Can you forgive someone who cut you off in traffic and angrily flipped you off? A spouse or lover who cheated on you? How about someone who killed a close family member?
Some transgressions, of course, are easier to forgive than others. But regardless of the issue, holding on to feelings of resentment, anger and maybe even a thirst for vengeance is bad for your mental health, research shows. For example, a 2016 study of 332 adults between the ages of 16 and 79 showed that increases in forgiveness were associated with reductions in perceived stress and improved mental health over the five-week study period. Findings were published in the Annals of Behavioral Medicine.
Other studies reinforce the idea that being forgiving has positive physiological effects. It’s typically associated with reduced cardiovascular health problems, including a lower heart rate, improved blood pressure and reduced cholesterol, according to a 2016 meta-analysis published in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication. Plus, there are links between forgiveness and better sleep quality, which has a positive effect on health. Forgiveness is also linked to strengthened immunity among HIV-positive patients, researchers have found. And there’s a connection between forgiveness and living longer.
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Though the health benefits of being forgiving are well-established, living that way can be a challenge, particularly if someone’s done something terrible to you or someone you love, says Loren Toussaint, a professor in the department of psychology at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. “The tendency to want to condemn someone who’s wronged you or a loved one is such a strong instinct,” Toussaint says. “If someone’s wronged you and you want revenge, that doesn’t make you a bad person. It makes you human and normal. But you don’t want [those feelings] to turn into a festering wound.”
Forgiving someone who’s wronged you or someone you care about is tough, Toussaint acknowledges. But, he adds, there are myriad examples that show forgiveness is possible in the most extreme circumstances. For example, in June 2015, during a bond hearing for Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who shot and killed nine black parishioners inside a South Carolina church, several relatives of the victims told Roof they forgave him. “I forgive you,” Nadine Collier, the daughter of 70-year-old victim Ethel Lance, said to Roof during the court hearing, according to news reports. “You took something very precious from me. I will never talk to her again. I will never, ever hold her again. But I forgive you. And have mercy on your soul.”
In her recently released book, “The Four Sacred Gifts: Indigenous Wisdom for Modern Times,” Anita Sanchez wrote about the murder of her father in Missouri in 1967, when she was 13. A white man killed her Mexican-American father, mistaking him for a black man he’d argued with earlier that day, she says in an interview with U.S. News. Sanchez’s challenge was complicated by the fact that her father was sexually abusing her, she says. She had to find a way to forgive the killer, her father — and herself, for having wished her father dead. “Though it took years, I discovered that I needed to listen to the yearning in my heart to be free of the suffocating anger and pain that I felt,” Sanchez says.
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Reaching a place of forgiveness can be challenging. Experts recommend these strategies:
1. Drop your emotional baggage and live in the present. “We often carry around our own emotional ‘stuff,’ [which includes] brooding over the ‘who’, ‘what’ and ‘when’ of a mistake, guessing at the ‘why’ and constantly evaluating the person who did us wrong,” says Susan Smith Kuczmarski, a Chicago-based leadership consultant and author of the book “Becoming a Happy Family: Pathways to the Family Soul.” Instead of brooding over something someone did to you, practice gratitude, realize you make mistakes, too, and practice patience with others, she says.
2. Don’t keep score. Keeping track of who’s wronged you is counterproductive, Toussaint says. “Remember, we’re all equally human, we all should be equally loved and we’re all flawed,” he says. Keeping a scorecard of the ways and times people have treated you unfairly only hurts you. “It’s the one place in life where having a zero on your scorecard means you won,” he says. “Otherwise, you’re keeping score of all these negative experiences, and that’s a losing formula.”
3. Visualize a conversation with the person who harmed you. While alone in a room, imagine you’re facing whoever harmed you or a loved one, advises Jim Curtis, author of “The Stimulati Experience: 9 Skills for Getting Past Pain, Setbacks, and Trauma to Ignite Health and Happiness.” “Talk as if you were talking to this person,” he says. “This works even if the person has passed away. Repeat: ‘I understand you are at a place in your life that allows you to mistreat or offend me. I understand this is more a reflection of you than me. Although your actions have given me more knowledge of who you are and where you are in life, I don’t hold resentment. I release my anger and resentment knowing I will be stronger and more free.'”
4. Don’t always be quick to forgive. There are times when forgiving quickly and easily may be counterproductive, says Bianca Wolf, who teaches a course called “Communicating Forgiveness and Revenge” at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington, where she’s the chair of the department of communication studies. For example, if a spouse or significant other cheats on you, and you forgive too quickly, “it puts you in a position of being re-victimized,” Wolf says. Too-quick forgiveness can undermine your efforts to make it clear to your spouse or significant other that his or her behavior was unacceptable and has to change, she says. Research suggests specific tasks that the injured person can work through with his or her significant other, which aren’t tied to any specific timeline; some people may need to work harder than others and repeat one or more steps, she says. These steps include confronting the transgression, ideally through open discussion of the hurtful event and how it was discovered; managing emotions and working to reduce negative feelings that can have long-term consequences; granting forgiveness with acknowledgments by both parties of the hurt that was inflicted; obtaining reassurances of changed behavior; and renegotiating the relationship and working toward restoring a “moral order” in the partnership, Wolf says. It’s important to keep in mind that “reconciliation may or may not be possible,” she says. “Forgiveness is the decision to let go of negative feelings and behavior toward someone who hurt you. Reconciliation is about the relationship and whether you’re going to continue that relationship following forgiveness or not.”
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5. Take responsibility. It’s easy to point fingers at someone you believe has wronged you, like a significant other who dumps you with seemingly little or no warning, says April Masini, who provides relationship advice on her “Ask April” online advice forum. “Ask yourself what your contribution to the relationship was, and what your part in the break-up was,” she says. “Rarely is a break-up because of one person. More likely, it’s because of an incompatibility that you either ignored or thought you could bridge. And couldn’t. When you realize the blame you’re attributing to an ex doesn’t belong to him or her, it’s easy to forgive.”
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You Should Be Forgiving, for Your Own Health originally appeared on usnews.com
