Dr. Fred Luskin, director of the Stanford Forgiveness Projects, explains how releasing resentment can transform both mind and body. Drawing on decades of research and work with people in war-torn regions around the world, Luskin explains why forgiveness is a powerful act of healing for the forgiver. He shares compelling stories and practical steps to help keep past hurts from stealing your peace today.
Plus, the Zulu concept of Ubuntu and how South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission used Ubuntu to help guide a nation’s journey towards healing.
Phil Stieg
Dr. Frederic Luskin is one of the world’s leading experts on the science and practice of forgiveness. As Director of the Stanford University Forgiveness Projects, he has spent decades researching how letting go of resentment can improve both emotional and physical health. His work has helped individuals and communities around the world heal from profound personal and collective wounds. Dr. Luskin is the author of several books, and he teaches mindfulness, emotional intelligence, and positive psychology at Stanford.
Today, we’ll explore how forgiveness can free us from the grip of past hurts and guide us toward lasting inner peace.
Fred, thanks so much for being with us today.
Fred Luskin
You’re welcome. Thank you.
Phil Stieg
To start off from the top then, why don’t we define for everybody what you mean when you say that you have truly forgiven somebody?
Fred Luskin
Ha, damned if I know.
Phil Stieg
Well, if you don’t know…
Fred Luskin
You know, there’s a very excellent, cheesy statement about that. You don’t forgive because they deserve it. You forgive because you deserve it.
The best definition that I’ve ever heard is not mine. It’s forgiveness is giving up all hope for a better past. And that crystallizes it right there. In the present right now, many, many of us are still arguing with what happened in the past, and they’re still hoping that a judge will say, “Well, you’re right. What unfolded in 2004 is wrong, so we’re going to do a redo or we’re going to punish the bad guys”.
Forgiveness means giving that up, resolving it, making peace, and being in some degree story of acceptance with this is the life that I have, these are the experiences that I have had, better or for worse, this is my life.
Phil Stieg
Have to ask, this is an unusual topic, as you point out in your book. This has not been studied very much. Was there something in your personal life that inspired you to dedicate your entire life to this topic?
Fred Luskin
I mean, one of the reasons it’s not studied that much, it’s really hard to do. I mean, it takes effort, and it takes some humility to not be so preoccupied with one’s wounds. So that’s a big ask.
There were many instances where I saw that I don’t know how to do this. When we started the Stanford Forgiveness Project, we were all like fancy PhDs and graduate students, and we had no idea how to talk to normal human beings.
We did a project with women from Northern Ireland who had had their sons murdered. We had brought somebody who could speak to both sides of the conflict, Catholic and Protestant. Halfway through the first day, these women went to the intermediary and that intermediary came to us and said, These women really like you, but they don’t understand half of what you’re saying. And they have eighth-grade education. So why don’t you try talking like a normal human being?
So that evening, we tried to come up with all sorts of metaphors and analogies to help it become clearer. When we went to them and say, “Hey, you have a grievance or a grudge?” They don’t really… Maybe not. But when we said to them, “You have airplanes that won’t land, and they’re clogging up the airspace so that your airport is now a mess”, that they got a little bit. We had to come up with all of these ways of making the abstract concepts that we were comfortable with tangible.
Phil Stieg
You alluded to it a little bit early here. Forgiveness, tell me if I’m wrong, forgiveness is more about myself than the other person.
Fred Luskin
If I had a crappy mother and she’s dead. Can I forgive for her? Well, she’s dead. Does she have to pop back to life and say “I’m sorry”, before I can forgive? No. Does she have to agree that she deserves forgiveness? Not at all.
The only thing forgiveness can be about is my own interpretation of what happened and my willingness to resolve whatever interpretations I have that are interfering with my functioning — because mom’s dead.
Phil Stieg
Can you expand on the concept or the three components of what forgiveness are?
Fred Luskin
Well, it starts when something bad happens and we react to it. We have a fight or flight response. Our mind spin stories, our muscles tighten up. And if we don’t release that, a car cuts you off on the freeway, you give them the finger for three seconds, and then you’re done, you’re done. But if that doesn’t happen, usually the process is you take it personally. That person meant to cut me off. They did it to harm me. That taking it personally is step one.
Step two is my reaction, my body and mind’s reaction, is their responsibility, not mine. I take it too personally It’s not my problem.
And third, then I start rehearsing a story where it’s their bad and it’s not my fault that I’m reacting like this. I create then a story that cements that. They did bad. It’s not my fault that three years later, I’m dysregulated and still ranting and raving. It’s them. And that’s the story. Forgiveness unwraps that.
Phil Stieg
If you feel that in yourself or you see those three components, you need to get some help, either internal or external.
Fred Luskin
You change the story. Well, this happened. I didn’t like it, but it’s okay. It’s life. Second, I’m responsible for how I feel now, not them. And third, most of a victimization is not because people tried to hurt me. It’s because they didn’t care whether they hurt me. It was more an indifference than malevolence.
Phil Stieg
Tell me how the process of forgiving influences brain structure and function. Do you have good data on that now?
Fred Luskin
I wouldn’t call it good data.
Phil Stieg
(laugh)
Fred Luskin
We’re at the beginning of really understanding neurobiology. A lot of the benefit of forgiveness and the harm of forgiveness is the stress that unresolved grievance causes, and it has the effect of accumulated stress. The un- forgiveness piece carries perseveration. You endlessly repeat to yourself, This is not okay. This should be different. Those create neurological changes whenever you have an orientation around threat.
The other thing that forgiveness can do; it often brings with it positive emotion. So it can bring with it benevolence, compassion, empathy, which have different brain manifestations. But the deepest value on our functioning as human beings is it creates efficacy.
So let’s say I had a terrible past marriage, and I walk around with a sense that I can’t trust people. That certainly has daily neurological impact, that I’m perceiving it through a lens of mistrust and hostility. But deeper than that, I’m perceiving it through a lens of, “I can’t cope with my life”.
The biggest positive from forgiveness is that release of bitterness and blame lead me to have more efficacy. I can handle things when they emerge. I have the capacity to cope with life. Those have tremendous positive impact.
Phil Stieg
Is it our identity that allows us to not forgive and carry a grievance, or does the grievance shape our identity? Which comes first, the chicken or the egg here?
Fred Luskin
Tell me what you mean by identity.
Phil Stieg
Who I am and the way I exist in the world. In reading all the examples that you talked about, these are unhappy people, by and large. Does that come as a result of the grievance and your inability to forgive, or are they naturally unhappy people?
Fred Luskin
My first answer to you is how much of our grievances are tribal.
Phil Stieg
By that, you mean?
Fred Luskin
Well, we did work in Northern Ireland, so Catholic and Protestant. I did work in Colombia and Sierra Leone, so there’s antagonizing forces. In the United States of America now, the red states and the blue states and the Democrats and Republicans have very hostile impressions of each other.
So you know the data where Democrats think Republicans are so much worse than they are, and Republicans think Democrats are so much worse than they are, and they believe that their values are way more extreme than they are, and both sides are wrong about a lot of things, but they hold on to those things because of their tribal alignment. So that aspect of identity makes people dramatically less forgiving.
Phil Stieg
That’s group identity, right? Is everybody a member of a tribe?
Fred Luskin
And familial identity. Like, my family doesn’t do this. We don’t get along with those people. In my family, we don’t allow disrespect. There is a huge identity portion to the taking of offense.
Phil Stieg
Are there limits to forgiveness?
Fred Luskin
Time is a significant limit. You can’t push yourself or other people to forgive too quickly.
Grieving is a prerequisite to forgiving. You have to feel that pain. You have to open to the woundedness. You have to recognize your vulnerability. All that is a predisposition to moving ahead.
Some people’s childhoods were so dysregulated that it is very hard for them to make peace with things that either remind them of childhood issues, or their nervous systems are so fragile that it’s very hard to put them back together.
Interstitial theme music
Narrator:
In contrast to the post-world war two Nuremburg trials, which sought to imprison and execute convicted war criminals, South Africa’s first post-apartheid government chose to pursue forgiveness over prosecution, and reparation over retaliation.
Their approach embraced the essence of “Ubuntu”
In 1996, the South African government established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission with the goal of healing their society by uncovering the truth about the abuses of the apartheid regime. It was described as being grounded in the traditional concept of Ubuntu.
Ubuntu is a Zulu word describing a value system based on the interconnectedness of all individuals in a community — and can be roughly translated as “I am because we are”.
Nelson Mandela described the deep cultural resonance of Ubuntu:
Nelson Mandela
In the old days, when we were young, a traveler through a country would stop at a village, and he didn’t have to ask for food or for water. Once he stops, the people give him food, entertain him. That is one aspect of Ubuntu, but it will have various aspects.
Ubuntu does not mean that people should not enrich themselves. The question, therefore, is, are you going to do so in order to enable the community around you to be able to improve? These are the important things in life. And if one can do that, you have done something very important which will be appreciated.
Narrator
Archbishop Desmond Tutu –chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission — combined the deeply rooted African tradition of Ubuntu with the Christian belief of all humans as made in the image of god, with the hope of creating a strong, moral foundation for the new, democratic government of South Africa.
Theme music
Forgiveness is always a work in progress … and it doesn’t mean forgetting the wrongs of the past. But, with time, it can be a path to healing.
Phil Stieg
So are there things that you would say cannot be or should not be forgiven? Or is there a potential to forgive in almost every aspect?
Fred Luskin
So there are people who have forgiven the Holocaust, murder, torture. The Dalai Lama’s monks forgave horrible things. So you can’t say that human beings have forgiven everything. The question is, what do people need to optimally function? So that’s a different question than should everything be forgiven?
Now, I have spoken to people who have had really abusive parents, and they’ve mostly been okay by compartmentalizing, Okay, I had this awful parent. I’m not willing to go there and fully let them off the hook, but I know enough not to let that prejudge the rest of my life. So every now and then, I might hate mom, but most of the time, I’m okay in life, and I’m willing to be open to life. So that’s a conscious, maybe downshift a little, then full forgiveness.
Phil Stieg
Also as an individual, if you hurt me, I have to recognize, number one, that you did hurt me, whatever it is that you did. Number two, what was it? You have to understand that you’re angry. The processes that you go through to get to thinking about forgiveness. What are those that you wrote about?
Fred Luskin
Well, and the one thing I’ll add to what you said, the problem is not just anger, it’s self-pity. Self-pity is a big issue, not just anger. Poor me. The biggest reason that people turn to forgiveness is because they get really tired of their suffering.
Phil Stieg
Other than the self-pity, that people carry when they don’t want to forgive, what are the other challenges that you and all of your clients experience when you’re trying understand how to start the process of forgiveness? What are the initial challenges?
Fred Luskin
The biggest challenge besides lowering bitterness and blame is acknowledging how much beauty is already in their life and that they are using their wound as a kind of eclipse, that the sun never stops shining, beauty never goes away, but they’re holding up this wound and saying, Because of this thing that happened to me, I can’t see the beauty that’s already there, and I’m going to blame it on somebody else instead of trying to move my eclipse out of the way. We always start with some gratitude, beauty enhancement, opening to love, so that we give anybody a tangible experience of what they’re missing.
Phil Stieg
I’ve had a number of friends that have lost their children through automobile accidents, other things like that. It made me reflect on them when I read about your Northern Ireland experience. How do you get those individuals past that? I mean, that’s just that terrible hurt and the emptiness that they have because their child is no longer with them
Fred Luskin
A lot of the challenge of forgiveness is really being willing to grieve what happened. And that means that with things like the death of a child or a really abusive spouse or all sorts of really painful things, grief is a difficult process that includes real acceptance of vulnerability. That part of this grief is understanding there are simply things in this world that I do not control. And part of the grieving is of our strength and our power in this world to protect ourselves and other people. So often, incomplete grief is either too much anger and not enough sadness. The sadness is the vulnerability part, or too much sadness and not enough anger.
And you tend to have healthy grief, including both and fear, which is based on that powerlessness. So you have to go through that range of experiences, and often people struggle to open with part of the emotional process of grieving.
Phil Stieg
You often emphasize the importance of the present moment as it relates to forgiveness. So expound on that.
Fred Luskin
I mean, the essential question is, right now, can I or you be at peace with our life? Are we capable or am I capable of saying, “I had a good life, some bad experiences, some good experiences. I was loved, I was not loved. But on the whole, thank you”. That’s forgiveness. Like, right now, I’m okay. When you can’t do that when you say, I’m not at peace now because of X, Y, and Z – that’s a sign that you’re sacrificing present happiness for past woundedness. To me, it’s a bad deal.
Phil Stieg
To give people hope, you talked about two mechanisms for going through the process of forgiveness. Can you explain what the PERT acronym means and stands for in your teachings?
Fred Luskin
Yeah. Positive Emotion Refocusing Technique.
Phil Stieg
Can you briefly take us through the quick scenario of what that means practically for me, trying to become a more forgiving individual?
Fred Luskin
There’s four components – One, narrative, change your story. Two, the cognitive piece, like you can’t always get what you want. I’ve had people sing the Rolling Stones song, You can’t always get what you want. Three, self-regulation, breathe, quiet, center. And four, Find Beauty.
Let me give you a really profound example of the use of that. When we invited, I think, the first or second group from Northern Ireland. Everybody there had somebody in their family murdered. They come into the building at Stanford. We were holding it. This is what we did. We brought them in. We brought every one of them to the window. We had them open the blinds, and the sun was shining on them. And we said, The most important thing we’re going to teach you is; open your arms. Take two slow deep breaths into and out of your belly, where you really relax your breathing, really relax it. As you’re sitting here with your arms open. Say thank you for the beauty of that sun and the warmth and everything. The next five times that you remember how horrible it was that somebody killed somebody near you, do that exact same thing. A couple of slow deep breaths and open to something beautiful. And we could promise them that if you did that 20 times, it would lessen the adrenaline experience, and you wouldn’t feel quite so helpless.
Phil Stieg
In the day of social media and instant gratification, where you’re always told you should be happy. Life is fair. You’re always supposed to be happy. Have you found social media, the internet, to change the people that you’re working with?
Fred Luskin
You know what a deep question that is. Everywhere, people are more distractible, they’re generally less calm, so it’s easier to upset them.
Two, because of excess technology, people do less reflective thinking, so they have a harder time accessing. Life is hard. Things happen. Those are diminutions in normal human capacity. Capacity.
Third, social media algorithms feed outrage, so the negativity is stoked all over the place. That has made it harder to forgive.
And last, we tend to multitask now so often without even recognizing it and go from one thng to another. So we’ll have a conversation, and the nanosecond that the conversation is done, we check our messages. So our brain and neurological systems never get the rest that they need.. And so our reserve of dealing with things has been weakened. To me, all those factors say, yes, it is much easier for people to take offense.
Phil Stieg
Your take home message regarding forgiving. What’s the message that you want our listeners to hear?
Fred Luskin
The Buddhists have a really good take on life is difficult, suffering is a part of it. They also recognize that you can use mental skills to move through it
Yes, you’ve been hurt because life is difficult or you’re struggling. The question to ask each of us is, How am I doing in this? How’s it working for me? Is being pissed off helpful? If it’s not, there’s so much data now that positive, kinder responses help. Our method is forgiveness.
Phil Stieg
Dr. Frederick Luskin, thank you so much for spending time with us. I think that forgiving is something that all of us need to have in our lives. It’s something that all of us need to figure out how to achieve. Thank you so much for enlightening us.
Fred Luskin
Thank you. I enjoyed the conversation. I appreciate your interest in our work.