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Medical, Psychology and Religious Professionals Learn About “The Healing Art of Forgiveness”
Orthodox Christian professionals in and allied to medicine, psychology and religion learned about “The Healing Art of Forgiveness” at an international conference held in Boston, MA, last weekend (Nov. 5-7).
Peli Galiti, Program Manager, International Forgiveness Institute
Peli Galiti, Ph.D., delivered the forgiveness workshop as part of the Annual Conference of OCAMPR–The Orthodox Christian Association of Medicine, Psychology, and Religion. She shared the stage at the Conference with distinguished speakers including: the Director of the Pediatric Psychiatric Care Program at the Montreal (Canada) Children’s Hospital; a psychotherapy and pastoral care specialist from Kitherona, Greece; and, a psychiatrist who is a priest in the Church of Greece and a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Divinity School.
Peli’s workshop included an Orthodox perspective of forgiveness, a synopsis of Dr. Robert Enright’s scientific research studies, and an overview of the Greek Forgiveness Education Program she established in Athens, Greece, two years ago with Dr. Enright’s guidance and which she now operates as Program Manager for the International Forgiveness Institute.
Peli was born in Athens where she earned her Ph.D. in Educational Psychology from the University of Athens before doing post-graduate work in family therapy at hospitals and medical centers in both the US and Greece. She now lives in Madison, WI, with her husband (a pediatric cardiac anesthesiologist at American Family Children’s Hospital) and their four children.
OCAMPR is an organization that “fosters interdisciplinary dialogue and promotes Christian fellowship among healing professionals in medicine, psychology and religion.” Its professional members have practices in medicine, nursing, mental health, psychology, ethics, theology, parish ministry, parish nursing, prison and community ministry, social services, and military, institutional and community chaplaincy.
Peli provided a similar presentation at the biennial Metropolis of Chicago Clergy-Laity-Philoptochos Assembly, Archon Retreat and Philoptochos Retreat held in Madison from Nov. 14th through Nov. 18th. The Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Chicago consists of thirty-four parishes in Illinois, with another twenty-four parishes in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, northern Indiana, and eastern and central Missouri.
Forgiveness has power to rebuild society, Pope says
Vatican City, Rome, Italy – Pope Francis spoke on the role of forgiveness in helping families become a force for the betterment of society during his Wednesday, Nov. 4 general audience address in St. Peter’s Square.
“The practice of forgiveness not only preserves families from division,” but allows them to aid society in becoming “less evil and cruel,” the Pope said. He compared the family to a gym in which “reciprocal forgiveness” is exercised and he expressed his desire for families to rediscover the “treasure” of reciprocal forgiveness.
“No love can endure for long,” without forgiveness, he said, reflecting on the “Our Father” prayer which calls us to forgive as we ourselves are forgiven.
“We cannot live without forgiveness – or, at least, we cannot live well, especially in the family.”
Forgiveness should be exercised every day, the Pope continued, saying we must take into account our fragility and pride. He also warned against allowing too much time to pass before forgiving; otherwise, it becomes more difficult.
“Do not allow the day to end without saying ‘I’m sorry,’ without making peace between husband and wife, between parents and children, between brother and sister… between daughter-in-law and mother-in-law!”
In learning to forgive and ask forgiveness, wounds are healed, marriage is strengthened, and the family becomes fortified against our own acts of meanness, both small and great, the Pope said.
“Don’t finish the day at war, understand? Forgive.”
Read more:
– Papal audience: importance of family as place of forgiveness
– Pope speaks on importance of forgiveness within families
– Families must forgive and not ‘end the day in war,’ Pope says
– Forgiveness in family has power to rebuild society, Pope says
How to Follow the Path of Forgiveness
Greater Good, The Science of a Meaningful Life – Anyone who has suffered a grievous hurt knows that when our inner world is badly disrupted, it’s difficult to concentrate on anything other than our turmoil or pain. When we hold on to hurt, we are emotionally and cognitively hobbled, and our relationships suffer.
Forgiveness is strong medicine for this. When life hits us hard, there is nothing as effective as forgiveness for healing deep wounds. I would not have spent the last 30 years of my life studying forgiveness if I were not convinced of this.
That’s how Dr. Robert Enright, a a licensed psychologist and a professor of educational psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, begins his own review of his recently-published book 8 Keys to Forgiveness on the website of the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley.
Dr. Enright is one of the world’s leading experts on forgiveness, founder of the International Forgiveness Institute, and the man Time magazine calls “the forgiveness trailblazer.” In the Greater Good article, he provides an outline of the basic steps involved in following a path of forgiveness:
1. Know what forgiveness is
and why it matters
2. Become “forgivingly fit”
3. Address your inner pain
4. Develop a forgiving mind through empathy
5. Find meaning in your suffering
6. When forgiveness is hard, call upon other strengths
7. Forgive yourself
8. Develop a forgiving heart
If you shed bitterness and put love in its place, and then repeat this with many, many other people, you become freed to love more widely and deeply. This kind of transformation can create a legacy of love that will live on long after you’re gone.
Read the complete article: “When another person hurts us, it can upend our lives.”
Read the article in Huffington Healthy Living.
Read more about the book: 8 Keys to Forgiveness.
Forgiveness – “The Beginning of All Things”
As a teenager in 1986, newsman David Gregory (former Meet the Press moderator) had been with his mother when she was arrested for drunk driving, capping her long struggle with alcohol through much of Gregory’s childhood. She immediately joined AA and has since remained sober. But deep wounds remained. Here is an excerpt from Gregory’s new book How’s Your Faith? An Unlikely Spiritual Journey:
And then I asked Mom the question straight out. “Do you think I have forgiven you for the arrest?”
“No. I don’t think you have,” she said. “I think because it’s the focal point of who are you today. It’s when you got tough.”
“You mean you think I hold on to the grittiness that I developed because of living with your alcoholism as a teenager?” I asked.
“Yes,” Mom replied. “Frankly, Davey, I have had to think a lot about forgiveness since I got sober. And I think it is used more as a word rather than an action. But since I’ve had my faith reactivated through the program, I’ve realized that it serves no purpose not to truly forgive.”
She is aware that forgiving is not a simple process. “I think there is daily work on forgiveness,” Mom said. “I don’t think forgiveness is the end of anything. I think it’s the beginning of all things.”
I forgive my mother.
Read the full excerpt from the October 2015 AARP Bulletin – A Newsman’s Struggle to Forgive.
Purchase the book at Amazon.com – How’s Your Faith?
Forgiveness: Why is it so hard?
AEON Magazine, London, Melbourne, New York – “Science is discovering what religion has always known: forgiveness is good for us. But that doesn’t make it any easier.”
That’s the opening of an article for AEON Magazine titled “Letting Go” by California writer Amy Westervelt, who writes on health issues primarily for The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian. In this article, she documents the science proving that forgiveness is healthy, but struggles to figure out why is it so hard.
After studying and interviewing forgiveness experts like Dr. Robert Enright, Professor Frederic Luskin, and Oprah Winfrey’s favorite life coach, Iyanla Vanzant, here is some of what Westervelt concluded about why forgiveness is so hard:
Forgiveness is a relatively new academic research area, studied in earnest only since Dr. Enright began publishing on the subject in the 1980s. The first batch of studies were medical in focus. Forgiveness was widely correlated with a range of physical benefits, including better sleep, lower blood pressure, lower risk of heart disease, even increased life expectancy; really, every benefit you’d expect from reduced stress.
The late Kathleen Lawler, while working as a researcher in the psychology department at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, studied the effects of both hostility and forgiveness on the body’s systems fairly extensively. ‘Forgiveness is aptly described as “a change of heart”,’ she wrote, in summarising a series of studies focused on the impact of forgiveness on heart health. Meanwhile, Duke University researchers found a strong correlation between improved immune system function and forgiveness in HIV-positive patients, and between forgiveness and improved mortality rates across the general population. . . .
Dr. Enright has established himself as ‘the father of forgiveness’, creating a therapeutic protocol for how to practise it that was officially sanctioned by the American Psychology Association and the United Nations. He thought the Catholic Church could be doing more to emphasise its deep history in the subject, and spreading the gospel of forgiveness to the masses, and said so in a speech at the Vatican. . . .
While researchers have spent the past 20 years proving the physical and mental benefits of forgiveness, it’s the step-by-step forgiveness guides they’ve developed that might turn out to be academia’s most important contribution to the subject.
Like Vanzant’s pop-psych version, the protocols that Enright and Luskin have developed offer specific steps towards forgiveness rooted in decades of research and clinical experience. While the various approaches differ, all include practical guidance and the basics are consistent: feel the feelings you need to feel, express them, then leave them in the past where they can no longer have power over you.
What all of the researchers and pop-psych proponents of forgiveness agree on is that it takes practice and that it is hard work. Vanzant compares it to pulling out a tooth without Novocaine. Luskin described it as re-training the brain. ‘You can get upset about anything – you can also get un-upset about anything, it’s just a matter of learning how,’ he said.
Forgiveness works, and that’s what makes it so damn hard. Time does not heal all wounds. This too shall not pass. Letting go of hurt and anger is a grind, and forgiveness only works if you practise it regularly, and are prepared to fail often without giving up. But the pay-off is so huge it just might be worth it.
Read the full article “Letting Go” and watch a related video–a classic Iranian documentary that draws a forceful, poetic appeal for dignity from the harrowing images of leprosy.
