Without forgiveness there is no future

The title of this posting is, I believe, a Desmond Tutu quote… but please don’t quote me on that.

Just by way of a quick recap we are still working through our Happiness Formula (H = S + C + V) and we are currently looking at V i.e. the voluntary variables that will create sustainable change and help us to achieve long lasting happiness. And within the V arena, we have started to explore emotions that are concerned with the past, present and future. This posting continues to focus on the past.

What we now know is that how we feel about the past depends entirely on our memories i.e. how we have chosen to interpret a situation or event. It really is as simple as that. And if we choose to focus on negative memories and wallow in self-pity, it’s only too easy to see where we’ll end up – bitter and twisted and not very pleasant to be around.

However there are some very good reasons why we might hold onto revenge and bitterness. Our natural sense of right and wrong might lead us to believe that it is entirely unjust to forgive. After all, the perpetrator needs catching and punishing, and if you forgive them then by definition you are sticking two fingers up at their victim.

Revenge is sweet as the saying goes. Indeed a study published in Science in August 2004 went some way to explain what they referred to as altruistic punishment. In this study blood flow in volunteers’ brains was measured using positron emission tomography (PET), whilst they participated in a game of exchanging money. If one player made a selfish choice instead of a mutually beneficial one, another player could choose to penalise them.

What was interesting was that the majority of players elected to impose a penalty even when it cost them some of their own money. And when they did so, the researchers found that a specific region of the brain was activated known as the dorsal striatum. Previous research had shown that this region was involved in enjoyment or satisfaction.

Also brain scans showed a correlation between a person’s brain activity and how much punishment they chose to mete out at their own personal cost. Individuals with stronger activations were more willing to incur greater costs in order to punish someone else.

So the activation of the dorsal striatum seems to reflects some sort of anticipated satisfaction from punishing those who break social norms. Now this is all very interesting but it doesn’t really teach us how to let go and forgive; instead it seems that the very act of forgiveness might actually go against an instinctive or learned response to being wronged!

Having said that, it is entirely possible to forgive but you may need to be patient and it could turn out to be pretty hard work. Recently I came across a framework for forgiveness that was developed by psychologist Everett (Ev) Worthington. Ev constructed a five-step model to facilitate the process of forgiveness, and it is one of the techniques most favoured by counsellors specialising in forgiveness, mediation and reconciliation.

Worthington himself endured one of the most horrific traumas that a person ever experiences when in 1996, his elderly mother was sexually assaulted and then beaten to death with a crowbar and a baseball bat. His successful journey to forgiveness was an inspiration to all.

Worthington’s five-step technique of forgiveness is called REACH, which stands for the following:

Recall the hurt in as objective a way as you can.

Empathise with the person who hurt you – this may not be easy but try to develop a plausible story that might explain the perpetrator’s behaviour. Explain the hurtful act, not from your perspective, but from that of the wrongdoer. People who attack others are themselves usually in a state of fear, anger or hurt and are certainly not behaving rationally at the time.

Altruistic gift of forgiveness – forgiving usually makes us feel better, and you are giving it for the wrongdoer’s own good. You can’t hurt them by not forgiving but you set yourself free by forgiving. (On a pedantic note, I think the work altruistic is misused here as I believe that an altruistic act is not meant to benefit the initiator in any way!).

Commitment to forgive – make a commitment to yourself to forgive publicly so you don’t have a chance to back out later. You may decide to write a letter of forgiveness to the wrongdoer or tell a trusted friend about your act of forgiveness.

Hold on to the forgiveness – memories of the hurtful event will surface even after you have forgiven the wrongdoer. Don’t ruminate or dwell vengefully on these memories – keep reminding yourself that you have forgiven and eventually your memories will weaken in emotional intensity and cease to be important.

So is it worth all the time and trouble?

Well as forgiving transforms negative emotions into neutral or even potentially positive ones, greater life satisfaction and happiness is likely to follow. And perhaps just as importantly physical health, particularly cardiovascular health, is likely to be better in those who forgive than in those who harbour a grudge.

So what are you waiting for?

I think therefore I feel

In my last posting, we explored some key emotions that one may encounter linked to the past – nostalgia, contentment, pride, fulfilment and satisfaction. Frankly though it’s a fortunate person who can say, hand on heart, that they only experience positive feelings about their past. More typically things are a tad fruitier than that with a smidgen of bitterness, a soupçon of anger, a frisson of shame and a dash of revenge thrown in. It’s what makes the world go round. Or does it?

The trouble is that if you can’t let go of a damaging past event, if you tend to harbour grudges, and if you focus on the negatives and overlook all aspects of your life that are fulfilling and life-enhancing, you are pretty much setting yourself up for a miserable existence. Instead of the world merrily spinning around, you’re stuck in Groundhog Day.

So what can one do about this? Cognitive Behavourists would say that all emotions about the past are completely driven by our thinking and the way we interpret events. As we reflect on our memories we continue to interpret old situations from the past, and our conclusions, opinions and judgements drive our emotions.

So if you believe that an old friend vindictively betrayed you last year by breaking a confidence you will continue to feel hurt, angry and hostile towards them. If you have decided that your manager has deliberately sabotaged your prospects of promotion by stealing all of your ideas and passing them off as their own, you will feel livid, frustrated and shafted every time you look at them. And if you conclude that the local supermarket delivery people are deliberately picking short shelf-life items for your order, you will feel indignant, cheated and robbed when your credit card bill arrives. Thus emotions are entirely dependent on our interpretation of events, and we tend to treat our emotions as facts. Unfortunately what happens then is that our emotions drive our behaviour and taint our ongoing thinking and feeling. It’s one of those vicious cycles.

Over the next few postings, we will explore some different ways to tackle negative views of the past – if I try to do it all here this one will run to many pages and I’m sure your attention span won’t stretch that far – mine certainly won’t and I’m writing it!

Our tip for today then is to challenge our interpretations of past events. You know, there just might be another explanation for what happened? Think about it…

Maybe the short shelf-life items were all that the supermarket had at the time, otherwise of course they would have put longer shelf-life ones in your order. Anyway you can always hand the items back to the driver and get a refund – they are not forcing you to take the stuff! It’s up to you what you do with the squishy satsumas, and it’s entirely down to you as to how you interpret the situation and therefore how you end up feeling. Raging fury at the thieving b@!*tards or mild irritation because you need to go to the shops tomorrow after all. The choice is yours!

Maybe your boss does steal a few of your ideas – it’s not unusual let’s face it – but is that really the only reason why you haven’t been promoted? What about all those missed project deadlines and the badly overspent budget this year? What about the sales conference in January where you had a few too many tequilas and took the Finance Director to task in the bar. Not feeling so self-righteous now eh?

And maybe just maybe your friend did not intend to betray you and is absolutely distraught at losing your friendship. Perhaps the person they were talking to pretended they knew more than they did on the topic, and came up with some uncannily accurate guesswork along the way while the wine was flowing. It happens… so pick up the phone and make amends.

So this is all good food for thought. Or on the other hand perhaps we shouldn’t be thinking about it at all as thinking seems to get us into so much trouble in the first place! But I reckon it just might be worthwhile every now and again challenging the mindset that you have the monopoly on the truth. For as we have seen, there might just be another explanation for a past event, and if so you may be making yourself very miserable for no good reason.

Vvveering towards Happiness

Finally we can start to explore the last element of our Happiness Formula, and hopefully this will be one that we can really nurture and encourage to flourish. Because it’s occured to me, and I’m sure to you too, that so far we haven’t got a huge amount of ammunition to throw at the delinquent devils of despair, depression and downright disillusionment. Which nicely brings me to V.

V then refers to the voluntary variables that we can address to help us create sustainable positive change as opposed to fleeting intense pleasure. Yes yes, some of us still might prefer the latter, but in my experience it can get downright exhausting and potentially expensive hunting it down each and every day! Far better to achieve the slow burn of deep contentment.

V encompasses things that create positive emotions about the past, the present or the future. Much has been written in the academic and popular psychology press about positive emotions and it can be helpful to identify them, and also to categorize them into one of these three buckets.

Positive emotions around past events include nostalgia, contentment, pride, fulfilment and satisfaction. Moving into the present we can experience the positive emotions of calm, ecstacy, pleasure, joy and also being in flow*. Finally looking into the future we can feel the positive emotions of hope, faith, optimism and trust.

I’ve been working hard to avoid using the word ‘happiness’ as an emotion – for me it is on a par with the inadequate word ‘nice’. Frankly ‘happiness’ just doesn’t describe the essence of the emotion for me. It is bland and all-encompassing whereas we want distinction and specificity.

Of course if you are honest with yourself, you are probably experiencing any combination of emotions in these three buckets right now. For example you might be extremely proud of your three stone weight loss over the past year but now are frustrated with your current compulsion to eat vast quantities of double chocolate icecream with extra chocolate chips and fudge pieces. You may also therefore be doubting your future ability to fit into your new size 12 wardrobe and be pretty hacked off with the whole situation.

It’s also entirely possible to be bitter and twisted about your current relationship, to reminisce nostalgically and with fondness (and possibly through rose-tinted specs) about a former love, whilst also being incredibly optimistic about positive change happening soon.

Alternatively you might have suppressed a miserable past, rant and rave about how unfair everything is in your life and also have an unfeasibly large black cloud of pessimism about the future hanging over your head. Oh dear!

Clearly then it would be advantageous and desirable to cultivate and amass vast quantities of positive emotions about the past, your present and your future life. And that is what the V is all about. It’s about making choices (including Choosing Your Attitude) right now and moving your emotions in a more positive direction.

In my next posting then, we’ll start to focus on generating positive emotions about the past. I’m not a massive fan of Sigmund Freud so we’re not going to start exploring your early childhood and your weird and frankly disturbing dreams. Instead we are going to consider how to forgive and move on, to spot things that we are grateful for and to acknowledge them openly, and to keep tracks on the balance in our life so that our present has the best chance it has of being both uplifting and personally satisfying.

*More on flow later in another blog posting.