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attempting genocide are appalling, etc. Such issues and religion-based terrorism
raise ethical questions about how to make peace and to deal with the perpetrators.
The decline of organized religion may also have raised the general public’s concern
with moral issues. There is a rising interest in psychology and the fantastic
technology that enables scientists to see the brain at work. Two or three groups of
psychologists are researching ways to facilitate forgiveness. Book publishers are
always looking for “hot new topics.” Maybe the time for forgiveness has arrived.
Techniques for facilitating forgiveness
Wade and Worthington (2005) have done a remarkable review of the two most
common treatment procedures for helping a patient forgive a person who has hurt
them. Most of the research used by these authors involved treatment in groups but
the techniques used are similar to what most individual therapists would recommend
to their clients for reducing anger and grudges. The group treatments were several
weeks long and consisted of 20 or so exercises or techniques. Many of the methods
were developed or revised by two groups of psychologists headed by Enright and
Fitzgibbons (2000) and Worthington (2001). Although the two groups take a
somewhat different approach, their groups do rather similar things. I’ll give a brief
overview of the 15-20 weeks of group activities and later we will discuss some of the
major controversies among the researchers.
Six group activities used by both Enright and Worthington’s groups of researchers:
1.
Defining forgiveness. It is important that the patients understand the
differences between forgiveness and reconciliation, forgetting, and from
condoning the perpetrator’s behavior.
2.
Remembering the hurtful/abusive experience…”telling your story.” Describe
the hurts, the unfairness, the bitterness, and the degrading aspects done to
you in the situation. Also, your feelings—fears, rage, resentment of what was
happening—and how appropriate you think your feelings were.
3.
Practice empathizing with the person who hurt you. Understand how they saw
the situation, their motivations and feelings, and try to understand them in
light of their history and see them as an ordinary human as much as possible.
4.
Encouraging the victim to remember times in their lives when they may have
hurt someone. Note any similarity between how they were hurt and how they
had hurt someone else. Do the two of you have similar past experiences?
5.
Make a list of the potential advantages of forgiving someone of something. If
you are willing to do so at this point, make a commitment to trying to forgive
them.
6.
Try reducing your anger-generating fantasies of being hurt or offended…the
more pain you feel, the more anger you store up. And try giving up your
daydreams of getting revenge. Replace “you-were-awful” thoughts with
stories of people who weathered hard times and forgave the people who were
mean to them.
This extensive meta-analysis of several possible steps in forgiving (as described
above) generally provides moderate empirical support for using these methods to
help people forgive. Much more research is needed, however. For example, the
relative effectiveness of building empathy vs. making a commitment to forgive needs
to be studied. While clinicians have several such procedures that might help
forgivers, very little research has been done comparing specific methods for specific
hurts. Likewise, little is known yet about which methods of teaching these self-help
skills work best. Nor do we know the characteristics of therapists who are best suited
