Tagged: “forgiveness journey”

What if positive feelings toward the one who offended me do not emerge?  What then?  Do I give it more time?

Please remember that forgiveness is a process and we do not necessarily reach the highest levels of this process.  If you do not develop positive feelings toward the person, but the strongly negative emotions shrink to manageable levels, then you definitely are on the pathway of forgiving.  Yes, you can continue the process of forgiving with this person, but please know that you are doing well in your forgiving by reducing resentment.

Giving a gift to the one who hurt me sounds way too difficult. What do you suggest?

Giving a gift to the other in forgiveness occurs in our Process Model later in the process.  You need first to try to think of the one who hurt you in broader ways than just defining that person by the unjust actions.  From there you can practice bearing the pain or standing in the pain so that you do not displace that pain onto the one who hurt you or onto others.  Once you begin to feel stronger as you bear the pain, then you can consider giving a gift to the other.  This might be a smile or a returned email or even a kind word about the person to others. I recommend giving a gift because this is what the moral virtue of forgiveness is on a deep level: being good to the one who was not good to you.

I wonder if some people are more inclined to forgive than other people.  In other words, might some people just have a natural disposition to forgive compared with most of us?  I think of Maximilian Kolbe as my example here.  He was in the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II.  He willingly gave himself up as a substitute for a Jewish man with a family.  Fr. Kolbe was calm and did not fight his abusers, which suggests to me that he forgave.  Most of us could not do that and so quickly.  What do you think?

I doubt that this saint of the Catholic Church only had some kind of natural disposition to forgive.  After all, his very life was giving to others as he became a priest.  In other words, he had many times in which he engaged in smaller sacrifices for people, which likely gave him much practice in the moral virtues, particularly love and forgiveness.  When it then came time for his momentous act of self-sacrifice, which probably included forgiveness, he was ready.  Further, theologians in his particular faith would include God’s grace as a large part of why he could love in this way by giving up his life.  So, did he have a natural tendency?  He might have, but at the same time he had abundant practice in love and forgiveness and he had God’s grace to accomplish heroism.

Sometimes It Takes 36 Years to Get Your Point Across: The Case for Forgiveness Therapy in Correctional Institutions

In 1985 I began to explore the social scientific study of forgiveness.  At the time there were no published empirical studies on person-to-person forgiveness.  For my very first attempt at a grant (36 years ago),  I wanted to see if we could help men in a correctional institution to heal from past trauma due to severe injustices against them prior to their crime and imprisonment. The approach was to offer forgiveness therapy for those who experienced severe abuse when they were children, as a way of reducing the resentment that can be displaced, sometimes violently, onto unsuspecting others.

For that first grant attempt over three decades ago, I was interviewed by a world famous experimental psychologist who was part of this granting agency.  This world famous person listened to my idea and then proclaimed, “This is an absolutely excellent idea.  I am going to rate your protocol as #1 in this competition.”  About a month later, much to my surprise, I received a rejection letter from the granting agency.  I made a phone call to the world-famous experimental psychologist and asked about the contradiction between his saying how excellent the work is and then I received a rejection notice.

He angrily and intensively said to me, “Dr. Enright, you embarrassed me!  I went into the meeting with very high-powered  people, praised your work, and the entire committee was outraged.  They said to me, ‘Give Enright money to help prisoners forgive??  No.  In fact, those prisoners should be seeking forgiveness from all of us for the crimes they committed! Rejected!'”

I then went in different directions (other than corrections) with the randomized clinical trials of Forgiveness Therapy (now considered an acceptable form of psychotherapy by the American Psychological Association) until 5 years ago when professionals in corrections began to contact me saying that our Forgiveness Therapy approach might work well with incarcerated people and they asked me if I thought that was a good idea. Well……yes, I said.

We continued to be rejected as we submitted at least three more grant requests, all of which were rejected.  So, we decided to move ahead with no funding.

Our point of Forgiveness Therapy in correctional institutions is this:  Forgiveness Therapy first screens those in corrections to see if they have suffered abuse while growing up.  Our scientific examination of this, now published in the Tier-1 journal, Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, shows that approximately 90% of the men in the maximum security correctional institution have had very serious injustices against them in childhood, such as ongoing sexual abuse and abandonment.  In other words, the unjust treatment toward them as children has left them with a deep resentment that can then be displaced onto others in society.  If we can find a way of reducing and even eliminating that resentment, then the person may be more amenable to traditional rehabilitation.  Forgiving the abusers is the way to do this.

To forgive is to strive to be good to those who are not good to the forgiver.  The one who forgives is practicing the moral virtue of forgiveness without excusing the behavior, or forgetting what happened (so it does not happen again), necessarily reconciling with the abuser, or abandoning the quest for justice.

For a year-and-a-half, a corrections psychologist within a maximum-security correctional institution engaged in a randomized experimental and control group clinical trial in which the professional worked with two groups of men, who were screened for abuse against them during childhood and currently have clinical levels of anger, anxiety, and depression and low empathy toward other people in general.  The research program took 6 full months for two experimental groups.

The results show strong statistical effects for the Forgiveness Therapy in that those in the experimental group, after they forgave their abusers from childhood, went to normal or near normal levels of anger, anxiety, and depression and their empathy for people in general rose significantly relative to the control group that had traditional rehabilitation strategies.  These results were maintained 6 months after the treatment ended for the first experimental group.  These results are unprecedented in the published literature within a maximum security correctional institution.  It is extremely difficult to improve empathy in this context.  We found the strongest psychological effects for any rehabilitation approach ever published. Here is a reference to that Tier-1 publication:

Yu, L., Gambaro, M., Song, J., Teslik, M., Song, M., Komoski, M.C., Wollner, B., & Enright, R.D. (2021). Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy.

We now are receiving inquires about this approach from scholars in Brazil, Israel, and Pakistan.

So, I have gone from being a total embarrassment to a granting agency 36 years ago to someone whom correction officials and researchers want to contact because of a vital idea.  Viewpoints can change over a 36 year period.  Sometimes we just have to be patient with true ideas that are life-giving until some in the world are ready to receive those ideas.

Robert

Read more about Dr. Enright’s prison work:

• Forgiveness Therapy in a Maximum-Security Correctional Institution: A Randomized Clinical Trial
• The Visit to a Maximum Security Prison
• Forgiveness Therapy for the Imprisoned in Israel
• Reflections from Prison: “Forgiveness Saved My Life” 

New Study Shows Forgiveness Intervention can Improve Mental Health of Grieving Parents

In the first ever true experimental study of its kind, researchers have demonstrated the effectiveness of an educational forgiveness intervention on improving the mental health of parents grieving the loss of a child. The research was conceptualized and done by Lucia Záhorcová, a psychologist at  Trnava University in Slovakia. The forgiveness intervention was developed by Dr. Robert Enright, co-founder of the International Forgiveness Institute, who also directed the study in the country that was once part of Czechoslovakia.

The pilot study results showed that participants in the experimental group (who received the forgiveness intervention), compared to those in the control group, achieved:

• Statistically greater improvement in forgiveness towards others and in self-forgiveness in both the post-test and the follow-up test conducted four months after the end of the intervention;
• A greater decrease in depression in both the post-test and follow-up test;
• A greater decrease in anxiety and anger in the post-test; and,
• Higher improvement in the post-traumatic growth in the follow-up test.

“The death of a child is a one of the most devastating and traumatic experiences a parent can endure,” according to Dr. Enright. “That’s why we wanted to determine if forgiveness could be a positive influence in reducing a parent’s depression, anxiety and anger just as it has been demonstrated in our studies with other clinical populations like incest survivors, emotionally-abused women, and post-abortion men.”

Dr. Enright said the study in Slovakia was the first ever forgiveness intervention with grieving parents in which a control group was used. It included 21 parents randomly assigned to the experimental group (in which the educational forgiveness intervention occurred) and 21 to the control group (in which a psycho-education grief intervention with a humanistic approach took place). All the parents were grieving the loss of a child older than three years of age.

“The study demonstrated that the forgiveness intervention definitely resulted in mental health improvements for parents grieving the loss of a child,” Dr. Enright stated. “The ability to forgive another person, perhaps even the murderer of their child, can positively influence the mental health of a bereaved parent.”

The Effectiveness of a Forgiveness Intervention on Mental Health in Bereaved Parents – a Pilot Study, was published on June 21, 2021, in OMEGA – Journal of Death and Dying. In addition to Dr. Enright (Dept. of Educational Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison) the study researchers included Lucia Záhorcová and Peter Halama, both in the Dept. of Psychology at Trnava University in Trnava, Slovakia. The three also teamed up for a 2019 study of 84 grieving parents called Forgiveness as a Factor of Adjustment in Bereaved Parents.