what we make believe we're doing, are really arguing with the way the world actually is. And it's not a human being that created that. It's spirit.

WF: Did you go through a period of your own life when you were carrying a lot of resentments?

Dr. Luskin: I did. That's where this work came from.

WF: Did you work on yourself, or did you see a therapist?

Dr. Luskin: I worked on myself and I talked to people, but it was really only when I discovered forgiveness that my issues resolved a bit. I was dealing with betrayal by a close friend. That was the precursor to what I ended up testing in my first study.

WF: You know, at this time period in the world, there's not just personal resentment, but race resentment, religious resentment. . . Do these all fit under the category of things that can heal through your process?

Dr. Luskin: I know that these processes can work with individuals. I don't know what they can accomplish in a cultural context, but we have done research projects with people from Northern Ireland. We brought mothers here, from both the Protestant and Catholic sides, whose sons had been killed, and we taught them to forgive in a group experience.

And then we brought all sorts of family members here, from both sides of this conflict, and taught them to forgive. Then we measured the results, and they were positive.

And so in this way we were able to help a limited number of people, who then went back to Northern Ireland where other people noticed the difference. So we started getting calls.

But can individuals change the texture of a culture that is embedded in hatred? I don't know. It's an open question. You'd have to train a lot of individuals.

WF: I guess there would have to be somebody at the top who said, "This is something we want to change."

Dr. Luskin: Obviously, and it has to come from both sides. There would have to be a willingness at the top to end the tribal antagonism. And there would have to be individuals from within who were renouncing bitterness and personal animosity. And both of these things would have to occur together. I don't see how it could be one or the other.

WF: I suppose one of the things that's a limitation in some people's minds is that they are attached to being a victim and don't want to forgive.

Dr. Luskin: Yes, and it's very difficult to change that.

One of the things that we always talk about in our work are the consequences of being a victim. Often when we're mad we don't realize the damage that's being doing to our own physical well being. The rush of adrenaline is not good for the heart. Being angry or frustrated is bad for the immune system.

And feeling like a victim ultimately disempowers us. It's not the event that does that, it's the way we perceive it. If we perceive ourselves as helpless, that carries over into other things and causes us to become even more reactive, because our helplessness is receiving such acknowledgement.

Also, every one of us has resentments that we bring from childhood and past relationships, and the costs to our current relationships are tremendous. Every one of us who has a significant other of any kind is often telling that significant other, I can't love you fully because this happened to me. We're all carrying that stuff around, and we don't like to look at the consequences of that on the people around us.

WF: You know, occasionally it seems as though somebody truly is a victim. Occasionally I run into people like that. For example, a woman may have an abusive husband she's financially dependent on, and she's scared stiff that if she walks out she'll be on the street.

Dr. Luskin: That's not a really good example, because as adults we all have accountability for co-creating our relationships. It's difficult for me to acknowledge that somebody's a victim when, as an adult, she chose to get married and now chooses to stay with somebody who's abusive. That is choice. I'm not saying it's a pleasant experience or that it's okay for people to be harsh to each other, but it's difficult to see victimhood in the situation you mentioned.

I'll give you a better example. Let's say when you were seventeen years old, a perfectly healthy kid, you were out there riding your bicycle, and a drunk came by and plowed you off the road. And now you're in chronic pain for the rest of your life.

Or let's say you are a parent in Northern Ireland and somebody walks up to your children and shoots them for no reason other than that they were on the "wrong" side.

WF: Okay. So how do we come to grips with those kind of happenings?

Dr. Luskin: The real difficulty is in the grieving process, not necessarily just the forgiving. The question is: How do we live in a world where that kind of cruelty is possible. It is very difficult, and requires a spiritual response. Two or three or four years later, the question becomes: Is being furious at what happened — being bitter or despairing — is that helping me in my life? And the answer always is no.

Something that happened years ago is in the past, and now we've just got our lives. So we can suggest to people that since we have to move on anyway, we might as well do so with an open heart.

The closer we can come to being "in love," accepting and peaceful, the better chance we have of a good life. It's just that simple. It doesn't mean that what happened is okay. It doesn't mean that what happened is not incredibly damaging. It's just that we have the choice either to put more of our energy toward loving the people around us and acknowledging ourselves as heros for overcoming such difficulties — or to remain locked in bitterness about something we can do nothing about. We have that choice.

WF: I can sense that you certainly have a spiritual aspect to your own perspective of things.

Dr. Luskin: We teach a secular approach, but it was heavily informed by my spiritual practices — a Buddhist background and also a great regard for the model that Christ provides when he is being crucified and asks God to forgive those who are doing this.

The spiritual perspective is an announcement that human beings have the possibility to be noble, even amid difficulties. That people can have access to their nobility. We can't insist that anybody do this, but if we at least provide the tools, then some people will use them.

We can't make it easy. Being noble is not easy. But it's possible.

Dr. Fred Luskin holds a Ph.D. in counseling and health psychology from Stanford University. He directed the Stanford Forgiveness Project, the largest research project to date on the training and measurement of forgiveness intervention.

He currently serves as co-director 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.

Dr. Luskin conducts workshops, seminars and trainings throughout the United States on the importance, health benefits, and training of forgiveness. His book Forgive for Good (HarperSanFrancisco; December 2001) was a main selection of the Book of the Month, Quality Paperback, and One Spirit book clubs.

For more information on forgiveness processes, please visit the Stanford Forgiveness Project, or Dr. Luskin's own website at LearningToForgive.com.

Footnotes:

*See LearningToForgive.com.