Forgiveness #4 2/8/07 RENO, NV (KUNR) - We've all struggled with forgiving someone or something that hurt us. Dr. Luskin at Stanford studies what enables us to forgive with the hope we can all learn this life skill: to forgive rather than holding onto a grudge. He's found three things that enable us to forgive: not taking the offense too personally; choosing to be resilient rather than a victim; and creating a different story to understand the offense.

Of course, how do you not take it personally when the offense was done to you? If your husband cheated on you, how is that not personal? If the drunk driver hit your car, how is that not personal? Dr. Luskin suggests you find a balance between the personal and the impersonal nature of what happened. Of course it's personal because it did happen to you; the personal aspect requires you to grieve what you lost. But it's not just personal, it's also impersonal. These things happen all the time, this is just when it happened to you. For a cheating spouse, this isn't the first time in the history of the world that a spouse cheated; in fact, if you look around, lots of spouses cheat, here and everywhere else in the world. For the drunk driver, unfortunately, there are so many of them hitting innocent drivers that we have systems of laws to give incentive to stop drunks from driving and rehabilitation centers to help people stop drinking. The point being, to forgive you have to come up with a balance between taking this personally and realizing it's just part of life; it may not be what you wanted, but it is what happened.

To forgive requires choosing to be resilient and forgive rather than choosing to remain defined by the offense, telling one's story over and over, re-experiencing the anger and resentment, seeing oneself as a victim instead of a survivor. The choice to forgive lies within the self, not within how awful the offense may have been. Dr. Luskin has helped people forgive the murder of one's child and go on with life. If it's humanly possible to forgive the person who caused the death of a child, then we can surely forgive other offenses. The capacity to forgive lies within the self; in the courageous choice one makes to let go of the anger and move on. Forgiveness lies in accepting we can't have the world occur the way we want or that things happen that we don't like; it doesn't matter how good we are or how careful we've been, bad things will happen. We are not safe from loss, harm or disappointment; that is the human condition for everyone, not just for you. To forgive we have to let go of our expectation for unenforceable rules about the way we want the world to work and accept what actually happens that doesn't make it right, it just makes it a fact it happened and now you choose to let this event define the rest of your life, or let it go and move on.

To forgive requires we rewrite the story we tell ourselves and others about what happened. If you hold the story with anger and resentment, you'll stay stuck in the grudge. Most of us initially write our stories with the narrative that we were blameless; the offender was completely at fault; the offender was horrific; and we're horribly harmed. Let's take the wife whose husband cheated. Her story is that she was a dutiful wife for 38 years, took care of him, raised his children, kept a lovely home, did everything he wanted, and this is how he repays her? He falls in love with a woman in his office who's half his age, and he thinks this is OK? What did she ever do to deserve this kind of treatment? He's caught in his midlife crisis, a shallow small, selfish man who's ruined her life and stolen her best years. OK, that's one way to hold it. But, clearly, if you keep repeating this story, you'll only feel betrayal, resentment, bitterness, sadness. To forgive, one has to rewrite the story getting rid of putting all the blame onto the offender, bouncing the perspective out to that of the bigger world, balancing the personal with the impersonal, letting go of our unenforceable rules, and finding something valuable that's come to us through the experience. That's right, finding something we've gained from going through all this pain and having our life flipped upside down.

How do you not blame a cheating husband? Well, you look at mistakes you made along the way as the wife; perhaps you could have been less critical, more understanding, kept yourself in better shape, been more interesting, more supportive, more adventurous. None of us are perfect; you can always find something you could have done better. You both created the marital problems; he's 100% responsible for having the affair, but you had something to do with the problems that led to the affair. And you bounce it out to the impersonal aspects of how difficult long term marriage is to keep going: you look at how the culture emphasizes youth and supports following one's heart, doing what you feel like, instead of having integrity; you look at how many times every day a spouse discovers their spouse was unfaithful; you realize this is a normal life experience even though you don't like it.

And just how do you find something good in such a heart breaking experience? Perhaps your friends were there to support you; maybe you learned you weren't sufficiently educated about the finances and now you're learning about money; you could have found that you had been way too passive, ignoring lots of things you didn't like or were afraid to bring up. Maybe without him you've realized you were really depressed having to live with him and now, on your own, you can follow those dreams you couldn't acknowledge and stay married. Or maybe she focuses on the fact she was well loved for most of the years they were together, and that was a gift.

So, the story could be rewritten to say: My marriage worked for a long time; we both made mistakes and it wasn't going so well; he chose to leave in an ugly way, the way a lot of marriages fall apart these days. I'm getting over the loss and looking at what I've learned about myself so I'm working to be more assertive and be more in charge of my money. Life goes on. I'm hoping to find my dream now and follow it.

Forgiveness is a choice that frees you to go on and enjoy your life; it has very little to do with the offender. Accept life doesn't work the way we wish it did, but there's still plenty of good. Rewrite your story of what went wrong so you place your experience in the larger context of what happens in the world, and you think about what you got out of this that was good. Then with the peace that comes from releasing the grudge, move on. © Copyright 2012, KUNR