Tagged: “Forgiveness Education”

Please help me get organized with my forgiving.  I have to forgive my father, my sister, my current boss, and even some kids who bullied me when I was a teenager.  Where do I begin?

In my book, The Forgiving Life, I discuss The Forgiveness Landscape.  I ask people to make an inventory of all people, across the forgiver’s life, who have hurt the forgiver.  Then the forgiver rates the degree of current hurt and anger toward each of these persons on a 1 to 10 scale.  The forgiver then places the people in order from the ones who have given the least hurt and produced the least amount of anger (in the forgiver) all the way up to the one who makes the forgiver the most hurt and angry at the present time.  Start at the bottom and forgive people there because they likely are easier to forgive.  As you build your forgiveness muscles, as you move up the hierarchy of anger and hurt, you then are more ready to forgive those who have given you the biggest hurts and the deepest anger.

One more request about the reliability and validity of one of your forgiveness scales.  Can you recommend one article that addresses the psychometric properties of your self-forgiveness inventory?

Yes, and here is that reference:

Kim, J., Volk, F., & Enright, R.D. (2021). Validating the Enright Self-Forgiveness Inventory (ESFI). Current Psychology

Thank you for the information on the Enright Forgiveness Inventory short form. Do you have similar psychometric information for your Enright Group Forgiveness Inventory? I appreciate the help.

Yes, here is a journal article that addresses the measurement properties of the group forgiveness scale:

Enright, R.D., Johnson, J., Fu, N., Erzar, T., Hirshberg, M., Huang, T., Klatt, J., Lee, D., Boateng, B., Boggs, P., Hsiao, T.-E., Olson, C., Shu, M.L., Song, J., Wu, P., & Zhang ,B. (2020). Measuring intergroup forgiveness: The Enright Group Forgiveness Inventory. Peace and Conflict Studies, 27, 1-29.

I would like to use your Enright Forgiveness Inventory short form in my research.  Can you suggest one journal article that shows the reliability and validity of this scale?  If this can be in a variety of countries, this is all the better.  Thank you in advance.

Click here for a published journal article that shows the psychometric properties of this scale in different countries:

Enright, R., Rique, J., Lustosa, R., Song, M. J. Y., Komoski, M. C., Batool, I., Bolt, D. Sung, H. J., Huang, S. T., Park, H., Leer-Salvesen, P. E., Andrade, T., Naeem, A., Viray, J., Costuna, E. (2021). Validating the Enright Forgiveness Inventory – 30 (EFI-30): International studies. European Journal of Psychological Assessment, 38, 113-123.

Forgive and forget.  I hear that a lot.  When you forgive, do you literally forget?

When you forgive, you do not develop moral amnesia.  You remember what happened, but you now remember in new ways, without the buildup of anger that persists.  So, think of forgiving as not literally forgetting, but as you look back you remember without all the pain and discontent.