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Hi, everybody, and welcome to the podcast. I wanted to talk today about forgiveness, but first of all, you might be wondering what does forgiveness have to do with anxiety, which is the focus of our podcast? Well, it does have to do with anxiety because research shows that people who are forgiving have less anxiety, they have less depression, they're less hostile, less angry, more serene. There's a recent study which also showed that increases in forgiveness were correlated with decreases in perceived bad stress, or in other words, stress that can be harmful to your performance, stress that is harmful to your health, stress that is associated with anxiety, that's what we call the threat response to stress. This study found that increases in forgiveness were associated with decreases in the harmful kind of threat response stress where people tend to feel like things are too much for them, and they don't have the resources to meet the demands that they're up against. Most major religions talk about how forgiveness is important, and there's a lot of different wisdom quotes in regards to this, but one of them by Buddha is that " holding onto anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else, but you are the one getting burned." so these are all reasons to work on becoming a more forgiving person or being able to forgive specific hurts in your life.
But first of all, we need to talk about what forgiveness is and what it isn't. We've talked from the beginning of this podcast about how your emotions are not organized by the situations that you face, but they are organized by the way that you see your situations, and we call that your appraisal, or in other words, the glasses that you use to see your life through, the stories that you tell about how these situations are going to affect you, what they mean. So researchers talk about how forgiveness is really a change in this perception of how you see your past hurts. When we go through forgiveness, what happens is that we no longer feel motivated to hurt the person in return, but instead we end up desiring good things for the person. So whereas before we might have wished that good things would pass them by or that they wouldn't have a moment's peace in their life or that something terrible will happen to them like they get in a plane crash or that they'll suffer from a lot of terrible remorseful feelings. These might all be examples of the bad things that we wish on the people who inflict us pain. After forgiveness, we actually desire to see good things happen to this person. But let me just clarify that forgiveness does not mean condoning what happened. It does not mean justifying or minimizing or tolerating the hurt. It doesn't mean excusing it or offering a good reason for the hurt. It doesn't mean denying it or repressing it or forgetting it. Research makes it very clear that forgiveness is not any of these things. And forgiveness is also not the same thing as reconciliation where you reestablish a relationship with the person who hurt you. But the shift that really happens with forgiveness is this desire to see good things happen to the person that hurt you rather than desiring bad things to happen to the person.

So this is a really dramatic type of appraisal change where you're gonna b-be feeling so dramatically different toward the person who hurt you. It seems almost impossible. How in the world can something like this happen? How can you change your story of the hurt that you went through in such a way that you can have this shift in what you desire for the person who hurt you without doing all of these other things that are not forgiveness, like minimizing or denying what happened to you, or repressing or excusing it or condoning it?

So there is a researcher that has a lot of authority to speak on this topic because he himself is a psychologist who studies forgiveness, but he also has had to practice forgiveness on a personal level. So this researcher named Everett Worthington is a man who began studying forgiveness in about nineteen ninety, but then in nineteen ninety-five, his mother was murdered by a burglar in her house. And so he had to go through the process of trying to really personally figure out if all of this forgiveness research was really helpful and possible on a personal level. And one thing that he comments about, which I think is really important to realize, is that being able to forgive someone who hurt you or, or in other words, being able to shift your appraisal of the hurt so drastically that it produces desiring good for the person who hurt you versus desiring bad things for them, he talks about how it's not going to happen suddenly, but that it's more like nourishing a plant that can produce the fruit of forgiveness. It takes time. And we've talked several times before about how our emotions come from our brains really asking and answering certain unconscious questions about the situation that we go through, and these three questions kind of fall into these three categories of the first one being, "How good or bad is this?" second one is, "Whose fault is it?" And the third is, "How will it develop?" Well, Dr. Everett Worthington, who wrote a book about his experience called The Five Steps of Forgiveness, he talks about how it's important, first of all, to understand your pain. And I've certainly found this in my own life, that it's really important to first start by figuring out, how am I answering these three questions? How good or bad is this? Whose fault is it, and how will it develop? To really be able to write, sometimes stream of consciousness, about the hurt that I feel, and then try and distill from what I wrote what my answers are to these questions. How good or bad is this? Whose fault is it, and how will it develop? Because that helps me to understand where I'm at right now, how I'm seeing this situation. Because the work that really has to be done is on the way that you're answering those questions. Dr. Everett Worthington talks about how it is really helpful if you can try to understand what that person was going through who hurt you, what they might-- what h- might have motivated them to behave the way that they did. Were they covering vulnerability? Were they trying to survive? Were they reacting to a painful past? He talks about how it can be really helpful sometimes to imagine the painful event from the perspective of the person who hurt you. And he talks about how he did this with his mother's murder. He talks about how he imagined the two burglars choosing the house, his mother's house, on New Year's Eve because it was dark, and there was no car in the driveway, and they thought for sure nobody was home. Maybe they had already tried to rob someone's house before and been caught, and they wanted to be sure that they could get away with this one without any consequences. And so they chose his mother's house. They couldn't have known that she didn't have a car, and so it didn't mean that there was nobody home just because there was no car there. And then he imagined them even wanting to test it and wanting-- and going up and knocking on the door because he said later the neighbors said that they had heard a noise. So he imagined them going up and knocking on the door, not getting a response because his mother was already asleep, and because she had a hearing problem, so she didn't hear them. And then he imagined how the burglars broke in the window and entered in and started ransacking the drawers and how his mother probably woke up at that point, came out and said, "What's going on?" and then he imagined the one burglar looking at his mother in dismay and surprise and thinking, you know, "This wasn't supposed to happen. This was supposed to be the perfect robbery. Where'd this woman come from? She will be able to recognize me. I'm gonna go to jail, and this is going to ruin the rest of my life." and then he probably glanced down at the crowbar in his hand and struck her. His partner might have yelled, "What have you done?" He probably felt extreme anger and guilt all mixed together. Maybe his partner ran away at that point. His anger and guilt and fear may have prompted him to hit all kinds of other things around him in the house and break them, and even break the mirror when he saw his, his image in the mirror. He may have thought, you know, to himself, "She made me do this," you know? And then he probably fled the scene feeling overwhelmed with sh- the shame of having murdered somebody. Everett Worthington talked about how difficult it was to imagine this from this perspective, but that after he did this, he felt that he understood better what had happened. It's not that what h- what this young person did wasn't terrible. It was evil. It was inexcusable. He wasn't trying to whitewash anything. He was simply trying to understand why this might have happened. He was able to understand that the young man had lashed out in, probably in fear and surprise and guilt and anger. This helped him to feel some compa- compassion and to be able to see the the person who killed his mother as someone who needed serious help and who needed help to prevent him from hurting other people. So this was one exercise that really helped him to begin to shift the story his brain was telling, his appraisal, so that he could begin to have different emotions, shift out of unforgiveness.

A couple of other things that he talks about that he personally did and that he has also tested and researched since that really helped were to identify different incidents in his own life where he had been forgiven by other people, times when he had hurt other people and they had forgiven him. And he talks about how it's, it, it's really helpful to think about it deeply, to, to write about it. Remember guilt, embarrassment, shame that you might have experienced when you hurt someone, to recall your concern over the consequences and how you might have tried to justify yourself, and then recall how it felt when you were granted forgiveness.

Another thing that he talked about doing that helped him to switch was to, to be able to see how he, in some ways he's not entirely different from the person who hurt his mother. Because he talked about how in that moment when he went and he found his mother, there was a baseball bat in her, in her house, and he talked about how if the man who had killed her had been present, that he would have beaten him right there until he was dead. And afterwards when he reflected on that, he realized that that was an occasion where his rage and his emotions would have overcome him, and he would have done the same thing. He would have murdered someone. And so these two exercises of recognizing times when he had hurt other people and he had been forgiven, and recognizing ways in which he wasn't entirely different from the person who hurt him were also helpful in, in, in helping him make that transition towards seeing this hurt with different eyes and giving it a different meaning, answering those questions in a different way.
He also gives some other suggestions that he has found helpful in his research and in his personal experience. Different things that you can do that can help your brain to change the way that you see the hurt. You can try and make a list of, a list of some positive things that you see in the person who hurt you. You can write the hurt, the crime on your hands and then wash your hands until all trace of the ink is gone. You can pick a big heavy rock to symbolize the revenge that you feel that you want to enact against this person and hold it out at arm's length for as long as you can, and when it starts to become too heavy for you, to let it go, and that this sym-symbolizes and helps you to feel the relief of letting go of that desire for revenge and hate. You can also write all of your hurt on a piece of paper and then burn it. You can write a certificate of forgiveness, which of course you're not gonna present to the person that you're forgiving. It's really for yourself, where you say, "I, on this day, hereby forgive so and so ." he talks about how it can be helpful to tell someone else about your forgiveness. Someone that you trust. Tell your, tell your friend. And how you can also imagine talking about the painful wounds of your past to your enemy while being encouraged by someone that you consider a hero of forgiveness, someone that you would really admire who is a forgiving person, and imagine them there with you as you talk to your enemy about these hurts. That this kind of vivid imagery can really change your memory of those past events because our memories are actually reconstructed when we recall them. And last of all, he talks about how if it's too hard to forgive for a particular hurt that you should start with an easier one. Just put the hard one aside till later and try again tomorrow, but start with something smaller. That it's a matter of practicing. Again, keeping this image of nourishing a plant that can produce the fruit of forgiveness.

One of my heroes of forgiveness is my brother who recently passed away. He had a period in his life where he experienced a lot of what we might call unforgiveness, where he seemed very angry against a lot of different people in his life. But then in the last years of his life, it was clear that he had gone through a change in the way that he saw these same people. He became someone who was very hard to offend He seemed to be able to look at what people did and what they said, even when it was careless or thoughtless, and just imagine how they had good intentions or how they didn't mean to be hurtful in that way. He had delight in his last years in seeing the successes of people around him, even the same people that he had been somewhat angry at before. And so to me, he is an example of someone who was really successful at being able to make this change in the way that he saw the world. He didn't need to go around and tell people, I forgive you, I forgive you, because it was simply apparent in the way that he reacted to people and in the way that he behaved. So he's one of my examples that this can be done. I would encourage you to think about ways in which you can reduce anxiety and depression in your life by practicing a few of these strategies that Everett Worthington suggests. Start small, as he suggests as well. Don't try and do the biggest one first. Pick three or four different offenses in your life that you would like to be able to forgive and maybe try some of these different practices. If you can do these on a consistent basis, you will be able to nourish this plant which can produce the fruit of forgiveness which gives the emotions of more happiness, more agreeableness, more serenity, things that I saw reflected in my brother's life as well. So that's what I have for you today. Thanks so much for tuning in and we'll see you next week.