Our Forgiveness Blog

Forgiveness Intervention Improves Health of Women with Fibromyalgia

Fibromyalgia News Today, Dallas, Texas – Fibromyalgia patients who suffered abuse during childhood achieved “significant improvements in forgiveness, anger and overall fibromyalgia health” after a forgiveness intervention administered as part of a new study conducted by the International Forgiveness Institute (IFI) and University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers.

Fibromyalgia is a medical disorder characterized by widespread chronic musculoskeletal pain, fatigue, stiffness and numbness in certain parts of the body, headaches, sleep disorder
and mood alterations. Fibromyalgia can affect people’s ability to conduct simple daily tasks, compromising their quality of life. Women are usually more affected than men.

Medical researchers believe that childhood abuse or trauma may change the body’s response to stress, potentially leading to the development of fibromyalgia. In fact, people with fibromyalgia have a higher prevalence of childhood abuse compared to the U.S. population in general.

According to the study, clinicians may be able to help patients cope with fibromyalgia through a forgiveness intervention and the changes that it induces in the patient’s mental and physiological state.

The study is entitled “A Forgiveness Intervention for Women With Fibromyalgia Who Were Abused in Childhood: A Pilot Study.” It was published in the September 2014 issue—Vol. 1(3), pages 203-217—of the journal Spirituality in Clinical Practice®, a publication of the American Psychological Association. Study team leaders were Dr. Robert Enright, founder of the IFI who has been studying forgiveness for more than 29 years, and Yu-Rim Lee, UW-Madison Department of Educational Psychology.

Read the full story: Forgiveness Intervention Helps Women with Fibromyalgia Abused During Childhood Improve their Condition.

Read the complete Fibromyalgia Study: A Forgiveness Intervention for Women With Fibromyalgia Who Were Abused in Childhood: A Pilot Study.

Starting the Journey of Forgiveness with Courage

It takes steadfast courage to finally decide, “I will forgive.”

So often we know in our mind, through reason, that forgiveness is the right path. Yet, we are hesitant to begin the journey. What if it proves to be too painful? What if I get lost along the way and do not know how to forgive? What if it comes out all wrong?

“Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

We at the International Forgiveness Institute, Inc. are here to support you as you begin the life-giving journey of forgiveness.

Robert

We Must Treat the Cause and Not Only the Symptoms of Bullying

Well-meaning people are making progress in confronting the student-bullying problem across the world…..and yet most of these professionals are not looking closely enough at the real problem to find the best solution.

Here is one example: An educator encourages the bullied students to find ways to calmly stand their ground when being bullied. This can be a way of diffusing the bullying behavior. It seems to work at least in the short-term, but the one bullying could start the mayhem all over again in the next week or two.

Here is a second example: A graduate student finished a masterful review of the bullying literature in the psychological sciences. She reported that a key research topic presently is to examine the coping strategies of those being bullied. Those who seek social support from friends and teachers cope better with the effects of bullying than do those victims who cry.

Help the victim, yes, but what about those who bully? How can we help them and what help do they need?

We suggest the untried—untried—theme that may seem counter-intuitive today, but will appear obvious to many in the future: Yes, help the victim, but also help the one who is bullying to get rid of his or her anger, which is fueling the bullying.

Those who bully have been victimized by others. Help them to reduce their resentment toward those who were the victimizers and the bullying behavior will melt away. Why? Because wanting to harm others comes out of a position of profound woundedness within. Angry people are wounded people and angry, wounded people are the ones who lash out at others, even when these “others” did nothing whatsoever to provoke the verbal or physical attack.

We point principals, teachers, and parents to our anti-bullying forgiveness program intended to melt that anger in the one who bullies…..so that victims are no longer victims…..because the one bullying has no need any more to throw his wounds onto others. Forgiveness heals those wounds.

Who is ready to give this a try?

Robert

What Is Love?

“I know what love is,” the sincere Forrest Gump famously proclaimed.

I was a bit taken aback by a recent Facebook discussion. One of my friends proclaimed that love is letting each person do as he or she wishes as long as the actions do not hurt anyone else. The context was this: Her friend insisted on continuing to drink alcohol even though further drink could kill her. “It is not hurting me and she just can’t help it the way she drinks,” her statement went.

The ancient Greeks had four words for love. One, storge, is the natural love of a mother for her baby, for example. A second form of love, philia, constitutes the natural love that we have come to call brotherly love in which related people cooperate with each other and have a natural affection. Eros, or romantic love, is the third. The fourth, which was vaguely specified in ancient Greece, agape, came to be known by such scholars as Thomas Aquinas as love that is in service to others for the others’ good.

I think that my Facebook friend had in mind the agape variety of love as she proclaimed her friend’s right to drink herself to death. Yet, such tolerance is a poor substitute for the real-thing of agape love because letting the friend die, perhaps a painful or even tortuous death, hardly is in service to that other.

Since when did tolerance become equated with agape love? “As long as it does not hurt me” sounds much more self-serving than other-serving.

Have we so privatized love that it means letting others do as they please regardless of the outcome…..as long as the other really, really wants to do this and as long as I am not directly and concretely harmed by the action? This seems to me to be the antithesis of genuine love, which would express concern and attempt to help, even if this made the helper uncomfortable……or even made the other uncomfortable.

“I know what love is.” Love unexplored and proclaimed as tolerance does not seem much like love to me.

Robert

“Nothing Good Ever Comes From Anger,” says Eva Mozes Kor, Auschwitz Survivor

The World Post, U.S. Edition – “For the life of me I will never understand why anger is preferable to a goodwill gesture. Nothing good ever comes from anger. Any goodwill gesture in my book will win over anger any time. The energy that anger creates is a violent energy.”

Those are the words that 81-year-old Auschwitz concentration camp survivor Eva Mozes Kor posted on her Facebook page after she encountered a former Nazi guard during his court trial.

Former SS Sgt. Oskar Groening is being tried in Germany as an accessory to the murder of at least 300,000 Jews at Auschwitz. Groening, now 93, admits he kept watch as thousands were led to the gas chambers at the concentration camp.

Kor, who was subjected to horrific medical experiments at Auschwitz, testified last week at Groening’s trial. Afterward, she approached the former SS guard in court to “thank him for having some human decency in accepting responsibility for what he has done.” To Kor’s surprise, Groening kissed her on the cheek and embraced her. Kor posted the photo on her Facebook page but wrote that she still holds Groening accountable for his actions during the Holocaust.

“He was a small screw in a big killing machine, and the machine cannot function without the small screws,” Kor wrote. She added, however, that she forgives the man, and believes that there may be value in bringing “the victims” and “the perpetrators” together to “face the truth, try to heal and work together to prevent it from ever happening again.”

Read the full story in The World Post: “Former Nazi Guard Oskar Groening Kisses Holocaust Survivor Eva Kor During His Trial“