The Psychology of Forgiveness

I'm Darlene Weaver I'm a faculty member in the Department of theology and religious studies here at Villanova and I am director of the theology Institute it's my pleasure to kick off what promises to be an engaging and fruitful day of reflection and dialogue on the topic of forgiveness this is the theology institute's 41st annual conference our conference's sponsor first-rate work on issues at the intersection of faith and culture the decision to focus on forgiveness as the theme for this year's conference grew out of a collaborative effort on the part of several faculty members currently working on forgiveness here at Villanova over the last few years with the support of Villanova's Office for mission effectiveness Villanova faculty across the disciplines have undertaken research and offered events and programs under the umbrella of what we call the forgiveness project today's conference is meant to showcase the work of some of the forgiveness project members but we also seek to supplement and enrich it through the contributions of our invited scholars and professionals they bring perspectives and experience it experienced from various disciplines beyond theology together our exploration of forgiveness ranges from interpersonal relationships to social and political reconciliation and as you'll hear in the next session in ways that focus on the benefits of forgiveness for the one who does the forgiveness as well as the one who is forgiven let me make a few announcements first as you may have noticed we have some artwork on display in the rear of the room let me just give a little background about that in 2008 students from Villanova and from Graterford prison here in the area participated in a class called beyond forgiveness reconciliation and restorative justice that was taught by Joyce's average during the semester students explored the concept of forgiveness from theological psychological philosophical and political points-of-view interpersonally socially and so on they viewed forgiveness from the perspective of the victim as well as the wrongdoer and as a culmination of their study each student articulated his or her understanding of forgiveness through artistic expression so we're very pleased to have the work of some Villanova students as well as some inmates from Graterford on display in the rear of the in the rear of the room there are books on display and for sale you can find them at the tables outside the double doors there should be a sheet there letting you know if it's just on display if it's free or if it's available for purchase if you're confused at all then wonderful theology students staffing our registration desk can help you out there are restrooms through these double doors and over to your left let me ask you to silence your cell phone if you have one and let me also then point out this is my last announcement for the time being that our concurrent sessions so the one after this one will be held in this way the session on forgiveness and the law which features Patrick Brennan and Penelope feather is going to be right here in this room the session on forgiveness and the New Testament which features Paul Danos and Peters potala is going to be in a room that's actually just behind you and you can enter that directly in the corner over on this side and then the concurrent session that deals with forgiveness between parents and children that features William Wirt Bo house key is going to be in the Connelly cinema which is near the coat rack if you go through the double doors and just take a left as though you're going to exit the building on the opposite side you'll just sort of make another u-turn and you'll see the cinema there okay let me introduce then our first speaker as well as his his respondent we're so pleased to have dr. Fred Luskin with us today he is director of the Stanford forgiveness project and a professor at the Institute of transpersonal psychology the Stanford forgiveness project has successfully explored forgiveness therapy with people who suffered violence in the Northern Ireland Sierra Leone regions as well as in the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11th 2001 in addition dr. Lusk and work has been successfully applied and researched in corporate medical legal and religious settings he currently serves as a senior consultant in health promotion at Stanford University he presents lectures workshops and seminars throughout the United States on the importance and the health benefits of forgiveness dr. Luskin is the author of forgive for love and forgive for good both of which are available for purchase here today along with dozens of articles and scholarly and popular venues he is this is not an understatement the go-to guy for national media outlets such as National Public Radio 20/20 CNN the New York Times The Wall Street Journal and so on - the next time you catch a little teaser that somebody's going to be talking about forgiveness on air it's probably our speaker Fred Luskin now because the work of the Institute is meant to foster a dialogue between church and world and to explore the intersection of Phaethon and culture a couple times today we're going to ask a theologian to offer a brief response to work on forgiveness that's coming to us from beyond the discipline of theology so I've asked a faculty member here at Villanova dr. Jessie Cohen joven to give a quick response to dr. Alaskan when he's finished Jessie Cohen Hogan is assistant professor of moral theology here at Villanova his research interests include forgiveness the nature of human freedom and responsibility but theologies of Augustine Bart Luther and Calvin and issues in bioethics such as the human genome project he's currently completing a manuscript called determination disease and original send an Augustinian essay on deep responsibilities so dr. Luskin will speak for a while dr. Cohen joven will offer a brief response and then we'll have some time at the end of the session for some questions and answers and conversation please join me then in welcoming dr. Fred Luskin [Applause] thank you you know I'm sitting there listening to a little bit that I'm gonna discuss the health benefits of forgiveness I live in Palo Alto California this is my winter coat there's not enough forgiveness out there to keep me healthy in this weather this is all I brought it's pretty funny so I may forgive but I'll get pneumonia so we do buy a used car from this guy it's an interesting it's an interesting thing and I was talking with my partner here who will be the discussion to that forgiveness has been around forever just as people mistreating each other has been around forever and as long as people mistreat each other and as long as we fail then one of the qualities that we need to recover from that is called forgiveness for ourselves and others as long as life is difficult and as long as it's unpredictable we're gonna need the quality of forgiveness to forgive God or nature or a spirit or the way it is and any did or were endowed with a wide range of responses to interpersonal unkindness personal failing and the horror of being a human being you know there's no there's no escaping the horror its omnipresent and everywhere and eternal and just changes form you know came up with some number of like 250 million people have been murdered just by genocide by other people and and you know what the teaching I do I mean I'm a public speaker and I lead workshops and I yak everywhere and you know I take groups of people and I lead them through classes and it and there's numbers like that or a hundred million people were killed you know during the 20th century by by murder and and then somebody gets upset because somebody gives them bad service in a restaurant and you think like haven't you read the papers you know don't you know the world we inhabit and but what I'm getting at is these are these are the deepest like human questions there are like our people evil and and do I deserve the wounds and horror that I have experienced and what am I supposed to learn from it and and I don't think I I haven't met anybody who has fully answered these questions but at the same time I have seen through the teaching and research that we do and that other people have done that when you teach people or encourage people or cultivate them to give more kindness in response to the unkindness that they have experienced they're healthier both emotionally and physically and in relationship that that there's something just really provocative about that that you take this sea of difficulty that everybody faces you know even if it's just your mortality or the fact that you know everybody's going to die and unpredictable things happen when people respond with goodwill or resilience or patience or compassion they're happier and healthier and the thing the thing that was most interesting to me about that is people have been talking about like forgiveness and these kind of things thousands of years you know but we do a few studies and I'm in the New York Times you know that there's something just weird about that IIIi don't know any other way to put it you know like Jesus's message on the cross is what a couple thousand years old but when we came out with one of our studies that showed that forgiveness would say lower blood pressure or would lower the consequences of stress you know I'm getting calls from half the news media in the United States and and that's that's an interesting thing to live in a secular culture and at the same time I think that is phenomenal because what I think that some research people such as myself for doing is from a secular point of view showing that the virtues espoused by the religious traditions work that there is a growing body of evidence that hostility is health harming no and and my conception and I'm a at this point I'm like III don't use to be a full-time researcher in preventive cardiology at the medical school and I'm not heading towards retirement but you know not quite there semi retired and so now I have a made-up title which allows me to do work that I want to do called I think senior consultant and health promotion which is which is fine well when I was a full-time researcher and you know seeing what we were doing out of the medical school and what other people were doing there is an abundance now of research about the harmfulness that hostility and mistrust and cynicism have on health and the opposite is also true that a tolerant kindly generous disposition impacts health and there's no God I mean I'm a secular person so that's emotionally competent there's just no way and so one of the things that we set out to do with our research from a secular point of view was to show that the practice of forgiveness was health enhancing I am personally not interested necessarily and where it comes from I think it's as useful and as valid to forgive because you think God wants you to as you think it's good for your blood pressure I personally believe they end up in the same place that kindness is kindness just point of view he says my religion is kindness and if I look at what the data shows it's that the experience of kindness the thinking of kindness what's the water of kindness and the heart of kindness those make you happier and healthier and that's good because that to me is another level of proof of the religious traditions separate and not necessarily refuting religiously based perceptions I don't doubt religiously based perceptions I believe there are people who get in touch enough with whatever their spirit or God is where they tend to be much nicer much more generous much more gracious and less selfish people but I'm here to tell you that you can teach people those things and they don't have to believe in any specific chin of spirit or religion and one of the things that we found that was really interesting is we we were uncertain when we started this work about 12 or 13 years ago how we wanted to interface with the religious traditions I mean I live in a very like religiously liberal area in the San Francisco Bay Area so it's it's it's not fundamentalist based it's very open and and I don't mean that as any criticism of anything else it's just the truth and we we were presenting this for that audience but even there when we started our work and we would dance around a little bit with some of the religious traditions because in 1996 there's three research projects unforgiveness when I started this nobody knew what to do and the deeper work was from the philosophical and religious traditions that's where the that's where the walk was it wasn't in science but one of the things that we found that discouraged us immediately from pushing this from a religious point of view and I'm not arguing any religious point of views was how people of specific religious faiths were so attached to their specific religious faith that they couldn't hear it outside of that language and so we would give talks and people would come up to us and say you know that's nice but it would have been better if Jesus was in it or that's nice but the Buddha said it better or that's nice my particular sect believes this and I got very anxious about that because I didn't want forgiveness to be part of what I saw as some of the roots of all the world's problems which is that each of us thinks that our specific point of view is right and many of the others are wrong and I started to understand and I'm giving you some evolution of this that that thinking that I'm right and everybody else is wrong is that the core of unforgiveness because I worked with Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland who were unforgiving of a different version of Jesus and I can't tell you how many places I have come into where people are fighting each other over their belief system and the arguments you take it even the belief system of Republican versus Democrat in this country and so what I tried to do was see that forgiveness is a way of being in this world when you get disagreed with when people do things that you think are wrong when you get harmed when you don't feel like you were any reason to be harmed when somebody takes your most cherished idea of the way the world should be and spits on it such as you should never murder my child that's an absolutely cherished idea which most people hold and yet we've done a number of research projects now with people have had their children murdered and so forgiveness I came to understand was holding your cherished ideas not necessarily relinquish ngey to be loving even when those cherished ideas are attacked and I didn't see that enough in the religious traditions to use a religious tradition to teach this that that's what I'm saying to you why I created a secular technology that has allowed people of almost every religious tradition to use and they fit their religious tradition into this very simple secular technology and the technology is that unforgiveness is the same as stress I was working in the medical school I was a wreath and anger is one of the leading contributors to heart disease and what happens when you're angry your body releases adrenaline and cortisol and norepinephrine and your nervous system dysregulated your endocrine system goes ape and if you practice anger or unforgiveness then your nervous system changes so that disequilibrium you experience as normal and let me explain that to you if you don't like your mother or you don't like your wife's mother or you don't like your grandma well you don't like your boss then every time you condition and causes you to feel stressed almost instantly the second the nanosecond that you perceive that person your body is under stress it happens whether you're Catholic or Buddhist or Lutheran or Zoroastrian it don't matter and calming that stress down is a significant part of forgiveness just children I mean seriously chill you're mad chill you don't like what they did take a breath you wish it had been different so do we all relax a little because what happens when you're angry well what happens when you're stressed is blood flow drains away from the parts of the brain that think creatively and straightforwardly it's that simple that's what stress is designed to do that's its purpose the purpose of your body stress response is to make you stupid so you don't spend time planning your dinner deciding what movie to go to or thinking creatively about a help heal the world your body gets you focused directly on something wrong and gets you the heck out of there or to beat it up when you create a pattern of stress around a particular incident or person your entire mind body becomes limited to a stress response towards that experience and you have not that much mental capacity to bring it don't matter what your faith is it don't matter what you believe in it don't matter whether you live in a blue state or a red state that's the way we're wired that's the way most of the animal kingdom is wired but we have a prefrontal but I'm looking we may think it's about Grandma I mean it is about Grandma or our neighbor but it's also about that exquisite to me mystery of this body it's about the exquisite mystery of a body that the second you think of someone you don't doesn't matter if somebody is telling you they love you if the whole world is telling you they love you and you're thinking of somebody you don't like your nervous system is tight and your belly is cringing and at that second you have created the physiologic experience of unforgiveness now you can do that once where you can do it a thousand times but it's the same experience every single time you do that and you have to break that pattern and it doesn't take years I'll tell you a funny story I mean for me it's a funny story I I try to walk a fine line because I happen to believe that if people actually followed their religions I wouldn't be needed that's what I believe used like I get invited into church or the first like the first like I don't know Church I'm trying to remember what it was but I was invited into a church to give a talk and the minister was was really like wanted me to talk and I didn't quite understand this then this was you know a decade or more ago and he comes up to me and says you know basically our parishioners are just struggling we had a bad minister who left and now there's a lot of bad will and everybody hates each other and you know there's all this unforgiveness and I blankly looked him in the eye and said what do you need me for your whole religion is based on forgiveness and he said well he did everything what to say I said you know like that's that's the point of your path here and and he said well we don't I guess we don't practice it that much and I said well you have technology even I mean I know you've been given an injunction to pray for your enemy so do that and the amazing news is if you pray for your enemy your blood pressure will go down and your stomach will untighten I'm gonna put it I'm gonna look at it from that point of view but you already have the technique I will tell you that praying for your enemy there's this Studies on this there there's a couple of research projects on yoga practices that have used something called mantra the the repetition of a holy thing but you can say Jesus Christ have mercy me or you know me I need Buddha or whatever it is it doesn't matter what the what the filling is but the repetition of a loving holy thought in people with some loving problems helps them breathe more fully and it helps people with cardiac problems relax because it's it's the same nervous system so I said to him well just ask your people to practice their faith it's very hard they invited me in anyway I mean I was trying to you know get myself out of business here it's sometimes easier when people hear from a secular point of view you know I went into a like what I what I can say in the simplest terms is your your life is going along normally and your heart rhythm is something like this it's it's a sinus rhythm it's just you know it's reasonably even it has a nice amplitude it's just like this and that that's put onto a computer screen when they take the trip though jolt it's like this if you get mad at somebody well again we did a hundredth of a second this turns to jagged your heart's in distress just goes like this and it's jagged and the important thing is the amplitude shifts and when the amplitude shifts your bother the body but it's also what's dangerous for the mind so are you going along at this and you think gee I hate George Bush or I hate Bill Clinton or I hate my mother whatever it is and then it gets like this and then it calms down a little bit and then you think oh this traffic is terrible so it gets like this and it goes like this but you picture the people who have real grudges every single day they're saying those kind of things in themselves this is becoming normal if you picture that and you ask yourself is this what I want to do to this body this precious body and this precious gift is this what I want to do because the anger is in me the resentments in me it's not in them it's in me is this what I want is this the gift I want to give this body the remarkable thing is so you have your body going like this your heart rate and then you get angry but if you think a deeply loving thought this gets better that's what's also so remarkable this gets better so you have your normal resting rate and then you have love and then you have forgiveness and compassion and goodness your heart opens to it on a physical as well as a literal level I can't believe that's a mistake and I can't believe and this is me that we weren't meant to discover the science of this the rudimentary tools we've had for 3500 years when the Yogi's were the first people to know that positive emotion was good field and then Saints have been saying this forever I mean there's no improvement on the prayer of st. Francis there's no Lu prove that but imagine that there's a little bit of a technology and a EKG reading that shows you that if you say the prayer of st. Frank - that wonderful and I think that's the natural progression of human beings you know as their minds become more able to hold science so you got this you got this and the question is what do I do with this you know this this distress in me and one of the first things we understood is that you need breathe to open your body to the parasympathetic settlement of your fight or flight system this is as simple as I can make it and it's called nothing more than taking full slow deep breaths into and out of your belly so why don't we all do that I want everybody to close their eyes for just a minute and what I want you to do is inhale slowly and deeply and fill your belly with air as you inhale so that you're opening your belly you're making it bigger as you inhale and then when your breath is full just gently push the breath out with your diaphragm and you want to have as little movement and effort in your shoulders and your chest that and one of the ways that I work with this with a more religious audience as I say inhale and appreciate the gift that you're given a breath and of life and don't resist it open to it allow your body to fully open to its own goodness and the more you can relax your belly and the more you can open not just the top part of your belly but the lower part of your belly the more about your relaxed your body is and the more relaxed your body is the more capable your mind is of having loving positive thoughts and the lower abdomen is where most of us hold tension that we don't even know and the the thing the exquisite thing about these bodies is that they're so completely linked to the mind that when the mind says I'm in danger the body tightens up and when the mind says I forgive the body relaxes but when the body can relax it allows your mind to have more choice so take one more breath like that and then allow your eyes to open so what we learned very easily and simply is this you take an angry person or aggrieved person or a bitter person or a despairing person that their life will never work out you teach them to breathe and you teach them to breathe in a way where they're telling their mind and body that they're safe in this world even if it's only for a minute and when you're safe in this world when your mind isn't constructing enemies and your body is in tight thoughts like forgiveness are natural to human beings they're not foreign they're not strange they're not weird they're natural faith does this as well people who have faith and actually practice it and hold it as opposed to profess it they get this because that if spirit will protect them they don't have to be like this and they don't have to have so many enemies that's wonderful but if you don't have that you can breathe and it can even help you get it in this anyway we were teaching all these heart patients to just breathe and it'll you know we do some of the jolts of electricity into your cardiovascular system just breathe and then the other thing that we saw which was really really really simple was grateful people forgave more readily what it does so instead of fighting with people about who they didn't like or what it was that went wrong we taught people to be more grateful we just went right at it breathe and be grateful that'll work for almost anyone and I'm simplifying this dramatically but I'm telling you those work so instead of waking up in the morning and thinking I hate my boss all right my life isn't fair think something better wish somebody well very simple but every it just it smoothes out and if you look at like EE G's they smooth out the the brain but stuff from the top part of your brain smoothes out and what's really amazing is when you're really thinking loving positive thoughts most of the systems in your body harmonize with each other which is really something you can watch a readout of the nervous system and some of the endocrine system and the brain impulses and the heart rate and they all have the same wave pattern now I believe that's part of the good that happens to people when they have a positive religious experience I believe that is all I'm saying is from a secular point of view we can teach through simple simple simple practices the ways to calm the mind and by down so you're more likely to have what would be called a religious experience I direct it towards the mechanism of teaching forgiveness very simple one more thing at its heart non forgiveness is an argument with your own life that's what it is and you never win fighting City Hall and boy do people try and the argument is I should have gotten a better mother or I should have had a better ex-wife or I shouldn't have had that traffic accident or I should have won the Nobel Prize or you know I should have written the Great American Novel or I should I should it should have but at the heart of unforgiveness is an argument with your own life and that is a losing argument and every time we argue with our own life we cause stress and so what I have come up with and I'm giving you very simple rudiments of it is very simple practices that reduce that stress and we have shown now I have only a few blowers depression lowers blood pressure lowers stress does your laundry but it doesn't give you enough brain power to bring a gun it makes you more efficacious forgiveness just like all the virtues is simply latent within each of us it just rests there waiting for us to tap it it just says I'm here you find me when you want me you can be angry and pissy and self-righteous for 170 million years if you are I'm just waiting here it's just there its latent and when we encourage people to go there there's something that happens to the human being when goodwill touches them you know I happen to believe that's what the religious traditions are saying that something happens to the human being when goodwill resides in us that's what I believe but you can use all sorts of methods to get there as long as a few things are understood that you want to stop arguing with life as best you can you want to search for the good in life not just notice what's wrong you want to work with your nervous system like you need to work consciously to calm your nervous system you want to have compassion for the suffering of others not just yourself so you see the universality in it one of the things that keeps people from forgiveness is narcissism that it's my suffering not the suffering you know one of the things that you'll find if you study history who said it's exactly the same as now what when my son was younger he used to go he used to like watching all the different ways that people would kill each other in movies that was the theme that I got out of what he liked about movies and I remember so I went to with him to like three movies over a period of a couple days and and you know one of them was probably one of the middle-earth ones and another one so here's that and they're killing each other and another one is from the 1700s were people killing each other and then one was in the future but I was struck by like the commonality of human hatred and righteousness but the mechanisms changed so in the past you know they threw rocks and they put them on fire and in the future they were launching intergalactic things and 200 years ago they shot cannonballs or whatever but the harshness behind it was exactly the same and and every human being who had a loved one killed I would imagine experienced very similar grief and and so when we can distance ourselves just a little bit from the on the presence of our own woundedness and see it as part of the human experience that's another pathway into forgiveness because then the question comes since this isn't unusual unique or even special what do we do and and again what we decided was we were going to create a forgiveness training that simply taught people what to do that didn't argue with life didn't have them spend weeks telling us about who hurt them like that's what one of the things we cut down is we know you're hurt otherwise you wouldn't be here so we'll take that as a given and now we're going to teach you how to forgive and the last thing that I that I will talk about is these research projects are done in groups I mean we don't we don't we don't I mean I do a little bit of private practice but we were able to show that for normal offenses you know just your garden-variety my mother didn't wasn't good enough my father my neighbor my ex my something myself it took nine hours of training to make significant results which is not a huge amount of group time six 90-minute sessions for the men and women from Northern Ireland who had their families killed around them was 15 hours of training we just sent a research project to Sierra Leone saying is because people to stop the unforgiveness and not encourage it by showing them the costs of on see that it's natural within themselves to extend that with some training to other things in their life and this is where this is probably a good place for me to stop this it's it's just just to imagine this because this is so simple if everybody in here was let's say mad let's let's say I don't know something nothing like the roof leaked and you know we were getting wet and it was cold and we were all you know pissy about that and you could see this general rumbling and then somehow we got saved from something worse like you know something happened and you just feel your body like oh thank you and in that moment of thank you the roof didn't matter so when you're driving down the street and you're thinking of somebody you don't like if you could shift your attention to somebody you love and feel it as you're full and what is all I'm saying is that shows the phenomenal flexibility of our nervous system and our body and the remarkable power that we have to regenerate well my thanks to Darlene for the invitation to give this response and also to dr. Lawson for his talk my comments I think are going to be directed not simply at dr. Watson's talk but uh more generally at what I see going on in the world of psychological approaches to forgiveness and they'll be largely credited about this research first of all I know that has been a good thing in general and I also think it's true that we often do attend too much tonight and psychologists have offered some helpful techniques in trying to reassess how we attend to the things that are going on in our lives and elsewhere we often blame ourselves or others more than we should or perhaps when we shouldn't at all and it is important to get in the habit of thinking clearly about who is to blame and how much we should not for instance take things too personally the thing is though I don't think that what I've been talking about so far is forgiveness forgiveness after all is a response to being wronged but all I've mentioned so far is the importance of not thinking you've been wronged in ways that you have not been wronged so far there's nothing to forgive it's important not to have too many negative emotions but that's the same thing as talking about forgiveness now most people agree with this in principle but in practice a lot of psychologists often fail for instance to distinguish between getting over imaginary hurts and forgiving in response to real in Justices so they can make it sound as though we might forgive any time we're upset but that's not really true we can only really forgive if we've been wronged by competent moral agent for instance if a friend of yours dies from natural causes that is indeed hurtful but we don't forgive our friends for forgiving us that kind of grief because they have not done us an injustice we also don't forgive rainstorms when they say delay baseball games and that's because they're not competent moral agents so what this points to is the importance of defining what forgiveness is carefully most people today understand forgiveness as overcoming some negative feeling like anger or resentment but this is not a sufficient understanding of forgiveness one reason why is that it doesn't say anything to discriminate forgiveness from other kinds of getting over it for instance if we're angry and we go for a jog or maybe depending on who you are you go to the firing range and then afterwards you feel better is that really that's not forgiveness is it or if you could take a drug that would make you feel less angry would that be forgiveness we don't usually speak as though it is because we tend to think that forgiveness is not simply an attitude change but a change that is motivated by appropriate moral reasons love perhaps being foremost among them forgiveness in what psychological literature forgiveness is is okay the the way that they speak about forgiveness is open to the charge that they are using the idea of forgiveness not really as a moral response to wrongdoing but rather as a kind of a psychological technique for self help but avoiding negative thoughts and feelings for the sake of your own peace of mind I think is not a morally serious you and it is not forgiveness which must confront evil a related problem is that what many psychologists advocate is basically overlooking the bad things that happen the sin that happens against us now it might not seem fair to describe many psychologists views as a kind of overlooking but I think it's notable that many psychologists there are some exceptions have very little to say about the importance of things like repentance on the half of wrongdoers the importance of reform moreover their views tend to make the feeding of negative emotions central to forgiveness rights forgiveness is stopping being angry but the wrong itself the thing that made you angry if you're legitimately angry has not been dealt with rather it is being emotionally overlooked perhaps you've distracted yourself from thinking about it sometimes there are good reasons to distract yourself from thinking about things that make you angry but I don't think that that's forgiveness now I agree that dr. Luskin and others do not promote condoning evil I'm not saying that but this does not refute my suggestion that their views of forgiveness promote a kind of overlooking of evil because on these approaches evil is not so much dealt with as left behind this is too individualistic a conception of forgiveness because it ends up making forgiveness only a change in oneself there's a lot more to say about that but when we move to a related issue modern psychology has main question about forgiveness is how victims can feel better when they are upset I think it notable that Jewish and Christian traditions tend to emphasize a different question ie how can perpetrators be released from their guilt so they look at things from the perspective often of the victimizer more than a lot of the victim when the psalmist cries out to God cleanse me with hyssop and I will be clean wash me and I will be whiter than snow the psalmist is not I think mainly asking God to get over being angry rather the psalmist is requesting that God blot out my transgressions this is a conception of forgiveness that remains powerful for those who recognize that they have done evil we want to be freed not just from feeling bad but from being bad consider as an example I'll send a Huaraz discussion of experiences of modern-day child soldiers in Africa who have returned to their communities in Angola and Mozambique child soldiers are both the victims and perpetrators of brutal violence physical and psychological some survivors managed to return to their homes and villages while they may be whole in body they are rarely whole in spirit they're evil pasts present a problem to themselves and their communities the UN and other agencies often offer biomedical and therapeutic treatments but these attempts to helped often fail hawala argues that traditional approaches valued by these child soldiers own communities are sometimes at least more efficacious because they address a need for purification here's one representative story about an attempt to cleanse a child soldier from guilt as told by his father we took him to the bush about two kilometers away from our house there we built a small Hut covered with dried grass in which we put him still dressed in the dirty clothes he came back with from the guerrilla camp inside the hut he was undressed then we set fire to the hut and pollo the soldier was helped out by an adult relative the hut the clothes and everything else that he had brought from the soldier camp were burned in the fire Paulo then had to inhale the smoke of some herbal remedies and was bathed with water treated with medicine to cleanse his body internally and externally now here we have a quest for forgiveness understood as a release from one's past granted by the vez toll of a new identity the need to be washed clean to be relationally and morally not simply psychologically healed explains why forgiveness is so deeply desired by soldiers like Paulo on this view forgiveness is an irreducibly social action primarily concerned not with changing the emotions of those offended although of course it has implications for their emotions but rather with changing the moral status of the offender freeing the sinners from guilt for the sake of reconciliation forgiveness all involves a recognition of sin then and the opening of a way forward for the sinner but that's quite a different view of forgiveness than the therapeutic one many psychologists offer in closing I want to consider one possible response to my suggestion that psychologists like dr. Lusk and Robert Enright and others are talking about something other than forgiveness they might argue that I've got my kind of forgiveness and they've got theirs it's just a verbal disagreement about a definition well I think it's more than that but I think it's also important to evaluate what they are advocating whether we call it forgiveness or not my concerns about these views can be inferred from what I've already said well the kind of getting over it that many psychologists advocate is sometimes appropriate I think their views are often too self-centered we forgive for ourselves it's often argued and too unconcerned with moral questions they spend a lot of time talking about how we can forgive attitude toward life shape your expectations of the world in such a manner that you will not be more than mildly upset about the bad things that inevitably happen and perhaps this sort of chill attitude might lead to fewer heart attacks but if so I'm not simply by that fact convinced that we then have on our hands a human good the appropriate way to pursue happiness it seems to me is to live a life of witness to what you think is right whether that leads to pain or not what is bodily healthy should indeed be part of the conversation about what attitudes it is good to have when wrong is done but they cannot by themselves provide the answer because we have more to live for than bodily health finally I think it's useful to at least consider the possibility that have properly managed and channeled anger does not have to consume or destroy one's life even if one never lets go of it indeed there are times when the smoldering smoldering and righteous anger might be a basis for a life well-lived perhaps simone dicen Thals life of hunting Nazis is one example if that's so we'll have to find ways to defend forgiveness unless therapeutic grounds thank you [Applause] [Music] [Music] the question is how do you power you trade in order to trade others that question is you have to practice it yourself that's the biggest training and that's the most important training that that's I'm not I don't mean that just to be flip I mean that we teach each other what we actually do and believe in so I work with a lot of therapists and people who have a kind of lip service for forgiveness but it's not in there it's not their language and it's not the way they behave generally speaking so the first place is you need to practice inside of you if through that you feel called at some level to help others then you can look for technologies that will make that easier so again some technologies are religious and some technologies of therapeutic you could be here you know if you're a therapist there's plenty of ways my technologies are medical or scientific and any of them will work in pragmatic the I mean from the more personal point of view I wrote a book that's helped you know hundred thousand more people but okay [Music] can you do that to kick yourself in other words do you act as if you forgive until it actually does become let me let me let me let me talk about the prejudice that's in your question and your prejudices your unforgiveness is more true than your forgiveness we all have both all the time it's what we it's what our deepest hook in our deepest belief is in we're in a culture that prizes anger or prizes victimhood so we decide that those are the truest emotions but even people who don't like other people they have moments of compassion or mercy or things towards those people and they disregard them because they think all true and then you decide which one is your goal and that changes the way you hold the transitory nature of your emotions you know during a day we will have literally dozens of different emotional experiences we take a few of them and make a story about this is our life that story provides context and meaning and makes the transitoriness true so very specifically I will ask somebody to do an experiment okay so you just told me whatever it is you don't like X well let's just picture for 15 seconds you have empathy for X's predicament how does that feel okay which would you prefer for yourself you'll have entirely different insights about X depending on what you prefer it's up to you X did what they did now you have more control over your response to X now that response could be anything but the point of our work is to give people more control and to allow them to understand just how varied their responses are so you want to try it hi this is a question for a doctor I'm just wondering if you feel to use our mutually exclusive or can they not both coexist or integrated dr. Ruston's buta so fillers focus more on the person needing to forgive and from what I heard from you worse unless I've missed some of it yours it it's not what focused on at least includes the perpetrator or the person needing to be forgiven is it not possible to use what dr. mousqueton is suggesting for the victim or the person needing to forgive to take care of themselves and at the same time can they not take steps toward reform or justice or whatever maybe be applied for the person who has caused the ill I bring this up because of some work I do in the city with the organization of mothers and grandmothers who've lost children to violence in the city of Philadelphia and this is a huge question and issue for them and one of the things that some of them have described as a turning point for them in the process of what I'm learning to consider is traumatic growth is that some point they have a moment of maybe awakening or feeling that they're not going to the person take their life - they've taken the life of their child and they are struggling with their own existence physically emotionally their tremendous fiscal consequences so I'm wondering if dr. luskin's you could help those victims or however you would want to call them take care of themselves but if they still don't have there is still isn't room and a need to take steps to court affecting justice or reform thank you yeah it's a great question I think I have a lot more to say about it than I can now but but at least briefly yeah in principle there's no reason why these these approaches the more traditional Christian approach that I've briefly articulated and one that's offered by many psychologists today there's no in principle reason why they need to be or have to be antagonistic I think in the best case scenario we can understand many of the things that a lot of psychologists are saying is a kind of a subset of a more complex view that's you know has more things to say but we could agree on certain basic things that said I think the context of one's talk about overcoming your negative emotions is really important and if it's a matter of just saying to people well you'll feel better if you if you decided to get over your anger or something like that that I think can be dangerous if it doesn't lead to or incorporate a desire for reform or justice as you talked about the end just you you some individual feeling better I mean that's important but it's not going to change the system that's screwed up which perpetuates these kinds of victimizations and hurts so I think it's important for forgiveness to also be understood as a confrontation of evil not simply a way of trying to change your what you're attending to or change just how you feel but you want to come back on that aspect of it having to do with the trauma itself transition transformation and transcendence and in that model which is for the greater good or toward society and I think for this particular organization affiliated with there was wisdom in the woman who founded it because it was founded on taking action doing something to convert the reef into action to save another life to work toward something before yeah I think that that's important because sometimes a simply therapeutic perspective on forgiveness has a tendency to say well how can I help myself but not to care about transforming those who have done evil you know the perpetrators but I think it's important to be able to understand forgiveness as an attempt to open up a way forward not just for yourself but for those who have done evil as well they may not embrace it but we need to challenge people in their evil and also that a kind of love that is not you know a doormat kind of love but a kind of love that asked them to reform their identity and that's why I argue that the best understanding of what forgiveness involves is that it offers people a way forward into a new identity so that there's a hope for both parties

Channel: villanovauniversity

Views: 64,931

Keywords: Fred Luskin, Stanford University, Villanova University, forgiveness

Id: zlo26PwfcLY

Length: 68min 9sec (4089 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 10 2009