Archive for September, 2022

Inaugural Partnership Achievement Award Presented to Tim Markle

Tim Markle, founder and director of Forgiveness Factor, has received a partnership achievement award for his years of commitment to helping others learn about the virtues of self-forgiveness and interpersonal forgiveness.

Markle was recognized with the “Healing Hearts Hero” award by the International Forgiveness Institute (IFI), a 27-year-old not-for-profit organization that has established forgiveness education programs in more than 30 countries around the world. It was presented at the International Educational Conference on Agape Love and Forgiveness in Madison, WI, that was attended by 160 educators from the US, Northern Ireland, Taiwan, Israel, Spain, and the Philippines on July 19-20.

Tim Markle, a forgiveness advocate and founder of Forgiveness Factor, is the first recipient of the IFI’s prestigious “Healing Hearts Hero” award.

For the past 13 years, Markle has been an Outreach Specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Waisman Center where his numerous titles include Director of the Southern Regional Center for Children and Youth with Special Health Care Needs. In those various capacities, Markle works to improve the lives of children and adults with developmental disabilities and neurodegenerative diseases, some of life’s most challenging conditions. He also develops curriculum for a variety of audiences, provides training for both children and adults, and is a prolific speaker.

Markle uses those same management and speaking skills to pursue his secondary passion of “educating people about the benefits of forgiveness”–the passion that earned him the Healing Hearts Hero award. In addition to teaching forgiveness techniques at workshops and conferences throughout the Midwest, Markle has teamed up with Stoughton Health to create a series of popular informational podcasts on the basics of forgiveness (i.e., “Forgiving Yourself” and “The Art of Forgiveness”). He also regularly sends out short written Forgiveness Boosts to his subscribers.

Through radio station Life 102.5FM in Madison, Markle has produced more than 50 short (2-4 minutes each) “Forgiveness Audio Boosts” that the station has been broadcasting since March 2021.

Markle even developed a six-week course that focuses on how to forgive and why forgiveness is indispensable for dealing with anger, depression, anxiety and trauma.  The course is based on the ground-breaking scientific forgiveness research work of Dr. Robert Enright, co-founder of the IFI and an educational psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“Tim is a contributing writer for the IFI and the most prolific speaker we have for our Speaker’s Bureau service,” according to Dr. Enright “No one deserves this award more because Tim is not only one of our strongest forgiveness advocates, but he has created his own forgiveness education organization called Forgiveness Factor so he can even better broadcast his faith in forgiveness.”

The Toledo (Ohio) native has a BA degree in Psychology with a minor in Philosophy from Bowling Green State University (BGSU, Bowling Green, Ohio), a Masters in Counseling (MC) from John Carroll University  (Cleveland, OH) and a Master of Arts in Christian Studies (MACS) from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School north of Chicago. He and his wife Tracy have two adult children and live in Stoughton, 20 miles east of Madison, WI.

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I hear such expressions as “State and Trait Forgiveness” and “Specific Forgiveness vs. Dispositional Forgiveness.”  Are there really different forms of forgiving?

I think this dichotomizing of forgiving is a philosophical error.  “State” forgiveness refers to individual people forgiving specific people who have hurt them.  “Trait” forgiveness refers to individual people having a general tendency to forgive many other people for many different offenses.  Aristotle reminds us that as each person grows in any moral virtue through practice (and forgiveness is one of those moral virtues), then there is a tendency to develop a love of that virtue.  As the person develops this love of forgiveness then there is a tendency to forgive others whenever there is an injustice.  So, “Trait” or “Dispositional” forgiving occurs when a person first has a lot of practice with specific forgiving toward specific people.  Such a person eventually shows a maturity in how this now is understood, valued, and expressed.  Forgiveness should not be dichotomized into “State and Trait” forgiveness.  Instead, we should see these as being on a continuum, with the love of the virtue appearing after a period of struggle and time.

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I have been reading some of the social scientific literature on forgiveness and I am a bit confused.  I see a lot of different definitions of forgiveness out there.  Is forgiveness more than one thing?

To forgive another is a moral virtue of being good to those who are not good to you.  I am going to give you a little philosophy here based on Aristotle.  He made the distinction between what he called the Essence of any moral virtue and the Existence of that virtue.  Essence asks this question: What is the objective meaning of forgiveness that is consistent across cultures and across historical time?  Existence asks this question: How does the fundamental sense of forgiveness (that is fixed across cultures and historical time) have nuances for each person and within different cultures?  So, there is a fixed definition of what forgiveness is (its Essence) and yet it can behaviorally vary according to each person’s ability to forgive and according to different cultural norms for expressing forgiveness (its Existence).  The differences in the definition of forgiveness (its Essence) within the social scientific literature is caused by different researchers having different views of forgiveness (including misunderstandings of what forgiveness is) and not something inherent within forgiveness itself.

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It seems to me that a safer approach when treated unfairly is to engage in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and not forgiveness.  Forgiveness invites an unwanted guest back into the heart.  Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, in contrast, helps me to think in new ways so that I do not condemn myself for letting the injustice happen and it helps me keep my distance from the one who hurt me.

Research does show that Cognitive Behavioral Therapy as a psychotherapeutic technique can be helpful in changing one’s attitude toward difficult situations, but it may not be as effective as Forgiveness Therapy in getting rid of the elephant in the room which is deep, excessive anger that just won’t quit.  Forgiveness Therapy has been shown to be very effective against the effects of trauma suffered because of others’ injustice.  Forgiveness Therapy can take time and is a struggle because you are growing in the important virtue of having mercy on those who did not have mercy on you.  Yet, the effort is worth it because the toxic anger can be reduced and eliminated.  Some residual anger can remain, but it does not control the one who forgives.

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Even if I ask for fairness from the one who hurt me, it seems that what I ask of the other may be too soft, too advantageous for the other and not for me.  After all, if I start having softness in my heart toward the other, aren’t I then likely to be, to use an expression, “soft on crime”?

As you forgive and seek justice, you are not excusing what the other person did.  In fact, as you scrutinize what happened to hurt you, then you may be seeing even more clearly what exactly the person did to you.  This can be a motivation on your part to ask for an accurate justice from the other person, not a distorted version of that.

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