The Compassionate Instinct

While nibbling on carrot flaxseed crackers (“I am relishing”), we talked about the past six weeks. McCullough doesn’t need to eat his hat—I definitely had experienced moments of feeling happier and more consciously grateful as a result of the exercises, and by the end of my experiment, my happiness index had gone up to 3.92. But I also found that there are times when I need to allow myself to feel bad without fighting against my negative emotions. And my cynical side continues to dream of opening a rival restaurant next door called the Cantankerous Café, with menu items like “I am depressed” and “I am resentful.”

My biggest question was how long these exercises’ effects would last.

“Sometimes positive psychologists sound like we’re trying to sell miracles to people. There are no miracles…. There are no long-term quick fixes for happiness,” said Peterson, when I asked him how I could maintain my happiness boost. “So if you become a more grateful person and you add those exercises to your repertoire, you’ll be different six months or a year from now. But if you say okay, I’m done with the story and I’m going back to the way I was, it’ll just have been a six-week high. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s not going to permanently change you.”

Perhaps that’s why, when I got home from dinner, I went straight to my bookcase where I keep stuff my dad has sent me—and picked out another journal.

THE CHOICE TO FORGIVE

Fred Luskin

DELORES WAS GOOD-NATURED and attractive, but I could see the hurt in her eyes and the sorrow in the way she held herself. Though her parents were successful businesspeople who raised her in an upper middle-class neighborhood, her mother was cold and critical, while her father was quiet and aloof. Delores grew up feeling unattractive and uncared for, and she struggled to create strong relationships.

When Delores was 30, her fiancé Skip decided he was more interested in sleeping with local waitresses than remaining faithful to her. One day she came home and found him in bed with someone else. She saw this betrayal as an example of how unfair the world was—as proof that she never got a break. She was angry, hurt, confused, scared, and lonely. Skip moved out, but Delores constantly thought of begging him to return.

I met Delores when she came to a class I teach to help people learn to forgive others. She rarely spoke without mentioning at least one of the many people who had done her wrong. When she began the forgiveness training, she doubted it would do her any good. She was there because her therapist had recommended the class.

I’ve known many people like Delores. There’s no shortage of people in the world who’ve been hurt—by someone they love, by a friend, by someone they didn’t know at all. My classes rest on the simple and radical notion that how we react to these hurts is up to us. I teach people to make forgiving choices.

For eight years, I have directed the Stanford Forgiveness Projects, the largest interpersonal forgiveness training research projects ever conducted. In conjunction with this research, I teach classes and workshops that offer a concrete method for forgiving others. I stress that while pain and disappointment are inevitable, they need not control us. It is vital to our health and well-being that we handle what comes our way without getting mired in blame and suffering.

Through my research and teaching, I have found that forgiveness isn’t just wishful thinking. It’s a trainable skill. My colleagues and I have developed a nine-step method for forgiving almost any conceivable hurt. We have tested this method through a series of studies with people who had been lied to, cheated, abandoned, beaten, abused, or had their children murdered. They ranged from neglected spouses to the parents of terrorist victims in Northern Ireland.

What we have found is that forgiveness can reduce stress, blood pressure, anger, depression, and hurt, and it can increase optimism, hope, compassion, and physical vitality. For instance, in a study we conducted with Protestants and Catholics from Northern Ireland who had lost a family member in the violence there, participants reported a 40 percent decline in symptoms of depression after undergoing the forgiveness training. Another study involved people who had suffered a variety of hurts, from business partners lying to them to best friends abandoning them. Six months after their forgiveness training, these people reported a 70 percent drop in the degree of hurt they felt toward the person who had hurt them, and they said they felt more forgiving in general.