Tagged: “Forgiving”
July 17 Marks a Day of Forgiveness in the Face of Cruel Execution Over 230 Years Ago
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On July 17, 1794, and as part of the French Revolution, 16 Carmelite nuns were martyred at the guillotine in Paris. As she was facing death, one of the sisters, Sister Mary of Jesus Crucified, proclaimed, “I forgive you, my friends. I forgive you with all that longing of heart with which I would that God forgive me!” All of the sisters now are known as the Martyrs of Compiègne. Pope St. Pius X beatified all of these heroic sisters on May 27, 1906.
Dr. Enright’s essay on how forgiveness can be tricky featured on Psychology Today website
Dr. Robert Enright
On July 22, 2025, Robert Enright published an essay on the Psychology Today website:
5 Expressions of Forgiveness That Can Trick Even the Forgiver, July 22, 2025
The essay was designated as an Essential Read and featured on the front page of the website, subsequently distributed to other media outlets.
Wall Street Journal Writer Suggests that Revenge Can Be Addictive and There Is One Best Cure for It
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On June 5, in the Wall Street Journal, James Kimmel Jr. reports on how he was bullied as a child, which led to him becoming an “aggressive attorney” as an adult. He realized that whenever he sought revenge or even imagined getting revenge, he felt better. As he researched the neuroscience of revenge, he discovered that the brain releases dopamine, a neurotransmitter associated with feelings of pleasure and reward. This feel-good sensation kept him seeking or fantasizing about revenge until he decided to stop the cycle of revenge, dopamine, feel-good, and more revenge to release the dopamine. In his quest to break the cycle, he discovered that forgiveness is a means to halt the cycle of revenge, which in turn eliminates the need for more dopamine, thereby reinforcing the need for revenge. Forgiveness was the cure for him.
More on this story can be found here: https://www.newser.com/story/369842/revenge-is-like-an-addiction.html.
‘The Forgiving Life’ featured on Elevate Society website
There is a website entitled Elevate Society run by Tal Gur as the Chief Editor. On July 24, 2025 they published a beautiful description of our book, The Forgiving Life. Their description of the book shows that they definitely “get it” regarding our message of forgiveness. Their review can be found here: https://elevatesociety.com/the-forgiving-life-summary-review/
Is it true that people “Forgive and Forget”?
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A recent set of four studies examined the extent to which people actually forget the unjust situation once they have forgiven. The reference to that work is:
Fernández-Miranda, G., Stanley, M., Murray, S., Faul, L., & De Brigard, F. (2025). The emotional impact of forgiveness on autobiographical memories of past wrongdoings. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001787
The authors made the distinction between the possibility that the memory of the event fades (what they called “episodic fading”) and what they called “emotional fading” in which the strong and negative emotions are diminished upon forgiving.
The authors, in their abstract, concluded this:
“While the episodic fading account predicts that forgiveness is associated with less vivid and detailed memories of being wronged, the emotional fading account predicts that forgiveness need not be associated with diminished episodic characteristics. Across four studies (N = 1,479, after exclusions), we found consistent support for the emotional fading account but not for the episodic fading account.”
In other words, people do not literally forget what happened once they forgive. The memory can pass through the mind and heart without the heightened negative emotions welling up.
“Forgive and forget” may need to be rephrased as “forgiving and remembering in new ways.”
