Psychotherapy often explores family dynamics, unresolved trauma, developmental issues, and the unconscious conflicts that interfere with a client’s ability to optimally cope. Psychotherapy is practiced in many forms with many underlying theories of how change occurs. Self-knowledge and key insights can often unravel unhealthy patterns from the past. Disputing irrational thoughts can help clients reduce their emotional disturbance. And clients can increase their social-emotional IQ through therapeutic work.
As a clinical social worker (Jed) and a psychologist (Fred) with over 30 years of experience each, we both use all these different techniques in some form or another in our work. However, we have consistently found that these tools are insufficient without including forgiveness in the therapeutic mix.
Today, because of the addition of forgiveness to our work, we approach our clinical practices differently than we used to. For me, Jed, my introduction to Fred Luskin’s work with the Stanford Forgiveness Project upended my thinking about psychotherapy. Forgiveness, I learned, may be the final step in the journey of emotional healing. My practice of forgiveness changed my life personally and then professionally. I have now been teaching forgiveness and using it in my therapy for over 20 years.
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While neither of us nor our clients can be fully protected against pain and loss, we can learn and teach the tools of forgiveness and choose to not lose our love and joy into the painful vortex of unresolved grievance. Here is what we have learned about guiding clients along the journey to forgiveness.
What is forgiveness in therapy?
In our experience, many therapists are unsure what forgiveness is and is not. They do not know that you do not forgive and forget; you remember differently. They do not recognize that reconciliation is about the relationship, while forgiveness is about releasing negative feelings, thoughts, and behaviors.
Making peace with our actual lived lives is the essential goal of forgiveness and, we aver, of psychotherapy. When we let go of resentment and blame, we have started the forgiveness process.
The powerful news for therapy is that forgiveness does not require an apology or even an acknowledgment of wrongdoing from the offender. Nor does it require reconciliation with an unrepentant offender. It does not condone past mistreatment, nor does it deny angry feelings. Forgiveness is simply the ability to release bad feelings and thoughts connected to a grievance and choose peace instead. Most therapists and clients can learn the skills of forgiveness if they are willing to try.
The multiple studies by the Stanford Forgiveness Project and others find that forgiveness lessens the negative hold grievances have on our physical and emotional well-being.
The Forgive for Good method that Fred developed began as his doctoral dissertation from Stanford. The methodology employs a combination of cognitive-behavioral, guided imagery, mindfulness, positive emotion, and narrative exercises. Our clients learn to locate their grievance, identify the associated feelings, challenge their distorted thinking, reduce the stress of rumination, use gratitude to cultivate positive emotion, and move from grievance to forgiveness.
How to guide clients in forgiving
We both believe in and have seen the therapeutic value of forgiveness. However, we do not insist upon it with our clients in a one-size-fits-all way.
We believe there are three pre-conditions that should be met before forgiveness is actively pursued. First, the client must have begun to experience the stages involved in grief, such as denial, bargaining, depression, and anger. Often the client has relied on either anger or loss and sadness, and their learning from the experience is incomplete.
Second, the client must have explored the details of the painful experience and be able to describe what happened and the actual harm they have experienced. That is different from “my father was an abusive asshole.” And third, the client needs to get support from telling their story to at least a couple of trusted people. The therapist can be one of those trusted listeners.
In our work, once the client can clearly identify how they were hurt, identify what the ongoing consequences of the hurt are, share their wounding with a couple of trusted people, and discuss their experience without significant defensiveness or escalating emotionality, they are ready to proceed with the transformative work of forgiveness.
What does that work look like? We highlight the need to grieve what they have lost and explain that forgiveness is the full resolution of grief. We affirm that grief can be of lost dreams, as well as relationships derailed or a dimming of their sense of efficacy in the world. This work begins the unpacking of what we call the grievance story, which is our term for the story the client tells themselves that locks into place their sense of victimization and blame.
The therapeutic focus subtlety shifts from an emphasis on the past to how they are creating their present experience with a vision of the future. Their overuse of blame, which characterized the grievance story, shifts to what the client wants to create positively in their life and how they can realize this forward-looking goal. As an example, one of Fred’s clients began to shift his story from rumination on past heartbreak to learning how to deal more effectively with disappointment in romance.
To us, forgiveness looks forward to present and future, while grievance looks back to a painful and helpless past. Clients do not like what happened and somehow expect the past and other people’s past actions to be different, even though that is impossible. Once the client has explored the past and recognized that impossibility, we encourage them to let their way of holding the past go.
If the client continues to tense up physically or becomes upset and defensive when they discuss a grievance years after they were hurt, we compassionately suggest that they are unconsciously utilizing a pattern that keeps them in the helpless role of victim. Their grievance story has become so familiar that they mistake it for the only true way their story can be told. We help them to see the continued suffering they endure as they cling to their grievance story. We share the famous question posited by Dr. Phil and often ask, “How’s that working for you?”
Through the use of gratitude practice and focusing on positive emotions, our clients experience moments of peace when their grievance is not ruining anything. We remind them that it is only in the present they can actually make peace with their past. We suggest that the best revenge is simply a life well-lived. This present-centered peacefulness is often the tipping point for the therapist as they help the client understand how good it feels in the present moment to forgive.
Ultimately, the grievance story shifts into a forgiveness story that looks to the future instead of the past, is driven by positive intentions rather than recitation of harm, and centers the client to take responsibility for their current coping.
Allowing feelings of compassion
Harry was a client who had been estranged from his father for a decade. When he came into therapy, his father had terminal cancer. His dad was an alcoholic who went on drinking binges that left Harry terrified and with no sense of a safe home. Harry severed his relationship with his father as a young adult and credits this decision for the personal and professional success he enjoys today.
Coming to therapy, to Harry’s surprise, he was feeling some sympathy toward his father. He tried hard to push away those feelings by reminding himself of the brutality he suffered as a child. Tenderness forced him to examine his life’s narrative. If Harry felt bad for his dad, did it mean that he (Harry) had been too harsh? Did it mean that Harry was wrong about his dad? Ultimately, Harry feared softening up toward his father.
“Why can’t you forgive him, Harry?” Jed asked. “This is a common query we use in this work. The question does not suggest your dad was not brutal to you in your youth, nor does it suggest his treatment of you was OK. The question offers you a chance to let go of some negative feelings toward him that maybe you do not need any more. Maybe you are afraid to let down your guard, so you hang on to your hurt and anger. Maybe instead of holding on to past feelings, you can get comfortable with feeling safe now. Forgiveness is for you, not your dad.”
Harry responded, “Yes, but my whole adult life I survived by making him the enemy. If I feel sympathy for him, does not that make me a fool?”
“Not at all,” Jed said. “It means you are emotionally nimble enough to access a wide range of feelings for your dad. You stopped taking his crap a long time ago. It is not weakness to now feel healthy compassion for a dying man.”
Harry was able to have an experience of peace when he opened his heart to his father even for a moment. We know that forgiveness is not a one-and-done experience. Clients tend to default back to their grievance and their negative feelings when they are afraid. That is to be expected; it is useful to clients to not lose their protection. We teach them to redirect their attention to the safety they presently enjoy, the gratitude for all that they have, the improved understanding of their faulty assumptions, and their new story as they work to deepen their experience of forgiveness. Clients are taught that forgiveness requires practice.
When we work with clients, we keep our radar up for where their warmth and tenderness lie. Once they soften into love and empathy, the tide shifts. Another useful practice is to help clients find compassion for their suffering rather than an enemy to blame. Harry allowed himself to feel the vulnerability of being a child with a rejecting parent, and as soon as he did that, his dad was less important in the story. This self-compassion is part of the turning from the past to the present that forgiveness embodies.
Finding moments of forgiveness
We find that clients get so accustomed to the negative feelings that emanate from their grievance that they do not consider that it is possible to feel any other way. Their quest is often oriented around how to perfect their protest against past mistreatment. What we call the grievance story is the well-articulated protest against what actually happened. Letting go of their grievance is frightening because they have often built an identity around it.
We often use simple cognitive disputation to query about whether or not life should have unfolded differently.
For example, Sally’s first husband had an affair when their children were very young. They divorced and both have since remarried. Sally was so hurt by the betrayal that the very mention of her ex’s name by her children brings on a grimace and snarky comment from her. Recently, her son said he avoids talking to her about his dad sometimes to avoid his mother’s disdainful reaction.
Jed asked Sally, “How does your disdainful reaction further your life today, Sally? What is it costing you?”
“Well, it costs me a lot when I think of the burden it places on my kids,” Sally responded. “But my humiliation was so deep at the time of the affair that I formed a hateful habit towards him.”
“He broke a rule you had no power to enforce,” Jed replied. “That hurts, but you cannot heal when you default back to the affair every time you hear his name. Tell me something positive about him. Something that makes you feel tenderness even though he hurt you.”
Sally responded, “He is a good father. He has always been there for the kids, and he supports me as a parent most of the time. I remember how devastated he was when my daughter was very sick years ago.”
“By saying this, Sally, you just experienced a moment of forgiveness,” Jed said. “He hurt you a long time ago. But that hurt need not define you today. You can be grateful for the love you share for your children. You can now change the story you are telling about your ex and the children you share.”
If a client cannot come to identify some positive emotion toward their offender, we often use guided imagery. We take the focus off the offender and ask the client to picture someone they purely love. Focusing on this loving image will in the present short-circuit the negativity they experience toward the offender. It provides a reminder that they have some control over their feelings and choice as to what feeling states they wish to experience. Then we use those generated positive feelings to help clients create alternatives to their grievance story and their habitual negativity.
Forgiveness ultimately is a change in story. Forgiveness amends the grievance story to remind us of the heroic choice to forgive and move ahead. The bottom line—and most important to remember—is that forgiveness means to remember the past differently, not to forget that it happened.
