Forgiveness #3 2/1/07 RENO, NV (KUNR) - Dr. Frederic Luskin studies forgiveness at Stanford. His research shows that the ability to forgive is a lifeskill, one we should all have. It's not about a spiritual commandment; forgiving is about finding a way to have peace in a world in which none of us always get our way.

Dr. Luskin has found there are three precursors to being able to forgive. The first is that you have to know what happened, and it often takes the passage of time to really know the harm done to you. You have to know what the other person did to you, how you've been hurt. You have to understand your part in what happened; to accurately assess what you did and didn't do that participated in this offense or failed to protect you from the offense. And you have to understand how you believe that life, or God, or nature has failed you. If your mate cheated on you, then you have to know something about the details: how long this went on, how long you were being lied to, with whom and where. You have to know how this discovery of infidelity effected you: the sadness, the loss, the self doubt, the fears. Then you have to think through what part you may have played in this without hiding behind the belief you were completely blame free; were you the best mate you could have been? Did you become too absorbed in work or the kids? Were you too critical? Too angry? And then you ponder how life has failed you: that marriages aren't always faithful; that people can deceive those they purport to love; that people can do what they want without sufficient regard to how much they might hurt others.

The second precursor to forgiveness is that you have to experience the full range of emotions from the harm. It's easy to feel angry, to have rage; but, it's important to delve beyond these. It's important to also feel the hurt, the personal offense, the harm. To grieve. Until you've moved through the sadness, the loss, it's very difficult to make the choice to forgive. As a culture, we don't ritualize grief; we seem to want to only feel the good emotions, not the bad. There are those in my field who believe you can't fully develop and mature unless you have suffered, having allowed yourself to feel the depth of pain that accompanies loss. You can get just as screwed up trying to forgive before you've grieved, as you can by choosing never to forgive and to remain in resentment with a grudge. Forgiving is not an act of weakness; it takes strength and courage to tolerate the suffering that brings one through the grief and to a place where one can forgive.

The third precursor to forgiveness is that you have to tell someone about the harm you experienced, and your part in the offense. Research shows that those who recover with the most resilience are those who tell someone about the harm; those who tell no one, don't fare well, just as those who tell too many, don't fare well. If you tell no one, then you're more likely to hold shame because the event happened to you; by disclosing the secret, by telling someone, the shame you feel lessens. If you tell too many people, then you're going to hold a grudge longer because you're reactivating your feelings of resentment with every telling. The telling of too many people is also a sophisticated way of retaliating against the offender and spreading the news about how terrible they were. Picture the wife whose husband has been unfaithful; the wife who tells everyone in town what a louse her husband has been, is smearing his reputation to get back at him and doing herself no good. How many is too many people to tell? The research shows that it's ideal to tell those in your inner most circle of confidants, say 3 to 4 people. You pick people who will hold your confidence and not tell others; people who won't judge you, and will take the secret with compassion. By telling the secret, you get the shared humanity of knowing you're not alone, and you may get good advice or counsel. You have to talk about it before you can overcome harm.

The next step to forgiveness is to realize how you didn't get what you want, and to restructure your beliefs to understand, no one gets everything they want. To look at what unenforceable rule you keep applying to the situation, and accept that it's not enforceable even though you really want it. Using our wife whose husband cheated on her, the unenforceable rule is he vowed to be faithful so he has to be, afterall, that's what marriage is based on, trust. You can't make someone live up to what you believe to be true; often, you can't even make yourself live up to all your unenforceable rules. It's time to turn your attention to whether you can prove that this unenforceable rule is true. Look around you, how many marriages do you know where there's never been infidelity or divorce? Or even though we might think parents should protect their children, how often does it happen that they don't? To forgive, requires bouncing your unenforceable rule expectation out to the bigger world and seeing whether the rule always prevails you'll find it doesn't it may be what you want, but it's not what you got. You wanted a husband would be faithful, but you didn't get one. To get to the point of being able to forgive, you have to accept the reality of what happened, stop organizing your life around your pain and anger, move on.

And how long is it good to keep focused on the harm? Just as long as it takes to grieve, and then move on to forgiveness. Stop repeating the story of the harm because each time you go through it, you activate all the negative feelings and make yourself feel bad again. As a friend, what do you do when your friend keeps talking about how she was harmed by her cheating husband, keeps asking the same unanswerable question of how could he do this? It may sound harsh, but the best approach is to ask your friend to accept what happened and move on, to stop retelling the story because it only makes her feel bad; remember, you give them time to grieve before you start shutting down their story, and then you shut down the story, urging them to talk about something else and accept they didn't get what they wanted.

After you've grieved, accept life worked out the way it did; accept you didn't get what you wanted; accept your unenforceable rules didn't happen and often don't in the bigger world. Shut down the retelling of your story, don't hold onto the anger. Nelson Mandela put it well: anger is drinking poison waiting for it to kill your enemy . Forgive, move on, get over it.
© Copyright 2012, KUNR