Tagged: “resentment”

What do you suggest I do when trying to help a friend start the forgiveness process so that she does not feel personally condemned?  In other words, the person might reason this way: Why is she suggesting this to me?  Do I appear overly angry or something?

A key is to realize that forgiveness is a choice and so you can start by gently having a conversation about your friend’s inner world relative to the injustice(s) against her.  Is she having emotional discomfort?  Is she restless because of too much anger?  Inner pain can be a great motivator for change.  If she tells you that her inner world is not healthy, then your providing a possible solution in forgiving may get her attention.  You will be able to ascertain her interest if she wants to discuss a solution to her inner pain.  At that point you can suggest forgiveness, but please be sure to discuss what forgiveness both is (a moral virtue of being good to those who are not good to you) and what it is not (it is not excusing, forgetting, necessarily reconciling, or abandoning justice).

Forgiveness and Finding Meaning in Sacrifice

〈This is an excerpt from my book, 8 Keys to Forgiveness, W. W. Norton & Company, 2015.〉

When you sacrifice for others, you are doing a lot more than acting in service to them. They may be bleeding emotionally inside, and you then bleed inside to help them stop bleeding inside.   For example, Brian’s mother, Yolanda, was overly-controlling toward him and his partner, Simone. Instead of distancing himself from Yolanda, he spent time gently giving her examples of her not letting him, in her own mind, develop independence in adulthood. This took energy, a checking of his anger so it did not spill out to her, and some suffering on his part to help her to understand.

Of course, we have to exercise temperance here too. Sacrifice does not mean that you do damage to yourself. The paradox is that as you sacrifice for others, you experience emotional healing.

Dr. Frankl, in his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, provides a remarkable case study of the kind of meaning one can find in sacrificing for others. His example is not in the context of forgiveness.  I relate it to you so that you can see how sacrifice works and becomes an aid to the one who is doing the sacrificing. An elderly physician came to see Dr. Frankl because of the loss of his wife 2 years earlier. Dr. Frankl saw that he was psychologically depressed. His question to the physician was this: “What would have happened to your wife if you were the one to go first?” With that question a bigger picture opened for the physician. Had he gone first, then it would have been his beloved wife who would be visiting Dr. Frankl for her depression. By her going first, she was spared years of grief. The physician then understood that he could willingly take on the suffering on behalf of his wife……….

Can you see how a sacrificial attitude, within reason, could aid you in forgiving and in overcoming resentment? I say within reason because you do not want to overdo this either. If a person refuses to hear what you have to say, or refuses to accept your sacrificial gestures and begins to use you, then it is time to reexamine the approach. None of these approaches is foolproof. If you see benefit in the sacrificial attitude and related behaviors, then what is your particular plan? What will you do that is hard for you to do in service to the other? How long will you give this undertaking? Do you see even a glimmer of evidence……that the other is open to even small change? Be sure to monitor your coping level during this exercise so that the sacrifice does not lead to an even greater resentment. If that begins to happen over a period of time, then it is time to reevaluate this particular approach in your case. If, on the other hand, it seems to be working, then stay at it as long as you can and as long as the other is willing to work with you in changing behaviors.

Reflect on the possibility that without your forgiveness, that person may never learn to live well. You may be playing a part in helping him or her grow deeply as a person. How might that be? He or she is being given a chance to see what genuine love is and to see it in action. Your sacrificial approach may even be playing a part in the very survival of this person. Of course, you do not want to go so far with this sacrifice that you do damage to yourself. Instead, the point here is that as you give of yourself, within reason, this giving might prove to be emotionally healing for you. When you are ready, write down your answer to the question of how you may be aiding the other’s healing.

Dr. Frankl then gives the reader an insight that is worth remembering: Sacrifice changes as soon as it is linked to a sound meaning that underlies it. The physician now had a meaning for going on, and his willing acceptance of outliving his wife was a sign that he loved her and wanted her safe.

Robert

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” 

Forgiveness Interventions Help Depressed Adolescents Cope and Thrive

Ample research has shown that depression is a significant and growing problem for today’s adolescents.  Depression can impair a teenager’s cognitive functioning (i.e., thinking, reasoning, etc.), relationships with parents and peers, academic performance, and for cases of severe depression may even result in suicide attempts. Moreover, adolescent depression is also associated with poor outcomes in adulthood such as low-income levels, low educational aspirations, and high substance use.

Now, two international education and forgiveness specialists believe they may have uncovered one of the keys to reducing adolescent depression and major depressive disorder (MDD).  According to the researchers, their first-of-its-kind study has shown that promoting social skills such as responsibility and self-control could be “particularly salient for the prevention of adolescent depression.”

The new study, A Longitudinal Analysis of Social Skills and Adolescent Depression: A Multivariate Latent Growth Approach, was published in the current issue of the International Journal of Psychological Research (the official publication of the Faculty of Psychology at San Buenaventura University in Medellin, Colombia.). The study authors included Dr. Zhuojun Yao, an educational psychologist and lecturer at Soochow (Suzhou) University in Suzhou, China, and Dr. Robert Enright, of our International Forgiveness Institute.

BACKGROUND: Adolescence is a period of increased vulnerability to depression because of complex changes in biology, cognition, and social domains.  According to the  2019 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), 3.5 million adolescents aged 12 to 17 in the United States (14.4% of the total) had at least one Major Depressive Episode (MDE), and 70% of these adolescents had an MDE with severe impairment in 2018.

Most clinical  depression among children starts in middle adolescence (ages 15-18) and is much higher for those in that age group than for those in early adolescence (ages 13-15). Although there are substantial empirical research studies demonstrating the association between social skills  and adolescent depression, the authors of this study could not locate a single scientific work investigating how the change in social skills influences the change in depression from early to middle adolescence.

THE STUDY: To  address  this  gap  in fundamental knowledge, the researchers in this study questioned how changes in social skills (cooperation, assertion, responsibility, and self-control) influence changes in depression from early to middle adolescence. Using internationally respected measurement tools, the authors measured both social skills and depression in 1,064 participants (half boys, half girls). Those participants were drawn from a separate longevity study by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (NICHD SECCYD) that ran from 1991 through 2008.

STUDY RESULTS: According to the study authors, adolescents who had more increase in responsibility  and self-control from 5^th grade to 9^th grade tended to experience a slower increase in depression; while adolescents who had more reduction in cooperation  and assertion from 5^th grade to 9^th grade tended to experience a faster increase in depression. Overall, the results suggest that responsibility in early adolescence may decrease adolescent depression by protecting adolescents from risk-taking and problematic behaviors in middle adolescence.

This study on adolescent depression is just one of the many research projects undertaken by Drs. Zhuojun Yao and Robert Enright. Others include:

• The influence of moral stories on kindergarteners’ sharing behavior
• The role of consequences of moral action in maximizing moral elevation
• Belief in altruistic human nature and prosocial behavior: a serial mediation analysis
• The Link Between Social Interaction with Adults and Adolescent Conflict Coping Strategy in School Context

You have said that once we forgive people, then we are ready for the next injustice and we might be able to go ahead a little better the second time. Isn’t that statement self-righteous? I say that because some people and some injustices are much harder to forgive than others. Why do you claim that we just get better and better in our forgiving?

Aristotle made the wise point that as we practice any of the moral virtues, this practice helps us get better in how we appropriate the virtues.  He never implied, nor do I, that the next incident will lead to quicker forgiveness than the first one and the person easier to forgive just because of the practice.  Instead, Aristotle implied this:  We will be more familiar with the process of practicing the virtue and so we may be more efficient and accurate in our next attempt.  Yes, you are correct, in that the next person who hurts us might do so in a very grave way, making it hard to forgive.  Yet, if we bring a lot of experience to this new person and situation, we may get through it more deeply and more quickly than otherwise might have been the case.

To get very concrete about this, suppose that to forgive Person A, you ideally needed two weeks.  To forgive Person B, without your having any prior practice in forgiving, you would need six months to forgive because the incident was so unjust.  Yet, if you have a lot of practice in forgiving, then your forgiving Person B now might take only three months rather than six.  Yes, this is still much longer than what was needed to forgive Person A, but the time needed for this with Person B is shortened precisely because the former practice is aiding your forgiving Person B now.