Nine Steps to Forgiveness

1. Know exactly how you feel about what happened, and be able to articulate what about the situation is not okay. Then, tell a trusted couple of people about your experience. 2. Make a commitment to yourself to do what you have to do to feel better. Forgiveness is for you and not for anyone else. 3. Forgiveness does not necessarily mean reconciliation with the person that upset you, or condoning of their action. What you are after is to find peace. 4. Get the right perspective on what is happening. Recognize that your primary distress is coming from the hurt feelings, thoughts, and physical upset you are suffering now, not what offended you or hurt you two minutes— or 10 years — ago. 5. At the moment you feel upset, practice a simple stress-management technique to soothe your body’s flight- or-fight response. 6. Give up expecting things from other people, or your life, that they do not choose to give you. Recognize the unenforceable rules you have for your health or how you or other people must behave. Remind yourself that you can hope for health, love, friendship, and prosperity, and work hard to get them. 7. Put your energy into looking for another way to get your positive goals met than through the experience that has hurt you. 8. Remember that a life well lived is your best revenge. Instead of focusing on your wounded feelings, and thereby giving the person who caused you pain power over you, learn to look for the love, beauty, and kindness around you. 9.Amend your grievance story to remind you of the heroic choice to forgive.

SOURCE:www.learningtoforgive.com

got people in, the results were not that different. [In an early study,] we were looking for people who wanted to forgive and our response was 90-percent female. And then we changed the recruitment [language to say,] “Looking for peo- ple who have a grudge”—and all of a sudden, all these men showed up.

Can you talk a little bit about stress and forgiveness and how they interact with each other? That’s the way that I became well known in teaching this —I simply reminded people of this: You’re walking down the street, you’re having a fine day. And then you think, “I hate my ex-wife,” out of nowhere, and you send a jolt of stress into your body. Your ex-wife didn’t do anything to you. You did it. Now, if you do that 10 times a day, you could have a really bad day—and still you never saw your ex-wife. So,

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the key is to realize that what goes through your mind—or what you pay attention to—triggers stress or triggers calm- ness. And you can learn to have more control over that. The only caveat is when really painful things happen; you

have to grieve before you can forgive. And you have to feel the pain. So, if somebody murders your child—as horren- dous as that is—we made sure that we didn’t take anybody into any of our trainings until two years minimum after something like that happens.

Your recent work has applied your research to business settings. We’re showing that if you make forgiveness and stress management—the two things that I do—an absolutely essential component of emotional-competence training, we can help people dramatically.We’ve shown 20-plus-percent decreases in stress and 20-plus-percent increases in sales.

Speaking of business, I know a lot of Americans feel very angry and betrayed byWall Street. Do you have any suggestions for how people can work through that? It’s the same as any form of mental health. One, say your piece, talk, share your opinion. Two, do what you can.Write letters, vote for somebody, march, demonstrate, organize. Three, don’t take things so personally, so that you are too outraged. Four, count your blessings, so you put things in per- spective. And five, try not to create a story that makes you a victim. Tell a story that has you doing your best or making the best progress you can, but don’t label yourself or treat yourself as a victim, so you don’t feel so helpless. Those are very simple things that anybody can do. I mean

they’re just normal mental-health things that almost nobody follows, and then by not following them, they become stuck in anger and grievances.

Is there one of those nine steps that is the biggest hurdle for people? That trips most people up? The thing that trips most people up is telling a story that presents themselves as helpless victims.

What is your ideal vision of how you’d like to see your research and methodology applied? That it be used preventatively. I’mteaching a couple of classes now at Stanford on emotional well-being—a posi- tive psychology class and a class called “Mind, Body, and Spirit.” They both teach positive mental-health strategies as prevention, as a general strategy for how to deal with life, and to help people become more resilient. People get upset about traffic and their partner leaving the window open. The big things don’t happen that often. But if you can min- imize the little things, and also teach yourself how to deal with it, then when the bigger things come, you already have some skills.

Barbara Palmer is a senior editor of Convene.

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