#96: The Science of Forgiveness - Fred Luskin, PhD

0:00Real healing involves some degree of personal renunciation, a kind of personal challenge to grow. Forgiveness is essentially a change in story. If we stay angry, then the anger starts collecting, so to speak, in the same pathways as physical pain. The only way we really pay anybody back is by being happy enough that what they did no longer matters. And that is such a powerful reminder.

0:41Welcome to the Fitmind podcast where we explore the frontiers of human potential, mindfulness and neuroscience. I'm your new host Josh and I'm super honoured to be filling in at least for now as my dear friend Liam dedicates more of his time to the practice. He'll still be super involved, just a little bit more in the background. So today I'm thrilled to welcome Dr Fred Luskin, a pioneering expert in the science of forgiveness and the founder of the Stanford Forgiveness Project. Dr. Luskin has spent years researching how forgiveness can improve mental and physical health and his work has been widely recognized for helping individuals transform their relationships and release emotional burdens.

1:26Through his research at Stanford and his acclaimed books, he's become a leading voice on how letting go of grievances can lead to greater well-being and resilience. I'm excited to dive into his insights and explore the powerful impact forgiveness can have on our lives. So without further ado, I welcome Dr. Fred Luskin. Fred, thank you so much for joining us. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you. So I'd love to dive straight in. What was it that led you to focus your research and career around this concept of forgiveness? You know, it's honestly a mixed blessing. It's wonderful to be of help, but it sucks to see how horrible people are to each other.

2:20You know, it's not so simple. It's like the yin and the yang or the full catastrophe. I see both. and there are times when the suffering or the ugliness they're too much and and there are other times where you know I'm doing good or I'm helping people but it's it's a fine line you can't do I can't you can't wade into people's being mistreated on a whole variety of levels without like throwing up your hands and saying hey enough or like when will human beings learn to be decent to each other and it brings up a lot of difficult questions absolutely it does particularly in this day and age it's yeah there's a lot of concerning things on the global level currently happening, I'm sure.

3:22Yeah. But currently we've just released, actually, it's just started releasing. There's a free course we're doing on loving kindness, meta meditation. And I think the biggest hindrance, this is why I was so pleased to be speaking with you, but the biggest hindrance or difficulty to be able to bring up this feeling is forgiveness. And I think this is probably, in many ways, it's probably the most important and potentially undervalued skill that's really somehow been lost. And I'm so glad that you have put it in a formula that particularly Western minds can understand. We know we like our formulas.

4:06You know, when you say most important, I don't necessarily think that's true. what what it is is the necessary kind of last step on the train that most people leave off so you go to therapy maybe you feel better but the therapeutic goal is often not full forgiveness so your parents are off the hook your ex-girlfriend's off the hook your bum of a boss the goal of real healing is to let them all off the hook as if almost as if it never happened not that it never happened but it's not a big influence now like that's the goal and so in order to get to that goal you have to release a lot inside of you and and people hesitate like they want to They want to change other people.

5:11They want to have a magic wand that makes the bad guys suffer. But the reality is real healing involves some degree of personal renunciation and a kind of personal challenge to grow. and and you don't hear that talked about as often as it could be if people were really looking at getting healthy yeah well put that's um yeah that's probably a good we should probably actually define forgiveness and what what it is and what it isn't because that's probably yeah an immediate sticking point when over the years that we've been teaching this we've come to understand that probably half of what we do is helping people understand what forgiveness is and is not that more than you would ever imagine that's our job so people have all these ridiculous notions about forgiveness and who earns it and who deserves it and that they forgive they're letting Adolf Hitler off the hook you know it's like they have these silly silly ideas and so a good part of our work is simply education the the the key the two key things to know about forgiveness are one they're letting go of the parts of life where they didn't turn out the way you want they're making peace with them that's all it is another way of saying it is it's making peace with the word no So, you're making peace at the times in your life where you got a no to what you want, no matter how righteous the yes might have been.

7:20You know, even if it's somebody murdered your kid, and it's a pretty damn good yes that my kid should still be here, we often get no to what we want. And forgiveness means we come to peace with the fact that we got no. And the central issue is the adapting to no. It's a very strong aspect of resilience and humility. And it also gives us the opportunity to cultivate gratitude for all the times where we got yes. So that's one, that forgiveness is making peace with the word no. The second is, like, you forgive for you. You can't, like, make anybody else's life. I mean, you can try. But you forgive to release yourself from a prison.

8:24And that's a very different take than did somebody deserve it? Have they apologized? enough has the world given me enough goodies so maybe I can be generous once it's I do it to save and rescue myself which is such a different take so though those are two central kind of understandings about forgiveness. The last one is forgiveness is essentially a change in story from a victim story, from a helpless story, from an angry story focused on the past to a story that presents a more hopeful future. So you don't have to do that much. You just have to free yourself from your self-constructed prison and come up with a story that allows you to move ahead.

9:37That's not easy, but it's not as hard as people make it. Love that. That's so empowering. I mean, it's really just giving you control back to your life about how you perceive and current situations. That's it. I mean, anybody that does revisit, as we revisit these things that happened in the past, they definitely tend to, in many ways, they'll get worse. or we could also look at that situation say somebody did something to us in the past we're in a particularly good mood i don't know we're out looking at the nature or and if we do revisit that in a lighter mood we can tend to sort of re-weight or shift the perspective on that automatically so it's a really beautiful and empowering skill to learn and i'm gonna say it's closer to true, then I'm a helpless victim of bad, ugly people or circumstances.

10:44That may be true for a while. Like there are things that happen that are so outside of our ability to cope with. So, you know, terrible things do happen or things that we have no skill to figure out. helpless vulnerable victimhood is a nice safe place to rest for a while so you don't have to do the hard work of making your own life successful the problem is when that becomes pattern or a habit you stop believing you have agency or that it's your life you start absolving yourself of responsibility and say, my life sucks because of this that's in the past, and it's not my job to turn it around. And that's not a healthy perspective for a happy life.

11:45Yeah, absolutely. Because we really, I mean, almost everything outside of us is uncontrollable in some way, even our best predictions, we couldn't fully understand the intention or background or experience of, it would usually be related to another person, I imagine. We're not even fully in control of our inner experience. Right. So, you know, you want to be careful even with that, but we have less control over others and we literally have no control over the past. Yeah, literally. But yeah, I think that's such a key point. We actually, and this is why it's so empowering to be able to forgive because it's really just us, in many ways, it's just us feeling the pain of the past situation, particularly in our subjective context.

12:42So if we are empowered with this ability, we can become happier now um which also would increase our ability to be better people for everybody else and and you don't i think forgiveness is not yeah as you say it's not letting them off the hook it's we don't have to agree with what they've done but we can allow our own ourselves to become happier to let go of this kind of way i mean for to in order to forgive you have to have had a period of time of unforgiveness yes and you have to have created a grievance against something forgiveness resolves your created grievance which it's not terrible to create a grievance it's not terrible to say they did the wrong thing it really screwed with my life I've suffered the consequences now for a while that's that's perfectly healthy what becomes unhealthy is when you don't move past that and so when you forgive you're resolving something that you created so it's not like you say it's okay that they went through a red light and hit my car of course that's not okay but after two years it doesn't really matter what your opinion is about it I mean that's the that's the difficult reality like who gives a shit whether you think it's okay or not it's irrelevant but we don't want to let go of that judgment which gives us a kind of short-term power to feel superior or to be able to blame something as to why our life isn't working.

14:46But we're not willing to sacrifice that opinion about something. And so forgiveness means, yeah, you accept the fact that you don't think this was right. And then you say at some level, so what I don't think it's right. Things that I don't think are right happen all the time. It's like this is not the first time that's ever happened, and it's not going to be the last time. So how do I now make peace with something that I don't think is right? That's the essence of forgiveness and why it's challenging, because you're making peace with something that you don't approve of. and that's a wonderful thing to attempt because in a little way it's the world healing itself one little node somewhere is saying okay i've carried this around now for a long time i've added my little dose of negativity to the world now it's time to clean out my mess and take my negativity home with me.

16:02That's what it is.

16:07It's not esoteric, and it's not even about the past. It's what am I doing now so that I don't have to construct that grievance prison. yeah i just think of a lot of the people that i most respect in history and modern um like leaders that i really admire and respect a lot of them have been through tremendous some of the worst probably the highest levels of adversity that you can possibly imagine i was there's a there's a quote from i think it was the dalai lama and he was asked he was asking some of the the llamas that had come back from China during the, um, the, the invasion of Tibet that had been captured and, uh, like had horrendous things happened to them and they'd, they'd been released and had come back.

17:02And I remember him asking him, what was, what was your greatest fear while you were, you know, going through, they were getting tortured and, and various other things. And I remember he said, the greatest, the greatest fear I had was that I'd lose compassion for my torturers, or my these people that were you know they were creating tremendous like turmoil and and suffering for them and yeah that's just it's such a i mean that would be extremely difficult but it's so it's such an empowering position to be in and being able i remember hearing that as um that his monk said the worst part was my hatred of the Chinese.

17:46Right, right. You know, that's what fouled my mind more than anything. Mm, right. I know, that's a remarkable statement. It is, and so empowering. He is not allowing the external world to kind of touch his well-being in many ways, or he has a faculty to be relatively unaffected by the external. And we all have that facility to one degree or another. And we make choices as to whether we continue to focus on the ways that we have been harmed or focus more on how we can recover and move ahead. Those are attention choice points. Attention choice points. I like that. They are. I mean, we would say that grief has to precede forgiveness.

18:55That you have to go through shit. You have to feel bad. You have to be knocked down. You have to suffer and struggle whenever something really painful happens. Your nervous system is really working hard to help you regain equilibrium. And that can take quite a while if it's a devastating loss, you know. If somebody you love is murdered, then that can take a couple of years to fully get back into balance. And that's what grief is. You know, you go through hell to integrate an experience into a system that wasn't ready for that experience. And it's like putting your mind in a washing machine. You know, you're like all over the place.

19:45That grief needs to resolve. And when it doesn't resolve, it's unforgiveness usually or grievance. grievance, its resolution is forgiveness. It's not like I'm not suffering. It's that I paid my dues as a human being. I accepted my attachments and my linkages because I'm a human being. I recognize that it hurts at times to be a human being, which it does. And now I'm releasing my personal identification with this particular wound, but it's not like I walked around it. There was no spiritual bypass. I went there and I suffered. And now I don't need that suffering anymore. And that's the healthier arc.

20:45But it's not like it can happen sometimes in a day or a week or a month. when we did a project in Northern Ireland we insisted that the people who come there whose family members were murdered that it has to be at least two years from the time of the murder because you need time to process and experience and maybe even develop a little empathy for other people and it's not we just decided two years and then we can talk to you about forgiveness that's yeah that's amazing and that's such a good point the time you need before you could even start to readdress of course one of the ways we used to teach this in our classes when we were doing a lot of classes was we talk about, you know, let's say you're on the freeway and you get cut off in traffic, right?

21:58And it would make sense if you're like in a hurry or somebody really tries to harm you. You know, I've said to people, so give them the finger, you know, like say, screw you for 10 seconds. And then you're done. yeah there's nothing wrong with giving somebody the finger for 10 seconds but that's it don't call for people after this and talk about how terrible the roads are and don't go running after the person to give them the finger again and don't start telling a story about how awful people are and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, blah, react if you need to with real emotion. That's your grief and let it go.

22:52So for something like being cut off on the freeway, it might be 15 seconds of, hey, screw you. For losing a job, it may be a month. For having your kid killed, it may be two years. but there's a period of time where it's absolutely within reason I mean you don't want to go shoot somebody because they cut you off but it's okay to be human and have emotion and be scared and frightened and frustrated but there has to be an understanding that at some point you unravel that and just let life progress. Just let it go. And that's the forgiveness piece. It's not that everybody becomes, you know, I never react or everything's peace loving or NOLA.

23:48It's not that way. I love that. That's such a good point. And that's, again, a common misconception with meditation as well, that thinking is inherently bad or that it's actually really the identification or the way that we feel this is my suffering, my thinking, my and that's uh yeah one of the big more empowering realizations i guess that thinking just happens but you don't need to be so tight or holding on to that this is my suffering this is my well and it's helpful when things happen to feel and investigate the suffering it's not wrong What's not useful is to keep that investigation going long term or to think that I'm the only person this has ever happened to, so I need to tell everybody for the next five years.

25:02You do get some wisdom and recognize that any pain that I have ever experienced is simply normal human pain. I'm not the first person to have their partner cheat on them or the first person to have been lied to or the 50th person to have been overcharged or a business partner cheat. So a piece of it is, yes, this happened to me and it's awful. but then you release that over identification into well it's normal life and things happen and everything has its season including being upset but then you evolve past that and as you go through that process you're forgiving you know it's like yeah it happened but this is it doesn't have to stop the presses every day right right what is the some of the more profound or impressive because you must see what what are the most the more common uh like issues or uh scenarios that people come to you with and have you got any anecdotes or stories about some of the more profound things you've seen people forgive the the best anecdote i have two of them the most two really truthful things and then i'll tell you about what brings people into forgiveness stuff beautiful the first i was new at the game i i was teaching i i started as a researcher.

26:49So all of my teaching was for research. And then I started to slowly add some public teaching and, you know, all comers and either the first or second group that I led. There was a woman there who I chatted with a little bit and she was in some chronic pain and in part she came to forgive. I didn't quite catch it, but I knew she had like chronic something, musculoskeletal pain. I ran into her again about six months from then at a local supermarket and we started to chat and she said, you know, I'm glad to see you. Let me tell you a little bit about how your forgiveness class, you know, lasted.

27:43She said, you know, when I came there, I was in chronic pain. I had had something happen to my back. And what had happened was my husband and I were arguing. We were getting close to a divorce and we were just like cats and dogs. We didn't like each other and we couldn't stop. And it was like, you know, constant bickering. and one day we're bickering and arguing while I'm on the back of his motorcycle and we're fighting and he's going up the hill and around the bend and we're fighting and arguing and yelling and he's trying to control the motorcycle and he couldn't control it. Something happened, And either a car came near him or he got on some wet leaves and he lost some control.

28:39And the motorcycle hit a tree and we got thrown off and I hurt my back and my hip and you saw me afterwards. But what your forgiveness class prompted in me was an exploration of, well, wait a second. Was it really just his fault? she said i was fighting with him every inch up that hill as much as he was fighting with me and when he lost control of that vehicle had i ever chosen to just shut my mouth he probably wouldn't have lost control so we co-created that issue wow wow so that got me to start releasing stuff. And then I thought, wow, and he has it much worse than I do that, you know, I have some pain and I'm angry, but he had hit his head on something.

29:46And so he was at that point still not cognitively fully recovered. And she started to realize, well, wait a second, I may not even be the biggest victim here. You know, my yelling, I'm not taking full blame, contributed to this poor guy, like basically being in a nursing home for a while because he didn't have all his marbles. So I went and visited him in the nursing home and apologized to him. Like, you know, it's not okay what you did, but it's not okay what I did either. And what she said is, you know, we got divorced. I mean, we weren't right for each other, but I started to go to the nursing home and help take care of him.

30:38Because once I got past my self-righteous bitterness I saw things more clearly and I realized at that point I was a lot more capable of taking care of him than he was of taking care of me because I had some pain he had a a ruined life and she said the amazing thing is when I forgave him my pain went away I didn't have any more pain so that was one of the more dramatic positives I've heard another and these are true I mean these are not you know as close as I can come to true we we brought a group of people from Northern Ireland who were mothers who had their their sons killed in the violence. And they came to Stanford.

31:36They spent a week with us. And we worked with them on forgiveness, but some other things, blah, blah, blah. And then we sent them back to Northern Ireland. And about a year later, we brought back a few of them and a wider group of people who had had individual family members killed in the violence. So we had about 18 people, each of whom had an immediate family member killed in their violence. And we're sitting in a room of not such happy folks. The woman, one of the women whose son was killed maybe a few days into the the week her daughter who was there also came up to us the people leading this thing and said you know I have to thank you um you helped give us our mother back that in the 20 years since you know x was killed in this violence she's just been lost in anger and self-pity and when she came back from you guys it's not like she was a happy camper but she was no longer acting the victim and so we were now able to talk to her and she could talk to us and we were able to discuss the past and we were able to talk about the future and so she said I really want to thank Thank you for helping our mother find her way back to us.

33:20And that was pretty profound.

33:26So those are two, in my memory, I'm going to say some pretty serious forgiveness stories. Well, I forgot the second half of the question. no that that that really uh i think was incredible and it was anecdotes and stories so that that answers you asked me something right before it too but i don't remember what that was um it don't matter yeah i can't remember what it was either but it really it reminds me there was There's a book by a hospice worker and she helped, I think it was three or 500 people go through the dying process. And then she wrote a book about the biggest regrets in life. And the number one is just like more time with family and not letting go or living by other people's expectations.

34:30So I think it just, it's just, there is just so many reasons to forgive when you have gone through the grieving process and you are ready. It affects clearly your mental health, but also through that, your physiology and your physical health. And I know, I imagine it is the same type of research, but I know meditation has been proven to change epigenetics, which is related to like longevity and various diseases and cancers and inflammation, which could have contributed to the bodily pain that you just touched on then. but then also relates to the default mode network quiet and of the default mode network which is related to anxiety and depression again contributors of mental and physical health so yeah there's just there's so many reasons you do know that neither meditation or forgiveness are like miracle cures for disease yes they they may help with some depression clearly and they do help manage anxiety and they have some effect on blood pressure and functioning of hormones but you know for most people they're not like well you go learn to meditate and you're going to cure all your diseases yeah i mean there's some magical thinking there absolutely what they do also is they minimize some of the ways where we interfere with our healing you know so if we stay angry then the anger starts like collecting so to speak in the same pathways as physical pain so it intensifies it and it makes it much harder to get to the physical pain because we're so pissed off.

36:48If we feel like a victim, we tend not to take good physical care of ourselves, you know? So we're not going to do a lot of the things that are helpful to us. These are wonderful, I mean, wonderful, adjunctive, important things for every human being. um but you know there are um like mindfulness has a salutary effect on most things but again you know if you have a broken leg you don't go to a mindfulness teacher

37:32yeah so that we don't want to we don't want to undervalue the doctor or medicine of course But they all operate on that sense of hyper arousal and threat that most of us have way too amped up, way too amped up. And in particular, if we've been in pain or we've been mistreated, then we get hypersensitive and we often misperceive our world because we're bitter. and they work on those qualities and they also just lower our general sense of arousal. So they will help with inflammation. They will help with the experience of pain. They harmonize the nervous system. I mean, you do all sorts of good things.

38:29I love that. Yeah. And good to highlight. This is part of a bigger picture of health, both mental and physical question so in the book you outlined that the nine the nine steps to to forgiveness so yeah i'd love to to dive into into that i mean you'll you'll have to pardon me if i don't always remember them in order it's been a while since i read my book i mean we should be We're talking maybe years. But the first step and the second step I brought up at least tangentially, one is forgiveness is for me. it's it's for my healing my releasing my growth my peace it it may help a lot of other people and it does but I do it to free myself and reduce my burden second forgiveness is about now it's not about the past.

39:40We forgive because right now we want to stop doing the behaviors that keep us tied to the past. That's the forgiveness experience. We are relinquishing the negative habits that keep us recreating the past over and over and over. So complaining is a negative habit. bitterness is a may is a negative habit mistrust is a negative habit they all can come from being badly hurt but if right now I'm saying you know I don't trust you because my dad hit me that's ridiculous you know it's like whatever dad did doesn't have anything to do with what the person in front of you is going to do unless you bring a prejudice with you.

40:37So at the moment that you're working on it now, that's where forgiveness takes place right now so that we can be at peace with our life right now. It's a presence-centered mindfulness thing. No matter when it happened, And right now is the only time I can address this. That's all I got is right now. The third part of forgiveness is it doesn't mean you have to reconcile with the offender. I mean, you can, but sometimes they're dead. So you're going to have a tough time reconciling with a dead person. Sometimes they don't want to reconcile with you. You know, like, screw you, buddy. you know you can still forgive them so it doesn't mean that you have to rejoin or improve a relationship what it means is that you clean your mind and heart of your bitterness and self-pity and obstacle to growth you don't they may or not benefit from it it would be good if they do but they don't have to.

41:54Forgiveness doesn't mean you can't take somebody to court or sue them or have them arrested. Those are not the same. They're like one is internal, the other is justice. Forgiveness does not mean that, again, I mentioned this, you're not making something okay. You're just saying that the lack of it being okay is not going to ruin my life. that is totally different. I mean, there's a lot of things that are not okay in this world. Right now, you and I are sitting in our very comfortable homes with plenty to eat and nice weather, and there's a couple of hundred thousand people who are starving. That's not okay, but we're still going on with our life you know it's like and and the last thing is um forgiveness doesn't mean you forget you don't forgive and forget you you remember differently and what a key distinction that is so there are some really serious misconceptions that people have about forgiveness and those need to be dealt with you know like the it's now it's for you and it's not these things those are kind of the prerequisites of forgiveness the rest of the steps are some degree or other of well once you recognize that it's now and I don't know if this is step four or step five, I can't remember, is you have to calm down.