Tagged: “New Ideas”
If forgiveness is intended to quell my anger toward other persons, then what am I supposed to do when I find myself angry with circumstances or “fate”? For example, suppose a hurricane destroys my home. How do I get rid of that anger if I am not supposed to forgive? And why not forgive a hurricane?
Forgiveness is the offer of goodness toward people who have acted unfairly. You cannot be good to a hurricane and so forgiveness is not the appropriate response in this case. Instead, I recommend working on acceptance of what happened.
It did happen, you cannot change that, and so fighting internally against the situation would seem to get you nowhere in terms of a rebuilt house. It is certain that your anger will not stop the next hurricane from barreling though your community. This is why I suggest acceptance which is a kind of surrender which can relax the muscles and calm the nerves so that anger does not take a toll on you. Further, you can take positive steps such as making plans to rebuild the home and making it, as best you can, strong enough to withstand at least some of the hurricanes that may occur in the future.
For additional information, see Forgiveness Defined.
If I forgive my own child for misbehavior I am concerned that this is giving the wrong message. I might be creating a sense of entitlement for that child who now comes to expect forgiveness and so continues to misbehave.
As you forgive, be sure to included justice as well. Yes, forgive when you are feeling resentful, but then ask something of the child so that correction occurs. When you ask for fairness when you are less angry, then what you ask may be even more fair than if you ask when fuming with anger.
For additional information, see Forgiveness Defined.
I notice your interest in forgiveness education. If others such as myself were interested in starting forgiveness education in our own area of the world, what would be some of your key suggestions?
Anyone can help to start forgiveness education in their own community. If you visit our Store section of this website, you will see that we have professionally-produced curriculum guides for teachers from pre-kindergarten (age 4) through grade 12 (using United States language here) (grade 12 includes students at age 17-18). We also have an anti-bullying guide for middle school and high school. These guides can be used effectively by teachers who are motivated to spend up to one hour a week for about 12-17 weeks instructing students. Each teacher guide (up to high school) uses stories (many by Dr. Seuss) that are appropriate for the grade level. If the books that are recommended in each guide are too expensive, we have professionally-produced book summaries of each one. The summaries are about 2-3 pages long and get at the gist of the stories (as far as forgiveness is concerned).
In impoverished and conflict-zones of the world, we give all of the above materials away for free—no charge and no hidden costs. For others, we ask that they purchase the materials so we can continue serving contentious regions of the world.
You also can access teacher evaluations of these programs in the Education section of the website and you will see that teachers are very favorable to these programs.
Consider taking courage in hand and bringing a sample of the teacher guides to a local school (along with the teacher-evaluation information and perhaps the Basic Description of the Guides). Tell the principal or teacher about the objective of forgiveness education: to help children grown in the virtues of love, mercy, and forgiveness, which can reduce student anger and increase academic achievement. Tell the principal or teacher that we provide free materials (if they are in an impoverished or contentious region).
For additional information, see Forgiveness Education: Curriculum.
Take the Long Perspective When It Is Difficult to Forgive
Think about one time in your childhood when you had what seemed to be a serious disagreement with a friend. At the time, did it seem like this breach would last forever? Did it? How long did it take to either reconcile or to find a new friend? Time has a way of changing our circumstances. This is not to advocate a kind of passive approach to life here—such as, “Oh, I’ll just wait it out and not bother to exert any effort.” That is not the point. The point is to take a long perspective so that you can see beyond the next hill to a place that is more settled and the pain is not so great. You already saw in your childhood that conflicts end. And the consequences of those conflicts (feeling sad or angry) also end. Why should that same process of change not also apply now? Try to see your circumstance, as realistically as you can, one month from now. Try to see your circumstance six months from now. Try to see yourself two years from now. Will you be the same person? Will you respond to injustices in the exact same way as you did three months ago? Probably not. You will likely be able to meet challenges with greater strength and wisdom as you continue on the forgiveness journey.
Enright, Robert. 8 Keys to Forgiveness (8 Keys to Mental Health) . W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.
A School Anti-Bullying Program That Works!
No one argues about the need to stop bullying in schools. Bullying’s adverse effects not only impact the child when the bullying occurs but typically impact a victim’s health and emotions throughout the person’s lifetime (see “The Impact of Bullying” box below).
That reality has become a growing topic of concern in the academic community with bullying being cited as a universal problem in countries around the world. Over the past several decades, literally hundreds of school-wide anti-bullying programs have been developed and implemented. That raises the question, of course: Do school antibullying programs work?
The typical answer from those professionals studying that question is: “Not so well. We need to do better.”
And sure enough, that’s the inauspicious conclusion of a just-completed systematic review of scientific publications covering the past 20 years. According to the study, Whole‐school Antibullying Interventions, a full 50% of all the school programs reviewed failed to “show significant effects on bullying prevalence” or found negative results including an actual increase in bullying.
The study, published in April by the peer-reviewed journal Psychology in the Schools, was conducted by university researchers in Brazil. While their study found that anti-bullying interventions resulted in increased reporting of bullying occurrences (with resultant increases in the use of punitive discipline), at the same time many of the programs failed totally–primarily due to inadequate time for training and implementation as well as lack of support.
Dr. Jichan J. Kim
Those findings come as no surprise to many psychologists. In fact, the report actually documented and reinforced what educational psychologist Dr. Jichan J. Kim first reported more than four years ago in his University of Wisconsin-Madison doctoral thesis: The Effectiveness of a Forgiveness Intervention Program on Reducing Adolescents’ Bullying Behavior.
Dr. Kim’s thesis includes a 29-page literature review in which he documents the unusually large number of research projects demonstrating the ineffectiveness of most school-wide anti-bullying programs including:
- A 2007 review of 45 separate school-based anti-bullying studies involving 34,713 individuals that concluded “the positive changes were too small to be supported as significant;”
- Another 2007 examination of 16 major anti-bullying programs across 11 different countries that showed mixed results with less than half the programs demonstrating desirable effects;
- A 2008 evaluation of 16 studies across 6 nations involving a total of 15,386 K-12 students that showed the interventions tended to influence students’ attitudes and self-perceptions but not their bullying behavior; and,
- Studies completed in 2012, 2014, and 2015 (one involving 560 school psychologists and school counselors) supporting the lack of evidence-based interventions.
Despite all the negative assessments he uncovered, Dr. Kim believes there is one approach that might be effective–helping adolescents exhibiting bullying behavior to forgive those who have offended them in the past. That approach, Dr. Kim says, is still not widely used and is, therefore, still not a compelling component of the scientific literature although he is confident it “can be beneficial.”
Dr. Robert D. Enright
That intervention approach, in fact, is the one advocated in The Anti-Bullying Forgiveness Program developed more than 8 years ago by Dr. Robert Enright, founder of the International Forgiveness Institute. The program not only incorporates lessons-learned from Dr. Enright’s more than 40-years of forgiveness research, it also integrates the scientifically-quantifiable forgiveness process he developed and , perhaps most importantly, it focuses directly on the one doing the bullying.
“Those who bully usually have pent-up anger and as a result they displace their own wounds onto others,” Dr. Enright explains. “Our program is meant to take the anger out of the heart of those who bully so that they no longer bully others.”
Dr. Enright says his research has taught him to take an approach that may seem counter-intuitive today, but will appear obvious to many in the future: “Yes, help the victim, but also help the one who is bullying to get rid of his or her anger, which is fueling the bullying. Those who bully have been victimized by others. Help them to reduce their resentment toward those who were the victimizers and the bullying behavior will melt away.”
- Learn more about Dr. Enright’s Anti-Bullying Forgiveness Program.
- Learn more about Dr. Jichan Kim, an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Liberty University in Lynchburg, VA. (Disclosure: Dr. Enright was Jichan Kim’s graduate school adviser).
- Read a review of Forgiveness Therapy.
- Learn more about the long-term impacts of bullying in the 2014 British Study.
- Learn how bullying statistics compare in your state versus others, with this interactive Bullying-Cyberbullying-Sexting Map of the U.S.
- Learn about bullying and cyberbullying in your country with this interactive International Research on Bullying Map of the World.
