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Introduction (excerpt from The Stanford Daily, February 4, 2002 )

New studies look at forgiveness  –  by Gohar Galyan

To earn his doctorate in counseling and health psychology from Stanford in 1997, Fred Luskin had to write a dissertation. At the time, Luskin was furious with a friend. To complete his graduation requirement and to cope with the pain, Luskin researched and wrote about forgiveness.

“I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t forgive,” he said. “I was badly hurt by a friend of mine and it threw my world upside down.”

Luskin, now a research associate with the Stanford Center for Research in Disease Prevention, focused on Stanford students’ experiences when he initially began studying forgiveness. In 1999, after earning his doctorate, Luskin launched the original Stanford Forgiveness Project, which studied Bay Area residents. According to Luskin, the study involved 260 participants, including 100 men.

“The results were very positive,” Luskin said. “People showed less stress, less anger, more optimism and more forgiveness.”

Research is conducted in a workshop format and typically lasts from five to six weeks, he said. In his research, he teaches forgiveness as a skill.

“It is not therapy. It is teaching people how to learn this kind of skill,” he said. “We can teach people to forgive and that will improve their well-being.”

The Stanford Forgiveness Project has evolved and now exists as an umbrella organization for numerous Stanford research projects that address forgiveness.

Over the years, researchers with the Stanford Forgiveness Project have worked with families from Ireland who have lost loved ones due to civil strife. The Stanford- Northern Ireland HOPE Project has conducted research on three different occasions with Irish families.

 Four Steps Toward Forgiveness
from Healing Currents Magazine — Sept/Oct 1996 

The process of forgiveness can be a liberating experience. One that if practiced proactively can lead to a wonderful experience of life. Interestingly, forgiveness can only occur because we have been given the gift of the ability to make choices. We have the choice to forgive or not to forgive and no one can force us to do either. Conversely, if we want to forgive someone no one can stop us no matter how poorly they may act. This ability to forgive is a manifestation of the personal control we have over our lives. It is nice to reflect upon and feel the respect that we have been given to be able to make such profound choices.

Compellingly, the option to forgive also implies that we had discretion as to whether or not we took offense in the first place. While forgiving may be a difficult enough choice for many of us, imagine how our lives would be if we rarely or never used our power of choice to take offense. Since we have choice, wouldnít it make sense to limit the amount of times we are hurt or offended so that the need to forgive rarely if ever arises? The ability to live life without taking offense, without giving blame, and by offering forgiveness are choices that offer a life of great peace.

The ability to offer proactive forgiveness proceeds along four steps. At step one you are filled with self justified anger. At some point in your life you have been hurt and you are mad at the person you feel wronged you. You blame the person committing the wrong for how you are feeling. It is their action and not your choice of response that you feel is at the cause of your anger. You have forgotten that you have a choice as to how you will react, or are so angry that you are convinced that it would not be right to forgive the offense. At this stage there is usually both active and submerged anger.

The second step towards forgiveness emerges when after feeling angry with someone for a while you realize that the anger does not feel good to you. It may be hurting your emotional balance or your physical health. Or you wish to repair the damage to the relationship. So you take steps to forgive. You may begin to see the problem from the other personís point of view or you may simply decide to let the problem go. In either case after an extended period of time you are no longer angry and you have forgiven the person with whom you were angry. This process can be applied to anger at oneself, another person or to life in general.

The third stage of forgiveness comes after you have seen the beneficial results of forgiveness and you choose to let go of your anger fairly quickly. In this stage the choice is to feel the hurt for a short period of time, and then work to either repair the relationship or let go of seeing the situation as a problem. In either case you decide to forgive because you have had some practice with it and see the benefit in your life. This could emerge in as simple a situation as being cut off by another car on the expressway or in a complex situation like an affair in a marriage. At this stage you are aware that the length of time you experience the situation as a grievance is primarily up to you.

The fourth stage of forgiveness involves the proactive choice to rarely if ever get angry. This means often to forgive in advance of a specific trigger. This stage often emerges at the same time as some or all of the following thoughts:

I don’t want to waste my precious life in the discomfort caused by anger so I will choose to feel differently. I am able to forgive myself, forgive others, forgive life, and forgive God.

I know how it hurts when people donít forgive me. I do not want to hurt other people by my anger so I will let it go.

Life is filled with incredible beauty and I am missing some if I am experiencing unresolved anger. I forgive myself for getting sidetracked.

People do the best they can and if they err I can best help them by offering understanding. The first step in this process is to forgive the specific offense.

Everyone, including myself operates primarily out of self-interest. I must expect that some times I, in my self-interest, will be annoyed by some one else’s expression of their self-interest. If I can understand that this is an ordinary part of life, what is there to be upset about? If I understand that self interest is the way that I behave, how can I but offer forgiveness to everyone, including myself for behaving that way?

These four stages of forgiveness will not be followed in the same way by all people and in all relationships. There are some people for whom we feel such love that we are almost always at stage four: open hearted and ready to forgive. There are other people for whom we feel so egregiously hurt and our well of good will for them is so dry that we can spend years at stage one. What is critical to remember is the power of personal choice and the importance of exercising that choice to forgive so that we can bring peace and healing into our relationships and ourselves.

Nine Steps to Forgiveness

from “Forgive for Good” (Harper Collins, 2002)
by Frederic Luskin, Ph.D.

1.   Know exactly how you feel about what happened and be able to articulate what about the situation is not OK.  Then, tell a couple of trusted 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 that which has hurt you less, 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.

Please note:  Dr. Luskin expands on these suggestions in his new book, Forgive for Good, which you can order through the New Conversations Bookstore and Reading List.  For more information about Dr. Luskin’s work please visit www.learningtoforgive.com

Fred Luskin, PhD, is a Professor at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in Palo Alto, CA, where he teaches tests and measurement and forgiveness classes. He is the Director of the Stanford Forgiveness Projects – a series of research projects affirming his forgiveness training methodology. He has taught and lectured on forgiveness worldwide and has been featured for his forgiveness work in many major media outlets. Dr. Luskin is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and a Nationally Certified School Psychologist.

Welcome the Blog of the New Conversations Initiative (which we might also have called “Curriculum Development For A More Cooperative World”).  We are making a new start here, and carrying forward the work of the Journal of Cooperative Communication Skills at our previous web site. The blog format suits our intentions better, because Gene Knudsen Hoffman and I (Dennis Rivers) have always written for the general public rather than for a specialized, Communications Studies only, audience. Gene passed away in 2010, after a lifetime of inspired work on the theme of compassionate listening. This blog will provide a venue for publishing some of her timeless articles, as well as articles of mine and new contributions from participants around the world.

I find it a considerable challenge to be a teacher and advocate of cooperative communication skills in a world continuously at war.  But I am inspired by the example of the two sides in the long running Northern Ireland conflict.  After generations of armed conflict, the combatants themselves realized that they had created a world in which there was no hope for their own children.  That gave them a powerful motivation to do a kind of peacemaking that seemed impossible at the time. In my own family, there were also conflicts that went on for generations, and I can remember the arrival of a baby girl being the impetus for the beginning of family peacemaking.  We were either going to pass the troubles on to yet another generation, or we were going to have to start talking and listening to one another in new ways.

In this blog you will find the continuing efforts of the New Conversations Initiative participants to dream the impossible dream, which, it turns out, is not so impossible after all.  Last year we reached about 140,000 people with free communication skills teaching materials, and if you Google for the words, “free communication skills workbook,” The Seven Challenges Workbook comes up at the top of the list.  My only regret is that we are one of two or three rather than one of a hundred.  Our job is to change that.

Dennis Rivers — March 2012

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Book Review by Gene Knudsen Hoffman  –  Summer 2002

There is a way the world can change from war to peace, from hatred to love. It requires a lot of effort, a lot of understanding, and it begins at home.

For centuries we’ve been told to practice it, that it’s healing for ourselves and the other, that it’s a way to manifest love and courage. It brings peace to the participants. It is a brave and noble thing to do, and — it can be very costly, costly to pride, to arrogance, to fear, to hate.

Michael Henderson has written the definitive book on it and it’s called: Forgiveness. Of it Desmond Tutu wrote, “A deeply moving and eloquent testimony to the power of forgiveness in the life of individuals, of communities, and between and within nations. It effects change — a powerful book.”

Forgiveness demands much of us, yet once we’ve practiced it, it is so obvious — and easy. It demands that we examine our lives daily to learn whether we have brought harm to anyone, discouraged anyone, destroyed anyone’s confidence or trust. If we find we have, we give up painful denial and simply acknowledge it to ourselves, to the one harmed, and ask their forgiveness. Whether or not we’re forgiven is not the issue. That we found the courage to take the unexpected act is. We have accepted our imperfection and begun a healing process for ourselves and the world.

In his book, Michael Henderson tells us story after story of forgiveness in action and its results. I’m going to focus on one of them. I feel it’s an object lesson for us Americans. Perhaps it will whet your appetite for more.

In 1788, the British colonized Australia, and for the Aboriginal peoples, this period was one of “dispossession and massacre,” to the point where it was assumed they would die out. But the number of the mixed Aboriginal and white people grew steadily, and, since they were almost always born of white fathers and Aboriginal mothers, most grew up in Aboriginal communities.

This alarmed the white authorities who had no respect for the Aboriginal culture. They thought if they took the children out of the aboriginal culture, Australia would comfortably become a western country. So they stole, often brutally, children from their mothers, often when they were newly born, and placed them in foster homes or in institutions. By 1970, some of the Australian citizens began working courageously to overcome the attitudes that allowed such cruelty to happen. Kim Beazley, a member of Parliament and leader of the Labor party decided to devote his parliamentary career to the needs of the Aboriginal (sometime called Maori) people.

In the late `80s the Labor commission initiated a Royal Commission to discover why so many Aboriginal people took their own lives while in prison. In 1993, some Australians and some government officials were ready to admit how cruelly the Aboriginal people were treated. By 1997, a 680 page report was finished and was titled Bringing Them Home. It called for a National apology.

The national report shook the conscience of Australia. After some months the government announced it would make available sixty-three million dollars over four years for counseling and family reunion. However, it ignored the proposal for a national apology and the concept of a National Sorry Day of acknowledgement and forgiveness.

On their own initiative many Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people came together and launched a plan to hold a Sorry Day on May 26, 1998, exactly a year after the report had been made public by Parliament. The idea spread rapidly with strong backing from the churches and from educational authorities. One group developed Sorry Books in which people expressed in their own words their sorrow for the forced removal of children from families. Eventually more than 1200 such books were distributed in which 400,000 people wrote personal messages. On National Sorry Day the books were handed to elders of “The Stolen Generations” in hundreds of ceremonies throughout Australia.

Former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser published an article called Why We Must Say Sorry in which he wrote “Facing the truth about our past, when it is contrary to that which we have been taught for generations, is difficult. Unless non-Aboriginal Australians are prepared to look at the past honestly, there will be no real reconciliation with Aborigines. It also involves matters of Spirit. This is where an apology for past wrongs is relevant. An apology does not say “I am guilty”; it is a recognition that our society perpetuated a wrong and that we are sorry it happened. … An apology says that by today’s standards these things should never have happened.”

The next step the Australian people took was a Journey of Healing which was led by members of the Stolen generations, who took the initiative to heal the remaining wounds among people of all races. One member of the stolen generation, Fiona, said “National Sorry Day was the final thing in my healing because it gave recognition to pain. …and it gave us permission to cry and grieve together. Since then, I’ve suddenly become aware that our people aren’t victims any more.”

On August 27, 1999, Parliament expressed its sincere and deep regret that indigenous Australians suffered injustices under the practice of past generations and for the hurt and trauma that Prime Minister John Howard (who two years before had refused to apologize to the indigenous people) came to describe with the following words: “The greatest blemish and stain on the Australian national story is our treatment of the indigenous people. It is important that we recognize that, we con-front it and acknowledge it.”

My dream is that we American people will come out of our denial about the tragic harm we’ve done others beginning with Native Americans, the people of whom we made slaves, all immigrants who were rejected and looked down upon, our gay and lesbian children, brothers and sisters — and from there move on to people all over the world who have suffered and died from the weapons we have used and the bombs we have dropped. Making a pilgrimage of acknowledging the harm we have done, making what amends we can, and asking forgiveness is not beyond our capabilities and it has a powerful example in our own Veterans Vietnam Restoration Project where they are performing just such acts of healing and restoration in Vietnam at this very time.

References:

Forgiveness: Breaking the Chain of Hate. 
by Michael Henderson, Book Partners Inc. Wilsonville, Oregon 97070. 1999.
Get more info about this book plus purchase links to many countries at Global-Find-A-Book .

Veterans Vietnam Restoration Project
P. O. Box 369, Garberville, CA. 95542

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