Why It Hurts to Hold a Grudge — and How to Let Go with Dr. Fred Luskin

0:06Pushkin.

0:12Hey, Happiness Lab listeners. It's finally spring, a season that's all about renewal and new beginnings. And of course, spring cleaning. As the weather gets a little warmer, we naturally get the itch to begin rejuvenating. This is the time of year when we say yes to clearing out our closets and refreshing our homes. It does feel great to freshen up our physical spaces, but could we take a similar approach to refreshing our well-being? Could we turn that spring cleaning urge towards pruning our junky habits or sweeping out our negative thought patterns? We usually think of January 1st and the start of the new year as the time for goals like these, but studies have shown that the beginning of spring is also a great time for a happiness restart.

0:55Take one of my favorite studies by my friend, the psychologist Katie Milkman. She recruited a group of people who said they had a personal goal that they'd been putting off for a while. She then offered them the chance to receive a formal reminder that it was finally time to get started. Half the participants were offered this formal reminder on some random day of the year. But the other half was offered that reminder on a day that felt like a new beginning. The first day of spring. What did Katie find? while more than three times as many people wanted to tackle their goal on the first day of spring rather than on some random day.

1:27I love these results because they show that our minds are always on the lookout for what Katie calls temporal fresh starts, those special moments during the year when our motivation to make positive changes gets a boost. So in this new season of the Happiness Lab, we'll be harnessing the motivational power of springtime. We're going to apply the spring cleaning energy that we take to our closets to all the stuff that's cluttering up our minds. Over the next few episodes, we'll be exploring how you can freshen up your happiness strategies, tidy up your busy schedules, and purge all your harmful beliefs.

2:00And in honor of true spring cleaning, we'll be doing a bit of our own closet refresh as we go back into the Happiness Lab archive to find old school episodes and insights that you might have missed. And in this first episode of our new spring cleaning season, I'm going to recommend that you start out by airing out your resentments. Today, we're going to hear about the mental cleansing power of forgiveness, right after The Happiness Lab returns from these quick words from our sponsors.

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4:58Grievances. They're pretty much part of human nature. When people hurt us or say mean stuff, the pain they cause tends to stick around. often for a long while. We might even spend years feeling angry or betrayed. But in the spirit of spring cleaning our happiness, what if you chose to drop each and every one of your painful grievances through the power of forgiveness? Luckily, we have just the guest to help you get started on that journey. Well, hi, I'm Fred. I direct the Stanford Forgiveness Projects, and I taught at Stanford for decades. Fred is Dr. Fred Luskin, a psychologist and counselor who spent decades studying the psychological effects of forgiveness.

5:39Fred studies people who've survived bitter relationship breakdowns, physical assaults, and violent conflicts, as well as people who've had the usual tiny sorts of fights with their neighbors or coworkers. And in all these cases, he finds that forgiveness can be an unexpected path to peace. But Fred's not just a scholar of forgiveness. He's also experienced the positive effects of this practice firsthand. It's often said that all research is me-search. Fred admits that this adage is definitely true in his case. A very close friend betrayed and abandoned me. Oh, I'm so sorry. I simply did not have the skills to cope with it.

6:19I developed an agitated depression. I kept busy. I moved. I became so much less hopeful. I had a wife at that time and a child and I could no longer see the beauty of that. And I functioned. I mean, I was in the world that was working, but not well. One day my wife came to me and she said, Fred, I love you. I just like you less. And it was a kick in the ass. And I started to look at what the hell was I doing, ruining years. and I stumbled upon two very simple things. One, I could be grateful for what I had or complain about what I don't. And second, I had been trained as a cognitive therapist, but I didn't use it on myself until that moment.

7:11And those two things helped me let go and develop the Stanford Forgiveness Project. And what's the Stanford Forgiveness Project? I did my dissertation on forgiveness. We got a big grant from the Templeton people to research forgiveness. I did work in Columbia and Sierra Leone. We brought people from Northern Ireland, I mean, just all over the place. because I'm at Stanford and Stanford has such a good name. My work was publicized in a way that I had an opportunity to talk about forgiveness literally all over the world. And now I'm back again at the very end of my career trying to do a little more research to show that this stuff has value.

8:00To prepare for my interview with Fred, I read up on the Stanford Forgiveness Project and all of Fred's work with people who were caught up in the brutal conflicts in Northern Ireland. I found one story particularly moving. It involved a woman named Patricia McGee. Patricia's brother was beaten to death in the early 90s. His killers were caught, but soon freed from jail. They wound up living not too far from Patricia's home. Could you imagine having your brother's murderers living up the street from you, just going about their daily life as if nothing had happened? That level of perceived injustice took a huge psychological toll on Patrician.

8:35She felt isolated and depressed. She couldn't even talk about the situation without falling apart. At first, she was reluctant to join Fred's forgiveness class. She feared having to talk about her brother's killers. But that's not what Fred's program required. In class, Patrician met other Irish women who'd also lost loved ones to violence. And together, they worked through their feelings. Afterwards, Fred measured the women's levels of depression, anger, and perceived stress. He also surveyed the degree of pain they felt over their loss. He found that the women's scores improved dramatically, and they weren't just feeling better.

9:11They reported having fewer headaches, less back pain, and even better sleep. Patricia was initially worried about the act of forgiveness, but the process of airing out her pain transformed her. She was even able to talk about her brother without being reduced to tears. Examples like these are so powerful. But what does Fred's process entail? What's the kind of forgiveness Fred is recommending that we all pursue? There's a couple of definitions of forgiveness. One more Webster, like, you know, to give up resentment and to forswear, holding on to bitterness. Our definition is making peace with the word no.

9:53And this came from literally years of working with so many people and hearing so much suffering and so much angst that we tried to look for what was the common denominator of all the suffering that we heard. And what we came to with everyone there was saying, I didn't get something I wanted. And sometimes what I wanted, I wanted desperately. And I got no. And I am unwilling to let go of that no to make peace. I am going to complain till hell freezes over that I deserved a yes. We watched and realized that that was kind of a unifying thing around all the variety of stories and complaints that we heard.

10:51So my evolution of that is that forgiveness I now define as simply being at peace with your life. Right now, right here, in total, I can be okay. I think the misconception we have about forgiveness is that you have to connect with the person that you're forgiving. Can we have forgiveness without that moment of reconciliation with the person that heard of. The way we went through that was very simple. Can you forgive a dead person? And the answer is yes. So that's the answer to your question. You can be married. Your partner can have an affair. You can reconcile. And you can go home to them every day and hate them.

11:38Or they can have an affair. You can completely release them from blame and bitterness. You can open your heart back up to life and tell them we're done. So you can have complete forgiveness with no reconciliation. They're not the same concept. I've also heard you talk about how forgiveness is about a change in your story. What do you mean by that? That's another, I guess, learned clinical kind of thing. I mean, I started so long ago as a boring academic, and I had these ideas about what forgiveness was and wasn't, and then talking to like zillions of people who had horrible things happen and others who got bent out of shape because someone had built a fence an inch and a half onto their property line.

12:35And what I came to see that they actually brought was not what happened, but their story. They brought a story about forgiveness or unforgiveness. And what we were trying to do was help them create a different story. So many people came into forgiveness with this sense of you forgive and forget. Mm-hmm. What we understood was you forgive by remembering differently. You don't forget. You can't forget. We've, I've dealt with many, many people who have had family members murdered or, you know, people shocked by 10-year-olds with machine guns. You don't forget. But if you're lucky and good, you can remember it differently.

13:26You reframe it enough and you quiet down your arousal so that you tell a different story and you believe a different story. I love that you brought up this idea that forgiveness isn't forgetting because I think that's a misconception that people have, right? That you need to forget the wrong or maybe trust the person. Can I tell you something that you may find peculiar? At this point, if I work with people, groups, individuals, at least a third of what we do is helping them understand what forgiveness is and is not. But there is so much wrong understanding and even so much hostility. Yeah. It almost feels like sometimes I hear this idea that forgiveness is for suckers.

14:14Yeah. It's weak. It's weird. Why is that wrong? Explain why that's wrong to the listeners. Well, if you view forgiveness as condoning bad behavior, then it seems weak. But if you view forgiveness, and I'll give you two simple streams around this. One is fully grieving your wounds so that at the end of the grieving process, you can release that suffering. Then you see that forgiveness is not such a weak thing. It takes real strength to feel the pain of being a human being and releasing that pain when appropriate. That takes real strength. The other thing is, I mean, having been a meditator or even as a therapist for decades, most people don't get better by avoiding pain.

15:12There are a lot of people stuck in perseverative anger and endless resentment. None of them are appropriately feeling it, holding that suffering, knowing that something wrong has happened, and letting go and moving on. That's not weakness. That's brave. That's the right word. It's brave. So when we teach, that's what we do. You're being brave. You're not being weak at all. But it is hard, right? And I think the fact that it's hard means we need to talk about the benefits of forgiveness or maybe what are the bad things that happen when we don't forgive? What's the value of it? Yeah, or so what are the consequences for our mind and our body if we don't forgive?

16:01The first part is just because something is hard, at some level we might benefit from growing up yes and not resisting everything that's hard it's hard in part because one we have untrained minds which do not know how to separate wheat from chaff you know between the chatter and maybe more centered contemplative thinking So anything that asks us to do that is hard. Secondly, forgiveness is hard because we're acknowledging a world where painful things can happen and that we are vulnerable. We are absolutely vulnerable. And so instead of opening to that vulnerability, we create this massive complex of no, stop it, it's wrong, I can't take it, all the distortions.

17:07But it is very hard for a human being to admit that they can't protect themselves or their loved ones from certain things. So that's the hard part. The forgiveness piece of moving through it without coming at the end with bitterness, and maybe even a story that talks about the growth, that leads to less stress. It leads to more hopefulness. We've shown that in our research for people who have been really badly wounded, it leads to less depression. It reduces pain. And that's in part because the pain systems between emotional pain and physical pain, once that becomes chronic, they're joined. So forgiveness is a release.

18:02We stop making our life worse. And so you mentioned in your origin story this kind of awful story of being betrayed. But it seems like you also came to forgiveness for more of a spiritual practice, too. You talk about being an old hippie, and so I want to see how that fits into the forgiveness story. I started the project, but my advisor, he was very helpful because he had decades of contact and I was just a graduate student. We had a discussion as to whether we wanted to do only a secular training or a religious training as well because we didn't know enough. So I went around, I started to talk to religiously oriented people, and they were almost impossible to engage with because they were so rigid on their religion being like the only religion.

18:54So I would give talks a little bit to Christian places and then say, we like what you do. There's not enough Jesus. And I'd give talks at Buddhist places. And that's great, but there's not enough Buddha. Why are you talking about other people? I went to yoga centers. It was like, wonderful, but yoga says this. And you said that. So we dropped the religious thing pretty quickly. It was like living in the United States now between red states and blue states where there's such a mistrust and such a righteousness. Anyway, I personally and my mentor had a meditation practice when we started and a very simple spiritual belief that there's something essential and unchanging and similar that joins everything.

19:48I don't teach that directly, but it informs how they see things. I found Fred's point about religion really interesting. Many religious faiths recommend that their followers practice forgiveness. But hardly any of us think deeply about what that act really means. After the break, Fred will share some examples of real-world forgiveness. He'll also give us some tips on how we can start forgiving right away. The Happiness Lab will be right back.

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24:20Dr. Fred Luskin has run workshops as part of the Stanford Forgiveness Project for decades. He says it takes quite a mind shift to truly understand what forgiveness entails and the benefits it can offer us. But he does have a few practical tips for getting there. One is start small. Practice on your own before you do anything. Like when you're in the shower, just talk. Can I forgive them? What might that look like? What would that mean? And third, the best place to start is where it really matters with people who you love and love you. Because that's the most important work you have to do is to build your relationships and maintain them.

25:04And there's good research that forgiveness is at the heart of marriage, maintaining itself. Okay, that's the first stream. The second is the practices are very easy. Probably the first and most important practice is gratitude. If you can not just look at what the world didn't give you, but balance it with what the world did give you, then maybe you can see things more clearly. So that's one. Second is some kind of cognitive piece. The simplest is just to repeat to yourself the Rolling Stones, I can't always get what I want. I mean that. As simple as you can make it, I can't always get what I want.

25:52Third is what we talked about before. Simply try out different stories. One of the ways I kept myself miserable was telling the same story over and over and over and over. And then you think it's like you're Moses carrying up the tablets rather than just a cranky pain in the butt. And the fourth piece is in understanding that forgiveness is about to pass or the grievance is about to pass. Your life is in the present. So you need to have more of your stories, your focus, your awareness on your present and creating a future than about what did or didn't go right in the past. Those are four incredibly simple practices.

26:44When we combine that with what forgiveness is and isn't, many people take that and make improvement. You've also talked about how forgiveness is embodied, like using the breath to forgive. Oh, absolutely. So what are some strategies we can pick up on there? I mean, I'm sure we're in alignment with this, considering what you teach and what I teach. It's hard to fully separate the mind and the body, whatever the soul is, our emotions. You know, there's a brain and the gut. We don't have accurate words to understand all the linkages. But we know that there is a link between mind and body and between thoughts and emotions.

27:30So the two things that we have found really help people to forgive is to remind them that when you're upset, calm down. Well, calm down for at least me had two pieces to it. One is the simplest. Anchor in your center. Take a couple of breaths. Activate a different thing than the flight or flight response. And learn some ability to manage your breathing. Second is touch something positive, love, awe, kindness, goodness, whatever, and hold it. Just hold it inside. And when you practice that, as your body arouses, you can counter condition the stress response. So it's simple, but that's often how we start.

28:21So let me tell you one story about that. We brought men and women from Northern Ireland who had family members murdered in their violence. We brought Catholics and Protestants. and they came and about, I don't know how long into it, they were telling their story and we took a break and we brought them over to the window at one of the buildings at Stanford on the fifth floor. And these people, you know, they had all had horrible things and they had just flown in from Belfast. And what we had them do is open their arms, pulled all the windows open and said, feel the sun's rays and welcome it. Welcome that warmth.