I’ve always been taught to forgive. But why? Forgiving someone else who has hurt us is hard. It is stretching and humbling. For the past month, I have been thinking and studying a lot about forgiving. I have come to understand that forgiving is so much better than holding on to the hurt and pain of anger, no matter how terrible the offense. During her famous “Lifeclass,” Oprah Winfrey quoted a guest on her show who said, “Forgiveness is giving up the hope that the past could be any different.” {You can see her say it here.}
I think sometimes our histories with people (or expectations) make forgiveness all the more challenging. But even though forgiving is challenging (to say the least), it is worth it. Forgiveness is releasing anger and allowing love to replace it. Sometimes when I am stressed I realize that I have been holding my breath. When I stop and exhale and inhale again, I feel refreshed. I think forgiveness works in much the same way. When we stop holding on to the grudge and we invite fresh feelings into our hearts, we feel refreshed.
The Science Behind It
Dr. Luskin
Dr. Frederic Luskin, the co-founder of the Stanford Forgiveness Project, says, “When you don’t forgive you release all the chemicals of the stress response. Each time you react, adrenaline, cortisol, and norepinephrine enter the body. When it’s a chronic grudge, you could think about it twenty times a day, and those chemicals limit creativity, they limit problem-solving. Cortisol and norepinephrine cause your brain to enter what we call ‘the no-thinking zone,’ and over time, they lead you to feel helpless and like a victim. When you forgive, you wipe all of that clean.”
Dr. Pietrini
In another study, Dr. Pietro Pietrini at the University of Pisa in Italy found that forgiveness seemed to be a sort of painkiller for moral distress. When he presented his research findings in a 2009 conference, he described them as “evidence that forgiveness likely evolved as a way to overcome pain and alleviate suffering, and that even though it involves parts of the brain responsible for reason, it also requires a counterintuitive, and some would argue, irrational choice: ‘You wronged me, but I forgive you, anyway.'”
Dr. Ewin
Dr. Dabney Ewin, a surgeon who specialized in burns, concluded that his patients’ anger often interfered with their ability to heal by preventing them from relaxing and focusing on getting better. He began counseling with his patients to help them to forgive, sometimes using hypnosis to help his patients. “What you’re feeling will affect the healing of your skin, and we want you to put all your energy into healing,” he said.
He would find out what led to their injuries and then he would do hypnosis with them and help them forgive–either themselves or the other person. He would say things like, “You can still pursue damages through an attorney. You’re entitled to be angry, but for now I’m asking you to abandon your entitlement and let it go, to direct your energy toward healing, and turn this over to God or nature or whoever you worship. It’s not up to you to get revenge on yourself or someone else. When you know at a feeling level that you’re letting it go, raise your hand.” He said, “Then I’d shut up, they’d raise their hand, and I’d know that a skin graft was gonna take.”
{The scientific information shared here is from Megan Feldman Bettencourt’s book Triumph of the Heart: Forgiveness in an Unforgiving World. An excellent article summarizing ideas from her book can also be found here.}
Love is Not Earned
Isn’t it fascinating? As I have been thinking about the concept of forgiveness, however, I had a very powerful thought come to my mind. We do not love people because they deserve it. I do not love my children because they have earned my love through some certification process. Instead, I love them because they are my children. For similar reasons, I love my husband and my family members. They do not have to complete a checklist of actions every day in order to earn my love. Forgiveness, I believe, is a form of love.
When we forgive and let go of an offense, we are trading those angry feelings of offense for feelings of love. Obviously I will never love the person who cut me off in traffic or who was rude to be on an airplane more than I love my child, but forgiveness is nonetheless a form of love. As a believer in God, I know that He loves me with a perfect love, even though I am far from deserving such great and infinite love.
Let It Go, Get It Out
When we choose to let go of hurt and offense, we are choosing to progress. We are choosing to move forward, embracing a future and letting go of past negativity. It is liberating. But we have to choose these actions. They do not happen on their own. If we leave them festering or try to ignore them, they will often repress, but not forever.
When I was at girls’ camp one summer, we hiked beside a beautiful stream. Halfway through the hike, we stopped for a lunch break and the leader of the hike told us we could take off our shoes and splash around a little in the shallow water beside the trail. It was a hot, Florida summer day and we all excitedly splashed our feet into the water. While I was walking, I slipped into the clay and a small piece of a stick (just a little thicker than a toothpick and about .25 of an inch long) lodged into the bottom of my heel. It hurt, but I didn’t want to make a scene, so I figured when I couldn’t get it out on my own right then, I’d mess with it again more when we got back to camp. Surely, I thought, it will come out.
Festering
But walking a few more miles back to camp didn’t do me any favors. For the rest of the week I was at camp, I had that little piece of stick lodged into my foot. It hurt, but I could not get it out. In fact, it was hard for me to even really see it because of where it was in my heel. I just kept walking all week, conscious of the annoying little object stuck in my foot, but so distracted by the fun of camp that I didn’t do anything to eliminate my problem.
My family was out of town when camp ended, so I went home with a friend and her mom who had been at camp with us. Fortunately her mom was a nurse. When we got back to their home and I wasn’t distracted by all the fun activities of camp anymore, I realized that my foot really did hurt. I mentioned it to my mom’s friend (after I had cleaned up from camp, of course) and she offered to take a look at it.
She was shocked to see the infected and swollen area on the bottom of my foot and it hurt terribly for her to remove the piece of stick that was now deeply lodged into my heel. The whole time she was working on extracting the stick from my foot (man, it really hurt!), she was reprimanding me for not telling her while we were at camp. She didn’t understand why I’d left that little stick in my foot. As I thought about it I realized I didn’t know why either. Camp would probably have been even more fun if I hadn’t had that annoying pain in my foot the whole time.
Start Healing
So why the gross story about my foot? Because often we do the same thing with offenses. We just leave them there, unresolved, and go about our daily lives. I know I do. We might notice their annoying presence, but we just keep moving along, focusing on other things. When distractions fade, though, and we must face the pain we’ve been carrying with us, the pain is deeper, and removing it becomes all the more difficult. But difficult is not impossible and healing can and will happen. You may not be able to resolve your problems alone–I know I couldn’t get that piece of stick out of my foot without the help of a nurse. There is no shame in seeking help. The deeper the offense, the more time it may take to extract it. The area may have even become infected.
But releasing those feelings allows us to heal–physically and emotionally. We allow joy to replace anger and offense.
