Tagged: “Enright Forgiveness Process Model”
When I do the forgiveness work, I try to take what you call the personal perspective of the one who hurt me. Yet, how much of this work must be factual rather than speculative?
As you say, we ask people who forgive to take what I call the personal, global, and cosmic perspectives. The personal perspective deals with facts, to the best of your ability to gather those facts about how the other person was raised and the challenges faced in life. If you have no knowledge of the other person’s past, then I recommend that you move to the global perspective in which you begin to see the common humanity that both of you share. You do not need to know precise details of that person’s history to know that you both: 1) have unique DNA, making both of you special and unique; 2) must have adequate nutrition to be healthy; 3) will bleed if cut; and, as one more example, 4) will both die someday. Seeing your common humanity may aid you in softening your heart toward the person, not because of what happened, but in spite of this.
Forgiveness Education for Students in Nursing Program Helps Reduce Anxiety and Depression
A research study published last month, utilizing Dr. Robert Enright’s forgiveness intervention model, showed that students in college nursing programs would benefit from a forgiveness intervention in the areas of self-care and forgiveness facilitation.
The nursing students, randomly assigned to either an experimental group or a no-contact control group, used Dr. Enright’s book 8 Keys to Forgiveness as the project’s treatment manual. After studying one chapter a week for 8 weeks, the students in the experimental group showed greater improvement in forgiveness compared to those in the control group from the pretest to the posttest which was maintained at the four-week follow-up. In addition, those in the experimental group showed statistically significant decreases in anxiety, depression, and fatigue from pre-testing to both post-testing and follow-up testing periods.
The study was conducted by a team of 8 researchers from the Liberty University School of Nursing (Lynchburg, VA) under the direction of Jichan J. Kim, Associate Professor of Psychology at Liberty. Dr. Kim has been the lead investigator on more than a dozen forgiveness-related studies over the past several years.
This latest study, The Efficacy of a Forgiveness Bibliotherapy: A Randomized Controlled Trial with Nursing Students, was published in the Journal of Holistic Nursing (JHN) on Jan. 10, 2022. JHN is a peer-reviewed quarterly journal with a focus on advancing the science and practice of holistic nursing and healthcare.
“The need for forgiveness education for nursing students has risen dramatically as responsibilities have broadened for nursing professionals,” according to Dr. Kim. “Our study positively demonstrated that the use of bibliotherapy can be a cost-effective way to promote the virtue of forgiveness for nursing students who are likely to be in need of exercising self-care and would have opportunities to facilitate forgiveness for their patients.”
Bibliotherapy, Dr. Kim explained, is a therapeutic approach that uses literature (in this case Dr. Enright’s 8 Keys to Forgiveness) to support good mental health. This study, he added, demonstrated not only the effects of forgiveness, as numerous studies have done in the past, but also the feasibility of using a forgiveness bibliotherapy that can be easily adopted into the existing nursing curriculum.
That same approach has been used by Dr. Enright, co-founder of the International Forgiveness Institute (IFI) and the man Time magazine calls “the forgiveness trailblazer,” in a slightly different format over the past two years. Dr. Enright has worked with Dr. Chontay Taylor Glenn, PhD, RN, PMHNP-BC, to enroll a total of eight University of Michigan-Flint nursing students in the IFI’s Forgiveness Therapy training course.
Dr. Glenn is Assistant Professor & Project Director of the Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner Residency Program at UM-Flint. In addition to incorporating the IFI’s forgiveness training into the curricula for her nursing students, she also developed a program through which nine Flint-area community counselors completed the Forgiveness Therapy online continuing education course. Dr. Kim provided three hour-long training sessions by Zoom as part of that collaborative effort between Dr. Glenn, Dr. Enright, and himself.
The newly trained counselors in Flint are also undertaking an expanded role in their community, according to Dr. Glenn–providing forgiveness education classes and case coordination to Flint-area adolescents who have experienced adverse childhood experiences. The project is funded by a grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation in Battle Creek, MI.
About Dr. Kim
Dr. Jichan J. Kim
Jichan J. Kim is an Associate Professor of Psychology and the Director of the M.A. in Applied Psychology program at Liberty University, Lynchburg, VA. His research interests include the effects of interpersonal and intrapersonal forgiveness as well as the integration of psychology and Christianity.
Dr. Kim has degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (M.S. & Ph.D.), Harvard University (Ed.M.), Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (M.Div. & M.A.), and City College of New York (B.A.). He also has extensive ministry experience in New York City, Boston, and Madison (WI), serving various age groups in Korean immigrant congregations.
Learn More:
- Nursing Students Research Report Abstract
- Bibliotherapy Defined
- Overview of the IFI’s Forgiveness Therapy Course
Which do you think is more effective as a treatment for anger: relaxation training or forgiveness and why?
Forgiveness is appropriate if the person is angry because of injustices suffered from those who have treated the person unjustly. If this is the case, then I would choose forgiveness over relaxation, if I had to choose only one of these. I would do so for this reason: If we are deeply angry or frustrated or sad inside because of another person’s unfairness, these emotions are not easily eliminated by relaxation because relaxation treats the symptoms and not the underlying cause of the challenging emotions. Once a person stops relaxing, the challenging emotions likely will re-emerge. In contrast, forgiveness focuses on the cause of these emotions—the unjust treatment by a person—and the forgiveness process helps the emotionally wounded person to have a new response toward that person which tends to reduce these emotions to more manageable levels over time. In other words, as the forgiver thinks about the one who offended, the challenging emotions will have been reduced toward the offending person and so healing occurs. With relaxation training, there is no attempt to directly alter one’s emotions toward an offending other person.
How can a person go about finding out how angry he is? What does this process look like?
There are at least two steps to uncovering anger. The first is to look within and to rate what you see for now as your level of anger. This can be done either by filling out a valid anger scale or more simply by using the 1 to 10 scale of pain that you typically see in a doctor’s office. That 1 to 10 scale ranges from no anger inside at all (rated 1), to a medium amount of anger (rated 5), to an extreme amount of anger that is very painful (rated 10).
Once a person makes a judgement about the anger, a next step is to discuss how forgiving those who have hurt you can lessen anger. Once you are convinced that forgiveness can help you, this becomes a kind of safety net for you. This safety net then can help you to let down your psychological defenses about how angry you really are. At this point, you can re-take the valid anger scale or again go through the 1 to 10 scale exercise. At this point, people tend to admit even more anger than they did the first time because they now are not afraid of that anger, afraid that there is no solution to that anger. From here, the process of forgiveness begins.
How does the issue of repressed memory fit into the forgiveness process? In other words, if I cannot remember abuse against me from my childhood, then how can I even consider the forgiveness process?
Repression is a defense against being overwhelmed by our feelings. This can be a protection for our mental health, at least in the short run. Yet, if the repression is so strong as to prevent an awareness of past trauma, so that the trauma cannot be uncovered and healed, then it can work against one’s psychological well-being. A key issue is this: Trauma that is deep and not uncovered can lead to symptoms in the present such as a lack of trust in others and/or anxiety. If a person presents with such issue of mistrust or anxiety, it can be helpful first to let the person know that there is a scientifically-supported approach to confronting any past trauma, if this happened in the person’s life, and experiencing healing from that trauma. That approach is Forgiveness Therapy. This can help people let down their psychological defenses, which then can lead to insight from the past, and this then can be the beginning of psychological healing through forgiveness, if the person chooses to forgive.
