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Dr. Fred Luskin talks about the process of Forgiveness and the healing force it can mean in our lives

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Guy Spiro: Fred, I usually like to start out by letting people tell their story. How did this work evolve?

Fred Luskin: It’s kind of two-fold. I got badly hurt, and didn’t know how to forgive or even deal with it. I became a forgiveness teacher because as I was trying to figure out how to handle my own pain and disappointment. I was also getting a PhD from Stanford. I developed a training out of my own misery and growth that was also the subject of my dissertation. The dissertation study was successful enough that I got grant money to run other and bigger studies. When Bill Clinton was being impeached for his Monica transgressions, forgiveness became a high interest household word, and the media started calling us all the time about opinions, ideas, studies, and what it is that forgiveness is. All those forces together led me to be a forgiveness teacher, and one of the handful of people to whom, when media people want to know about forgiveness, they give a call. It all started just from being unhappy.

GS: In my August editorial titled Bitter Fruit, I wrote that one of the most damaging things facing this country right now is the culture war — the hatred that the right and the left have for each other.

FL: When I travel around and listen to talk radio, most of it right wing, some of it left wing, but all you hear is “I’m OK, and I’m going to tell you what’s true, because you’re not OK.” Most of the community of friends that I have here [California] are virulently left wing, and they are not kind in how they talk about people who disagree with them.

GS: The hatred goes both ways.

FL: I have done some work with both sides in the conflict in Northern Ireland. We brought together people who have had family members murdered in the violence, and you can see how it takes both sides to keep these kinds of never ending conflicts going, because their definition of peace becomes the elimination or destruction of the other side. I’m starting to hear that, and it pains me, among my own friends. “George Bush is not just a politician I disagree with, but an enemy.” They can lose their thinking ability because their emotions are so invested, somehow, in making themselves right by making everyone else wrong. I find that very uncomfortable. It just doesn’t strike me that that is what makes America what it should be, or that it’s anything related to a spiritual connection or quest.

GS: I wrote that some people on the right look at people on the left and say, they’re not real Americans. People on the left may have a “Hatred is not a family value” bumper sticker on their car, but they’re hating the right. We’re all hurt by this.

FL: I was asked by a media person, when the Senate was about to impeach Bill Clinton, what I would say to them about this vitriol of who’s right and who’s wrong. I said that it’s just as important to create a space where you can disagree with each other, as it is to be right. I don’t think we’re doing our best when we don’t do that.

This is the central question of forgiveness. When life isn’t the way you want it to be, how much hostility and resentment do you create, and who gets hurt by that? The question that I give to people all the time is, “Who (do you defend in your mind) deserves to be hurt by that?” You allow yourself to have less humanity towards certain people because you think that, through their actions, they deserve to have less humanity.

GS: How did your work in forgiveness progress? I don’t know if you want to discuss the nature of the wound that you had to recover from.

FL: I had a very close friend reject and abandon me after a long period of very good friendship. To say that I fell apart would be too strong, but I really struggled with that reality, and as the years progressed, what I started to understand is that having friends hurt me is a normal part of life. I started exploring my activity and my lack of emotional maturity, and started to develop ways of handling that. This is what I turned into a forgiveness teaching and project.

GS: You say your reaction was an over reaction?

FL: It was certainly extreme. I suffered for a number of years. When dramatic change like that occurs, people may suffer for a year or two, but I dragged it out and milked it for all it was worth. “You wouldn’t believe how bad this was…” or “you wouldn’t believe how unfair it is.” That’s very different from what I see now, and what I teach people is a methodology so they don’t have to do that.

GS: One of the many things that my wife and I have explored over the years is Unity. Forgiveness is a big part of that.

FL: Well, the whole New Thought movement …. I get invited pretty often to give talks, and they resonate to what I say in a way that I haven’t seen any of the other religions resonate. One time I was at a Presbyterian retreat somewhere, and people were arguing with me about forgiveness. I stopped and said, “I’m a Jewish guy. I practice a form of Hinduism or Buddhism, but it’s your man, your boy who pushes this forgiveness thing. He is being crucified and he looks around and says ‘Father forgive them.’ So this is central to your methods. Why don’t you take this program.”

GS: How did they respond?

FL: Their jaws dropped a little. They knew what I was saying, and it was said in lightheartedness.

GS: In my work as an astrologer, I counsel people who are nursing resentments. Oftentimes it comes as a surprise to them to realize that when you forgive somebody, it doesn’t really do very much for the person who is forgiven. Forgiveness heals the forgiver.

FL: I think it does subtle good for everybody. It’s important because each of us walks around and we are the vibration of our thoughts and feelings and actions. The more it is that we are capable of seeing a benign world, the more we create that benign world. And that is part of the quality of forgiveness. You acknowledge that the world isn’t always going to be the way you want it to be, but that doesn’t have to cause you to develop a bitterness or hostility towards it. Everybody feels that.

GS: As you milked your wound over those years, you did a great deal more harm to yourself than you did to the other person.

FL: And that’s one of the things that actually got me to stop. Realizing that he has a great life and mine sucked. There’s a problem there.

GS: After you had the realization, what was your next step?

FL: It was a two-part realization. The other part was that when I brought information to my mind that this guy was a shit head, basically, my blood pressure went up. I had been working at a Medical School for a number of years and realized that I didn’t want to give another human being the power to wreck my blood pressure. Especially somebody who was having a good life and mine sucked.

GS: And who was not even giving you a lot of thought.

FL: That would be my absolute conclusion. At that moment I realized it was up to me what happened to my blood pressure, not up to him. And like that (snaps) I was able to regulate my own reactivity. Once you can regulate your own reactivity, you have choices as to what you do. So I developed a training, in part around that. The moment-to-moment regulation of reactivity based in part upon mindfulness experience, but also based in part on some breathing practices. Based in a philosophical understanding, once I calmed down, that life is often difficult. It is simply how I handle it. I teach a very pragmatic present centered approach like that.

GS: Talk a little bit about the research and projects that you’ve done at Stanford, and then how you’re helping people on how to practice forgiveness.

FL: There are two aspects. We, myself and people who have used my methods, have finished eight research projects on this forgiveness methodology. There’s also a book called Forgive for Good. We did these projects with college students, with middle age, middle class Bay area people. We did three projects with people from Northern Ireland. I did one with people with high blood pressure, another with people who are stressed. I finished a research project on corporate people and showed that forgiveness will raise their productivity as well as lower their stress. All of that was simply for me to affirm that a) forgiveness is good for you, b) that I can teach it, and c) that it’s a trainable skill, that it wasn’t just pie in the sky. I’d been a researcher long enough to know that good ideas don’t necessarily work. The research was to validate the fact that I could feel comfortable going around the country and teaching this stuff. So I used the research as confirmation of the applicability and the teach-ability of forgiveness.

GS: It’s nice, I suppose, to be able to pull out the charts and graphs.

FL: It’s nice more on the inside than the outside. It’s affirming that I did the work as opposed to just going out there and saying that I like this. The other thing is that the audience doesn’t want too much knowledge about the research, but they are so much more responsive and receptive knowing that I’m from a major university and that we’ve tested this. That gives them a level of comfort that would be a mistake to minimize.

GS: Talk a little about the forgiveness process.

FL: It’s a methodology based on four training principles. One is that lack of forgiveness is a form of stress that we’ve created for ourselves. So whenever there is anything in our lives that we don’t accept, then the memory of the arguing of it causes the body and mind to feel stress. Whenever we find ourselves doing that, we have to practice stress management.

Second, forgiveness and gratitude are intimately related. It’s much easier to hold grudges and to see what the world hasn’t given us when we are inarticulate about what the world has given us. So a part of this training is a reminder about gratitude and ways of looking at the blessings of life. It’s just life. Sometimes it hurts, and often it’s very rich. If you don’t notice the rich, then you exaggerate the hurt and magnify it and take it much too personally.

The third aspect is just the use of cognitive reframing, which is a very simple psychotherapeutic technique which teaches people to argue themselves out of their expectational thinking. A very simple use of a very common practice. The bottom line is that there’s nothing in the world that has to be different than it is, just because you don’t like it.

The last part of it is a reminder to stop telling victim stories. Using Richard Bach’s wonderful words from Illusions, you don’t have to argue for your limitations, they’re already yours. Every story you tell that paints you as a victim creates that as your reality.

GS: That can become quite an addiction.

FL: It’s unbelievable. That is very different from talking honestly about what it is that happened to us and the fact that it was painful.

One thing that’s useful is to remind people that forgiveness is a spiritual quality that can be of use in a secular manner, and that both are wonderful expressions of spirit. You can forgive because you want to lower your blood pressure or because you want to provide an example to your children of a better way to relate. You can forgive through the occupation of praying to Jesus or practicing Metaphysics. They’re both the unfolding of what I would consider a healthy and positive way of helping to heal the world. That artificial distinction between secular and spiritual sometimes is an impediment to people. Forgiveness is both a spiritual quality and a secular quality, but on the deepest level it’s one of the ways by which people heal themselves and help the people around them.

The over arching thing is that forgiveness is just good for you. It helps your physical body and helps your emotional experience, and that’s a wonderful thing.

GS: Any poison that you carry around with you works against your own system.

FL: The last thing I’d like to communicate is just the idea that it can be taught. You can teach people how to do the positive aspects of being a human being. You don’t just have to explore the negative. You can actually teach the positive.

Nine Steps to Forgiveness

1. Know exactly how you feel about what happened and be able to articulate what it is about the situation that is not OK. Then, tell a trusted couple of people about your experience.

2. Make a commitment to yourself to do what you have to do to feel better. Forgiveness is for you and not for anyone else.

3. Forgiveness does not necessarily mean reconciliation with the person that upset you, or condoning of their action. What you are after is to find peace. Forgiveness can be defined as the “peace and understanding that come from blaming less that which has hurt you, taking the life experience less personally, and changing your grievance story.”

4. Get the right perspective on what is happening. Recognize that your primary distress is coming from the hurt feelings, thoughts and physical upset you are suffering now, not what offended you or hurt you two minutes -- or ten years -- ago.

5. At the moment you feel upset, practice a simple stress management technique to soothe your body’s flight or fight response.

6. Give up expecting things from other people, or your life, that they do not choose to give you. Recognize the “unenforceable rules” you have for your health, or how you or other people must behave. Remind yourself that you can hope for health, love, friendship and prosperity and work hard to get them.

7. Put your energy into looking for another way to get your positive goals met than through the experience that has hurt you. Instead of mentally replaying your hurt, seek out new ways to get what you want.

8. Remember that a life well lived is your best revenge. Instead of focusing on your wounded feelings, and thereby giving the person who caused you pain power over you, learn to look for the love, beauty and kindness around you.

9. Amend your grievance story to remind you of the heroic choice to forgive.

From Forgive for Good, by Frederic Luskin, Ph.D., Harper Collins, 2002.

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Dr. Fred Luskin is the director of the Stanford Forgiveness Project, the largest research project to date on the training and measurement of forgiveness intervention. He holds a Ph.D. in Counseling and Health Psychology from Stanford University and 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. For more information about his work, visit his website at www.learningtoforgive.com.

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