All About Emotional Intelligence from Six Seconds - Forgive for Good

Forgive for Good - Interview with Author Fred Luskin

Dr. Luskin, Director if the Stanford Forgiveness Project, discusses the power of forgiveness and his new book, Forgive for Good. Luskin explains that, “forgiveness is about today and tomorrow and not about the past.”
by Kate Bedford.

Dr. Luskin holds a doctorate in Counseling and Health Psychology from Stanford University. He is the 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. He served as the Director of the Stanford Forgiveness Project, the largest research project to date on the training and measurement of forgiveness intervention. He currently works as a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Center on Conflict and Negotiation and as a Clinical Science Research Associate at the Stanford Center for Research in Disease Prevention.

Recently I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Luskin about his work at the Stanford Forgiveness Project and his new book Forgive for Good. According to Luskin’s research, forgiving has tremendous emotional and health benefits. In his studies people who learned to forgive increase their optimism and reduce their physical symptoms of stress. Dr. Luskin hopes to help us become forgiving people capable forgiving life’s little annoyances and injustices as well as profound losses. As Dr. Luskin explained to me, “Forgiveness is not something esoteric, it is something people do every day.”

Kate: This is book is filled with great hope and your research has shown that forgiveness training increases optimism. Can you talk a little about hope and optimism?

Dr. Luskin: To me, the whole passion of this work is that people have the capacity to be more and better and kinder and gentler and decenter than they knew themselves to be. It is simply a matter of learning and training. Something like forgiveness, something like optimism, something like compassion can be taught. Forgiveness is not esoteric: It is not unavailable: It is not for other people. To me that is a message of great hope. And I know now, through this research, that we can teach people to become forgiving people. So it is not as much hopefulness as it is passion, guided by the fact that I know it can happen.

Hope is not even strong enough, in the sense that I know that every single person has inside of them a reservoir of great kindness, great compassion, great love and great forgiveness and there are ways to crack into this reservoir in almost everybody. That is hopeful news in terms of the human species, though it is not new. Every religion talks about a quality underneath all of our selfishness, crankiness and unkindness, a soul-like quality that lets us be better.

Kate: Your work in Northern Ireland demonstrates the power of forgiveness can you tell me a little about that project?

Dr. Luskin: We brought a group of people from both sides of the conflict in Northern Ireland, each of whom had had a family member killed in the “troubles.” Most swore on a stack of Bibles that they would never forgive, they would never move, and they would never change. When we did an exit piece the prevailing sentiment was, “When I came I was convinced that all Catholics (or Protestants) were evil and from Hell and that is really the way I was raised. But, after spending a week like this, I have come to three conclusions. I don’t have any reason to hate them all. They are not all bad. And they suffer in the same way I do. I may never fully forgive the one person who shot my son in cold blood, but he is not going to control my whole life. The world is bigger than that. It is filled with suffering and pain and the people that I met from the other side of this conflict suffer in the same way.”

Kate: That was how far they had come.

Dr. Luskin: In one week, which is to me remarkable.

Kate: People often have misconceptions about forgiveness.

Dr. Luskin: That is the biggest reason people don’t forgive.

Kate: Can you explain a little about what forgiveness is not?

Dr. Luskin: First, forgiveness is not condoning unkindness. You do not have to run off and reconcile with someone who treated you badly.

And second, on a very much deeper level, you do not have to start by forgiving the most hurtful person in your life. That would be like learning to mountain climb on Everest. You want to begin with someone really easy to forgive and build on that.

Those two misconceptions keep people from even considering forgiveness because it is too awful; it is too far away and assumes that I will have to like them again. You don’t have to like them again. You just have to extricate yourself from your extra suffering and from your conception of yourself as a victim. Then you regain your life.

Kate: Do you think people resist forgiving someone because they are afraid it lets that person “off the hook?”

Dr. Luskin: Of course, and yet you have to ask what the “hook” is. Nelson Mandela has his famous quote; “ resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for it to kill your enemy.” If we want to set up our minds as hooks to hang other people, then we have to understand that those people are going to occupy a lot of space in our minds. And we have to determine whether or not it is worth it. Every time we critically judge someone who did a great unkindness to us a.) they are renting space in our minds, b.) they are activating stress chemicals and c.) we are announcing at some level that we have not gotten past something that is already done.

So the question is, who is “hooked”? Who is the one with the impediment? I would argue it is more inside of me or I wouldn’t be upset about it. We are willing to suffer in order to make believe that we are holding people accountable. It is not such a healthy strategy.

Kate: According to your book, when people are hurt and unable to forgive, they create grievance stories. What is a grievance story and how is it different from a retelling of the facts?

Dr. Luskin: A grievance story makes someone else responsible for your suffering and details your helplessness in coping with your own life. It is their story and you are only a whining baby saying, “Please stop hurting me.” A resuscitation of the facts describes the incident, describes your emotional response, but claims your own challenge to deal with your own life. It is your story; you are in control, but without ignoring the situation.

Kate: What are unenforceable rules?

Dr. Luskin: We all hold rules about how the world should work or how people should behave. The catch is that we are incapable of enforcing these rules. For example, we may have the rule that our spouse shouldn’t cheat on us. Unfortunately, if our spouse does cheat on us we discover that we are unable to enforce that rule. Since people operate their own culture, we have to understand that the rules made by us are often not the rules other people live by. In fact, others may do great violence to our rules. I am not suggesting that we give up on our rules. What I am suggesting is that we make peace with the fact that other people may not follow our rules, and we cannot make them.

Since you can’t force someone to follow your rules, what do you do now that you are in a situation where your powerlessness is apparent? Do you want to spend years in grief and continue pounding on an imaginary wall trying to make that person do what you want, or do you want to make peace with the fact that in this situation your power was insufficient to change that person’s behavior?

Kate: And then you can make a decision about how to handle the situation.

Dr. Luskin: Maybe leave. Maybe find another solution.

Kate: When I read you examples of other people’s unenforceable rules, that their husbands should be faithful, that their employers should respect their work, I kept thinking, “but they should be enforceable, they are such legitimate expectations.” Then I realized that this is exactly how people get stuck.

Dr. Luskin: All the time. It may be a legitimate expectation, but there is still no guarantee. And that is the difference. You may have a legitimate expectation that your car will start, but you still have to have some wiggle room when it doesn’t. People who have no wiggle room curse and scream and blow up at their car. People who understand that their car doesn’t have to start, might say, “ Boy, it was good it started 98% of the time.” Other strategies are available once you accept the fact that there are limits to what you can demand.

Kate: What suggestions do you have for a leader or parent to create a “forgiving community”?

Dr. Luskin:
First of all, leaders need to model healthy, forgiving ways to respond to frustration and disappointment. It is very hard to create a forgiveness community if you are harsh and intemperate when people make mistakes. Or if the expectations about performance are so high that people don’t get both time and privacy to process their own experiences.

Secondly, space cannot be only communal. Forgiveness requires inward reflection. So, you have to have a structure that gives people the capacity to have access to themselves. So companies and families need provide avenues for people to have their own space. In some companies you have to run into the bathroom to have a little bit of privacy.

Within that, there are some very simple strategies for a leader:

1. Include regular practices of stress management as part of the work experience. You need to quiet yourself. You need to appreciate things. For example, taking a few minutes of quiet before meetings can be very useful.

2. An environment that appreciates the positive in other people and teaches people to be grateful for opportunity can go a long way toward creating a forgiveness community.

3. Allow people the time to solve things when they are upset. You want to give people the opportunity for their better sides to come out.

4. When you give feedback or criticism, ask the person if they are ready hear it. Just ask, “Is this an appropriate time?” That would solve so many problems.

Kate: You say that forgiveness is more about the present than the past.

Dr. Luskin:
In any hurtful situation the question is how much suffering you are willing to experience now from something in the past that you can’t change Since the past is immutable, it is never about the past.
Forgiveness means that you take information and re-perceive it, re-process it with information from the present so that you suffer less. The essence of forgiveness is that something happened in opposition to your wishes and you can’t change it. The issue is, in the present moment, what can you do to suffer less?

It can work in two ways. One, you disentangle yourself from your over-connection to this person. And two, you get a life. These two strands have nothing to do with the past. Now, when you disconnect yourself from that person, and when you get a life, your perception of the past will change. However, if you try to heal that situation without disconnecting and getting a life, you will just look back with pain. As you look at how you can suffer less, your compassion will grow naturally for both yourself and the person you need to forgive. You will begin to forgive to whatever capacity you choose.

Kate: In this book you discuss the importance of learning to become a forgiving person. That sounds like an EQ skill to me.

Dr. Luskin: That is the theme of the whole book. I see forgiveness primarily as preventative and secondarily as something to work out. It is very secondary that you forgive one specific event. What you want to develop is the capacity to forgive when things don’t work the way you want them to. And to really keep your heart open as much as possible, even when things are not going the way you want. If your airplane is late, can you forgive that and still enjoy the time you are waiting in the airport? Or forgive that there is traffic on the freeway, or that your friend is late? That is the quality I try to develop the ability to forgive the things that can turn us off to life because they aren’t what we want.

Kate: What are three steps people can take to become more forgiving people?

Dr. Luskin:

1. Begin by forgiving the small things. Work on forgiving traffic, long lines, late planes, the things that don’t really matter.

2. Forgive those you love. We erect roadblocks, called grievance stories, which stop us from loving. The most important people to forgive are those closest to us.
3. Always practice first. You may not be ready to forgive someone today, but if you were, what would it sound like? Practice saying it to yourself, say, when you are alone in the car. That why when you are ready to forgive, it is available to you.

Kate: Thank you.

For more information on Dr Luskin, visit his web site.

Posted on April 26, 2002 by Editor

Don't have an account yet? You can create one. As a registered user you have some advantages like theme manager, comments configuration and post comments with your name.