IFI News
Dr. Enright Joins Two New Digital Media Ventures
Dr. Robert Enright, world-renowned forgiveness researcher and educator, has been selected by two of the nation’s premier blog sites to add his forgiveness expertise as a regular contributor.
Dr. Robert Enright, founder of the International Forgiveness Institute
1. Psychology Today is a New York City-based print magazine that will celebrate its 50th year of continuous publication in 2017. Its new blog site, according to the publication, is “devoted exclusively to everybody’s favorite subject: Ourselves.”
To make and keep their new blog site relevant, Psychology Today has gathered a group of renowned psychologists, academics, psychiatrists and writers to contribute their thoughts and ideas on what makes us tick. According to the website, “We’re a live stream of what’s happening in Psychology Today.”
The forgiveness blog section on Psychology Today’s website is called “The Forgiving Life”–which is also the title of one of the eight books Dr. Enright has written. Here are links to the first four blogs Dr. Enright has produced for the new site this month:
Dec. 7 – Forgiveness Saved My Life: Reflections from Prison
Dec. 16 – Afraid of Mingling with the Relatives This Holiday Season?
Dec. 17 – A New Approach to School Bullying: Eliminate Their Anger
Dec. 20 – Is It True That Forgiveness Is “Ridiculous“?
Arianna Huffington’s New Venture
2. You’ve probably heard of Arianna Huffington, the 66-year-old digital media pioneer, bestselling author, and founder of The Huffington Post–the online news powerhouse that has spread its influence around the world in dramatic fashion. Oh, yes, and she is one of TIME magazine’s “100 Most Influential People.”
Huffington stepped down in August as editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post (affectionately called HuffPost), which she founded in 2005 and sold to AOL six years later for $315 million, to concentrate full time on her new venture–Thrive Global. The new entity is partly based on her runaway bestselling 2014 book, Thrive, which defines a new math for success based on the variables of well-being, wisdom, wonder and generosity.
One of the entities under the Thrive Global umbrella is The Thrive Journal–an online blog site that the company says goes “beyond informing and entertaining to action. Our goal is to help you bring about changes in your life by giving you concrete, actionable tips laid out in five pathways: Calm, Joy, Purpose, Well-Being, and Productivity. These microsteps and tips are embedded in every piece of content we produce.”
Similar to the new blog site developed by Psychology Today, the Thrive Global blog site will feature a wide array of international wellness experts, psychologists, medical doctors and other professionals. Here are links to the first five blogs Dr. Enright has produced for Thrive Global:
Nov. 25 – Forgiveness and the Presidential Election of 2016: 7 Tips
Nov. 30 – Reflections from Prison: “Forgiveness Saved My Life”
Dec. 4 – Forgiveness, the Marathon, and the Inspired Work of Art
Dec. 8 – How Evil Works
Dec. 17 – Afraid of Mingling with the Relatives This Holiday Season? 4 Tips from Forgiveness Therapy
Forgiveness and Reconciliation in Lebanon. . . . . . . . Can It Lead to Peace?
Lebanon native Ramy Taleb, his wife Roula, and a handful of like-minded individuals are confident they have the solution to the sectarian violence that is plaguing their homeland–peace through forgiveness education.
Roula and Ramy Taleb with their children JD and Deborah (in front of Ramy).education.
Although Ramy has been working with Dr. Robert Enright, founder of the International Forgiveness Institute, for several years, he has now broadened his focus by forming a government-registered NGO (non-governmental organization)–The Foundation for Forgiveness and Reconciliation in Lebanon (FFRL).
“FFRL believes in identifying all people through a common humanity, seeking to break down dehumanizing perceptions resulting from sectarian division and establishing a path towards social reconciliation through the lens of forgiveness,” according to Ramy, Director of the FFRL.
“We work with youth and young adults from various communities in Lebanon, providing education in nonviolent conflict resolution through our Forgiveness Journey curriculum,” he added. “This involves developing an understanding of the spectrum of forgiveness, from a space of basic coexistence all the way to complete reconciliation.”
During the past couple years, the group’s “projects have included people from Lebanese, Palestinian, Syrian and Iraqi communities of various religious backgrounds,” according to FFRL’s website. “Intergroup engagement is core to our work, bringing opposed groups together in order to nurture the aspects of reconciliation they have learned from the Forgiveness Journey in a real world setting.”
Renewing Communities Through Forgiveness Education: A Prospect For Peace
Dr. Enright and his International Forgiveness Institute first pioneered this concept in 1985 and created the first scientifically proven forgiveness program in the US. Since 2002, Dr. Enright has focused almost exclusively on the development of forgiveness education curricula for children in war-torn, impoverished, and/or oppressed areas of the globe. The Foundation for Forgiveness and Reconciliation in Lebanon is one expression of this forgiveness education that now reaches to more than 30 countries around the world.
“Together with the IFI, we believe that forgiveness is a path to peace,” Ramy says. “With Dr. Enright’s help we are mentoring a generation of future peacemakers in the Middle-East.”
Independence, Civil War and Turmoil
On Nov. 22, Lebanon celebrated 73 years of independence from France. Those years have been marked, however, with continued sectarian violence and conflicts including an Israeli invasion, Syrian occupancy, and a Lebanese Civil War.
In addition to all that, the recent and ongoing influx of Syrian refugees
has only added to the nation’s instability, with an estimated 1.5 million Syrian refugees now seeking refuge in Lebanon. Furthermore, Palestinian refugees still make up another 450,000–this equates to a ratio of one in four being a refugee in Lebanon, the highest anywhere in the world.
Learn More:
1) Visit The Foundation for Forgiveness and Reconciliation in Lebanon website.
2) Watch a short 3:16 video about the FFRL.
3) Review the complete curriculum compendium for the Lebanese Forgiveness Education Program.
4) Donate to help FFRL mentor a generation of future Middle-East peacemakers in Lebanon.
Forgiveness: why it’s important
Editor’s Note: Forgiveness has matured into a world-wide movement, including in India. This article is excerpted from a more lengthy news story in one of India’s largest business publications.
LiveMint.com, New Delhi, India – In his 2015 book, 8 Keys To Forgiveness, psychologist Robert Enright cites research to demonstrate the power of forgiveness. In a study conducted with fellow psychologist Suzanne Freedman, he found that incest survivors who underwent a 14-month programme to forgive their perpetrators were free of depression one year after the programme ended. The study was published in the Journal Of Consulting And Clinical Psychology in 1996.
In another study, published in the Psychology & Health journal in 2009, Enright and his colleagues worked with men who were admitted to the hospital with cardiac problems. After undergoing forgiveness therapy, which involved 10 weekly sessions of identifying and forgiving those who had wronged them, the men not only exhibited reduced levels of anger but also had healthier hearts.
Intriguingly, Enright has even found that students who were unable to concentrate in school owing to anger issues benefited from forgiveness counselling, so much so that they actually raised their grades from D to C, were able to focus better and had more amiable relationships with others. This study was published in the Journal Of Research In Education in 2008. Thus, forgiveness can have a positive ripple effect, wherein mercy extended to one person radiates to others.
If forgiveness, then, can have such a positive impact, how can we practise it more often? As Enright says, forgiveness goes beyond saying “I forgive you”. In fact, the words do not even have to be uttered; rather, they have to be felt. In its essence, forgiveness entails “extending goodness towards those who have hurt you”. It involves acknowledging the inherent worth of every human being. And, as we all know, this can be hard even at the best of times, and can become a Herculean task when we have been wronged grievously.
Enright, however, says that we can become “forgivingly-fit” with practice. By first forgiving people whom we love for minor misdemeanours, we can gradually graduate to forgiving those who have injured us in more heinous ways.
Finally, forgiveness should not be mistaken for weakness. As Mahatma Gandhi aptly put it, “The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.”
Aruna Sankaranarayanan, the author of this article, is the founder and director of Prayatna, a centre for children with learning difficulties in Andheri, a suburb of Mumbai, India. She completed her undergraduate studies at Mount Holyoke College and acquired her doctorate in developmental psychology at Harvard University. Both schools are in Massachusetts, USA.
Mint is one of India’s premium business news publications and the clear No.2 among business papers in terms of readership. LiveMint.com is Mint’s online portal and is among the fastest growing news websites in India.
To explore more of Dr. Enright’s compendium of peer-reviewed forgiveness research from the past 30+ years, visit the Research Section of this website.
Forgiveness Becomes Her Passion: “Replace Hate with Love”
Carly Elms is a determined woman, a well-educated and experienced therapist, and a disciple of “forgiveness therapy” as developed and proven by Dr. Robert Enright, the founder of the International Forgiveness Institute (IFI) and a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Forgiveness is the only way to move through the anger and pain of even the most horrible wrongs,” according to Elms, “and to not let hate consume the rest of a life.”
Carly R. Elms, M.Ed., LMSW, CRC
Elms holds two master’s degrees. Along with her Masters in Clinical Social Work (MSW), she has a Masters of Education in Educational & Counseling Psychology (M.Ed.). She is a certified rehabilitation counselor (CRC), with experience as a trauma therapist, counselor for the blind, transition counselor for youth with disabilities, a service-disabled veteran of the U.S. Air Force, and a fanatic about forgiveness therapy.
Last fall, Elms opened the Franciscan Forgiveness Center on the grounds of the Sisters of St. Francis of the Holy Eucharist in Independence, MO, to help victims recover their lives from even the worst thing that could possibly happen to them.
“It’s a place of healing,” Elms said of the peaceful grounds where she has her office and where she also teaches the Sisters about forgiveness. “And that’s what forgiveness is. It is healing.”
Elms said she became a disciple of Dr. Enright’s forgiveness model after reading his popular self-help book Forgiveness Is a Choice: A Step-by-Step Process for Resolving Anger and Restoring Hope. Inspired by what she read, Elms then enrolled in the IFI’s online Continuing Education Course: Helping Clients Forgive. She completed the course with the highest score ever recorded at the IFI.
Elms’ philosophy is simple (though easier said than done): Replace hate with love.
“You have a right to be angry if someone does something wrong to you,” Elms said. “But there really can’t be anything good that comes out of that. All that anger is the desire for revenge.”
“Revenge won’t heal a broken heart. The ability to forgive and to love will.”
Read more about Carly Elms:
» Replace hate with love: forgive and heal, an article in The Catholic Key Online.
» Carly Elms, M.Ed., LMSW, CRC; Franciscan Forgiveness Center, a review on CatholicTherapists.com.
Jerusalem Conference on Forgiveness for Peace
The Jerusalem Conference on Forgiveness for Peace, scheduled for July 12-13, 2017, is the first ever forgiveness conference to be held in the Middle East. It is being organized by Dr. Robert Enright, whom Time magazine called “the forgiveness trailblazer,” and an international team of religious and secular leaders.
Day 1 of this 2-day conference will include speakers from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam discussing what it means to forgive in each of those religious traditions, the importance of forgiveness, and how to better interact with others through forgiveness. Internationally-known speakers include Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, this year’s recipient of the Templeton Prize, and Dr. Mustafa Ceric, Grand Mufti Emeritus of Bosnia.
Day 2 will help us learn how to better understand what forgiveness education is and how to bring forgiveness to our children and adolescents in school and at home. Speakers include educators from Northern Ireland, Greece, Israel, Lebanon and the United States.
The conference is open to all who wish to obtain a deeper understanding of forgiveness across the three Abrahamic faiths and who have an interest in bringing forgiveness to the home, school, and other community organizations.
Early Bird Registration is now available at $150.00 but ends October 31, 2016. For more information or to register, click the link below.
