Author Archive: directorifi
On Being Treated Unfairly: Don’t Let Them Win Twice!
Learn to Forgive? Who, Me? Why? How?
You can now access the answers to all those questions from the comfort of your own home.
Dr. Robert Enright, dubbed “the forgiveness trailblazer” by Time magazine, has helped thousands of people improve their lives by discovering and learning how to practice forgiveness through his one-day in-person workshops. Now that same remarkable forgiveness process, presented by Dr. Enright himself, is available to you via recorded audio right in your own home.
Forgiveness: A Pathway to Emotional Healing
Based on his 33-years of peer-reviewed, empirical scientific research, Dr. Robert Enright will help you discover and learn a step-by-step pathway to forgiveness. This 6-hour audiotaped workshop will enable you to develop confidence in your forgiveness skills and learn how you can bring forgiveness to your family, school, work place and community for better emotional health.
“Forgiveness is a process, freely chosen, in which you willingly reduce resentment through some hard work and offer goodness of some kind toward the one who hurt you,” according to Dr. Enright. “This gives you a chance to live a life of love, compassion and joy.”
Dr. Enright explains during this workshop how you can learn and use that process to help yourself and others. He explains, for example that:
• Forgiveness is NOT reconciliation, forgetting, excusing or condoning.
Dr. Robert Enright, founder of the International Forgiveness Institute
• Forgiveness does not get rid of the injustice but the effects of the injustice.
• Forgiveness cuts across many different philosophies and religions.
• The benefits of forgiveness are significant: scientific analyses demonstrates that considerable emotional, relational, and even physical health benefits result from forgiving.
This course is offered by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Continuing Studies which is approved as a provider of Continuing Education credits social workers, counselors, therapists, psychologists, and more. Registration fee is $95. Start anytime, complete within 1 year.
REGISTER ONLINE 
or register by phone at 608-262-2451. For additional information, contact Barbara Nehls-Lowe, UW-Madison Continuing Studies Outreach Specialist: 608-890-4653.
Anger and Cancer: Is There a Relationship?
Anger is a negative emotion that can follow frustration, disappointment, and injustice. It can vary from mild and short-term to intense and long-term. It is the latter, the intense and long-term variety, that concerns us here, what we have called unhealthy anger (Enright & Fitzgibbons, 2015).
To begin answering the question concerning the link between anger and cancer, let us start with a quotation that may be an overstatement and then let us get more precise. Groer, Davis, Droppleman, Mozingo, and Pierce (2000) made the following general statement: “Extremely low anger scores have been noted in numerous studies of patients with cancer. Such low scores suggest suppression, repression, or restraint of anger. There is evidence to show that suppressed anger can be a precursor to the development of cancer, and also a factor in its progression after diagnosis.”
Notice that their conclusion centers on a certain type of anger, that which is not overtly expressed but instead, to use a common expression, is bottled up.
Our next question, then, is to look for supporting evidence of this claim of suppressed anger relating to cancer, and we find it in. . . . .
Read the rest of this blog by Dr. Robert Enright in Psychology Today. First posted on Sept. 18, 2017.
Power: Five Non-Traditional Views
Within psychology, power is seen as having influence over others, whether of the benign kind (such as an authority directing others) or the coercive kind (manipulating and controlling others). Friedrich Nietzsche (1881/1997), the 19th-century German philosopher, talked about the “will to power,” suggesting that the quest for power is a major human motivation. In their now classic analysis of power, French and Raven (1959) identified legitimate power (the benign kind above), referent power (drawing others to the self for the self’s benefit), expert power (the ability of others to listen and follow), reward power (being able to reinforce others), and coercive power (already mentioned).
We propose five power-themes rarely discussed. We do so to challenge you: Do you use any of these aspects of power?
1. Power-Over vs. Power-For
In virtually all of the social science literature, you will see a hidden assumption: All power is over others and for the self, even if it is benign and reward-producing. Yet, there is another form of power in need of exploration, what we call here power-for, meaning an altruistic form of power in which the power-wielder aids those in need, suffers for others, and builds others up.
Read the rest of this blog by Dr. Robert Enright in Psychology Today.
Posted Oct. 30, 2017
Does Forgiveness Victimize the Victim?
In the latest round of false criticism against the moral virtue of forgiveness, we find this: Forgiveness places an extra burden on victims because they already are burdened by injustice. Now asking them to forgive or even assisting them in forgiveness adds a new challenge, a new burden and this is unfair. Leave the victim alone, is the advice.
Let us examine this claim of a new unfair burden in forgiving. Suppose that Person A deliberately hits Person B’s knee with a baseball bat, breaking the knee. Person B has a burden: the broken knee and the resentment toward Person A.
If Person B now wishes to take seriously the responsibility for physical healing, should this person now go to the emergency room and endure the bright lights and the MRI and the surgery and the physical rehab? Or, would this be too much of an added burden for Person B. Perhaps it is unfair to encourage Person B to seek medical help……if we follow the logic of the forgiveness criticism.
Yet, this added burden of medical care, which can be a challenge, is hardly a burden relative to living with a broken knee that may not heal well with the resultant pain and limp that may last indefinitely. The “burden” of healing is not nearly as troublesome as the burden of neglect of the injury.
Now let us turn back to the argument against forgiveness. Let us even stay with the baseball bat incident. Person B not only has a broken knee, but now also a broken heart from the shocking and unexpected incident.
Is it a burden to assist this person in healing the broken heart? Should we just let the victim be? Should we just let the victim live with the broken heart…..perhaps for the rest of the person’s life?
Do you see how this latest criticism against forgiveness is false? Do you see how the major problem is the error in thinking by the critics and not in forgiveness itself?
When a person is morally injured, it seems to be charitable to offer healing. Yes, healing can be challenging, but ignoring healing can be much worse.
Robert
Dr. Robert Enright
What strikes me in particular about this young man is his apparent kindness. He does not have angry eyes. He talks in a respectful way to me. We are engaged in a conversation, not engaged in a battle of wills. He wants to learn more about forgiveness, but he knows he could pay a dear price for practicing it, especially if his family and peers begin to mock him.
“You can forgive and not tell anyone you did this, not even the one who hut you,” I said. “Those you forgive will know by how you respond to them, by how you are civil to them. You do not have to use the word, ‘forgive.’”
“I need my anger,” was his studied response.
“Yes, you have been hurt by others. Now you are hurting others. You are even hurting yourself by your actions. Do you see how those who hurt you at first are hurting you again? They may not be present to you, but they are inside of you, disrupting you, angering you, causing you pain and causing you to give pain to others.”
“They have hurt me twice,” was his insight. He got it.
“The key now is to deliberately commit to do no harm to those who have injured you. Another key now is to deliberately commit to do no harm to others. Don’t let your pain become others’ pain. When you do that, those who have hurt you win again. Those who originally hurt you win twice.”
Forgiveness Stops the Hurt So the “Bad Guys” Don’t Defeat You
How about you? Have others hurt you? Are you allowing them to win again?
Forgiving allows you to win for a change.
Posted Nov 11, 2017
