Music.

Hello and welcome to today's episode of the Action for Happiness podcast.

In this episode, Mark is in conversation with Dr.

Fred Luskin, who is a pioneer in the field of forgiveness research and practice.

He is the founder and director of the Stanford Forgiveness Project and the author of the best-selling book, Forgive for Good.

His groundbreaking work has helped thousands of people around the world find freedom from resentment and pain.

Music.

The Senior Consultant in Wellness and Health Promotion at Stanford University, Fred teaches the popular Forgiveness Project course.

His research has been featured in major media outlets, including the New York Times, Time Magazine and the BBC.

Today, he will be teaching us how we can find peace in a world that so often leaves us hurt, angry or resentful.

We hope you enjoy.

It's great to have you here for another live Action for Happiness event.

My name's Mark Williamson, and it's lovely to welcome you from all around the world to be part of this community, the Action for Happiness movement, where we're trying to create a happier and kinder world together.

Today, we're talking about letting go and finding peace, something that many of us want and many of us find rather hard.

And I'm really delighted to guide us through this journey.

We're joined by someone who's been inspiring me for many years since I first met him at one of the World Happiness Summits, Dr.

Fred Luskin.

Fred, thank you so much for being here.

We're really delighted to have you with us.

Thank you for inviting me.

It's good stuff you do, introducing or reminding people about the aspects of happiness.

Thank you, Fred.

Well, you are, of course, an author and an expert in the subject of forgiveness.

and one of the things we'll be doing a bit later on is talking about resources that you have, particularly a new workbook that can help people.

But I find that the topic that we're going to be talking about together today is a really challenging one, but a vital one if we care about a happier, kinder and more connected world.

So I'm really looking forward to exploring this and for those of you who are new, thank you for being here.

For those of you who are regulars, again, thank you, but for being part of this community.

Fred and I will have a conversation together while I'm going to be mainly listening to Fred's wisdom.

And then along the way, we'll do a couple of interactive exercises.

And at the end, you'll have a chance to put your questions to Fred on anything that we've talked about or indeed that's come up for you.

But Fred, I wondered, could we start with maybe you could say a little bit about yourself, just for those who may not be familiar with your sort of expertise, but also maybe why this subject of letting go of forgiveness is so important to you personally.

I mean, I started doing the science of forgiveness only because forgiveness itself was so hard for me.

And I had a couple of very painful experiences where it became very obvious to me that this was not something I could do.

And learning, as you said, is painful.

And when I stumbled across kind of a finish line, with one particularly challenging episode of forgiveness.

I took some of what I learned and started the Stanford Forgiveness Project with what I had learned.

And do you want to say a little bit about what the Stanford Forgiveness Project is doing, Fred?

I mean, it started with my dissertation back a million years ago when I had to graduate from my PhD at Stanford.

I did a randomized trial on forgiveness.

And back then, 30 years ago, this was unheard of and undone.

And then since that time, I've been experimenting with teaching and researching how to help people forgive and have written four books and gone all over the world.

But the issue that you brought up, that essential difficulty, letting go of negativity, resent, and bitterness when you've been mistreated is really hard.

It is really hard, and I'm really looking forward to us trying to get into the weeds of that.

But before we dive in, as many in this community will know, we're big believers in looking inwards and taking a moment to be mindful and pause.

And I know that you have various meditation practices that you use as part of your work.

Maybe we could take a quick mindful pause and you could guide us through something to help us be really present for this conversation, Fred.

What would you suggest we do?

Well, I will do that.

Let me bracket it with the major work that we did with the Forgiveness Project was make forgiveness a hell of a lot simpler.

But we recognize all the ways that people make themselves unforgiving.

And I'm going to say a good piece of what we learn to do is get rid of some of that.

And one of the ways that we use to get rid of some of the mechanisms by which people do make themselves unhappier is through some simple guided practice.

So I will frame it that way with a, I'll just do a very simple guided imagery practice.

So if you and everybody else out there would simply take a moment to go inward as a very beginning meditative injunction.

And when I say go inward, that means bring your attention inside, be willing to relax your muscles of your shoulders and your abdomen, and you can look at it as a deliberate practice in trust.

Even in a world that might have hurt you like you can practice trust and safety right here right now like that's a direct link and the way you practice is by quieting your breathing, gentling your muscles and slowing just slowing yourself down a little just a little bit, slowing.

And as any meditative tradition will suggest, when you inhale, your abdomen gets a little bigger.

And when you exhale, your abdomen contracts.

And then as you sit, just bring an image to your mind, just for a moment, of someone you really love.

Just as you sit for a moment, bring an image to your mind of someone you really, really, really love.

And see if you can feel that image impact to allow you to feel a little bit of calm, a little bit of affection, a little bit of safety.

Just try to bring that feeling out in you of connecting with someone you love.

And then maybe hold that positiveness for another five or 10 seconds and then take a breath and gently open your eyes.

So let me be really clear why I would have chosen that as a simple opening practice.

That quiet place in you or me or any of us, that's where forgiveness already exists in us.

It's not something that has to be, I mean, it has to be, it's latent, but it doesn't have to be learned.

It emerges out of a way of being in the world where we're quiet, safe, open, and trusting.

And that part of us forgives.

That was one of the immediate learnings that I got in my own life when I was resurrecting myself from my pit of unforgiveness.

Thank you, Fred.

I found that surprisingly powerful to do that exercise, especially the visualization of a loved one and the way that could affect.

I think maybe safety is the right word, actually.

That was a really powerful word, that idea of feeling emotionally safe.

As we begin to explore forgiveness and perhaps some of the challenges to it, I'd love to involve this amazing community that are with us.

We have such wisdom here and we often ask a question to people that you and I can then maybe respond to.

And I think when you and I were chatting yesterday, one of the thoughts was, we could ask people, what's an obstacle to forgiveness?

Or what's something maybe we're a bit confused about when it comes to forgiveness?

So wherever you are right now in the world, if you'd like to sort of share in a few words in the chat, something about forgiveness that you maybe find a little bit hard or confusing, we can then maybe use that in the rest of this conversation.

So afraid, I'll read some of these out, Fred, afraid of being hurt again, ruminating, ego, putting others' needs above my own, resentments, loss of trust for the future, pride, feeling guilty, forgetting the other person is not sorry, feeling angry, moral hazard, forgiveness, being abused, betrayal, unfairness, injustice, forgiving a bully, letting go of hurt, embarrassed.

These are really profound.

So thank you, everyone, for sharing those.

Fred, what's coming up as you hear those responses?

What a list, huh?

Yeah.

All the ways that human life can be a challenge.

What we found after a while that we would teach forgiveness.

And the biggest obstacle was people had no idea what it was and what they thought it was was wrong.

And we kind of adapted our methods to, at the beginning, have a lot of, like, here's what it is, here's what it isn't, and be careful, you know, that so many people would think that forgiveness means that they forget what's going on, or they don't remember the hurt or the wound, and it's ridiculous.

I mean, you can't forget the worst opportunities or experiences, but we would remind people that forgiveness is simply remembering differently, which is an enormous change for many people.

Like the latent obstacle of bitterness, grudge, revenge is over and over perseverating, saying the same thing, ruminating, holding this stuff tight.

That has costs.

And one of those costs is a kind of tightness and a loss of trust in how the world is going to be.

Forgiveness doesn't mean you forget what happened or that all of a sudden you excuse what happened.

What it means is you make peace with your life.

You make peace, including the things that weren't the way you want.

And you make peace for the purpose of freeing yourself.

And that guided imagery that I started with, that's a reminder of that.

So you could have all sorts of history and story and terrible experiences.

And you can also practice being at peace.

And when you practice being at peace, like for that moment, you're free.

You're just free.

You're free from the story.

You're free from the consequences.

You're just free.

What we saw is that people don't know, one, the value of being free, know how to be free, and that they keep on practicing things that make them stuck, not free.

And that was some of our, I'm going to say, re-evaluation of what forgiveness is and isn't.

I'm seeing a comment in the chat, which I think I'd love your response to, but Ruth's just put, forgiving myself, and we can talk later on about forgiving others and forgiving ourselves, which said it feels like losing the battle with the hurt.

And so I guess what that brings me to is, why are we battling with the hurt in our lives and the hurt that others have brought us, Fred.

You said a phrase when I last saw you speak, and it was, give up all hope of a better past.

And we all have, whether awfully bad or slightly bad, things in the past that were unpleasant.

As the Buddhists told us, and you reminded me yesterday, suffering is at the heart of all our lives.

Why do we fight this battle with things that happened and aren't here necessarily now?

I'm not sure the heart battles.

My experience with my heart and with other people's hearts is when you touch your heart, a lot of the battle's over.

And, you know, we don't always know what to do with that.

We like battling.

We like making people wrong.

We like the sense of being aggrieved.

But even deeper than that, we wouldn't really know what to do if we didn't have some excuse or reason to explain why we're not happy enough.

I mean, the issue of each of our lives is, how's your life now?

And if it's not as good as you like, often one of the reasons we tell ourselves that it's not as good as we'd like is because we were mistreated back in the day.

And so we use it as a, not an excuse as much as a placeholder.

Oh, okay.

I don't have to do the deep work of coming into some present centered acceptance of my actual life.

The one I actually got, not the one that I think I should have gotten, not the one that didn't include mom or dad or grandma or the ex, but the actual life.

We don't want to do the hard work of making peace with it, of just this is my life.

So that quote you came up with, my knowledge of that was it was created by a woman whose daughter was murdered.

And one of the ways that she forgave was by saying, I'm going to give up all hope of a better past.

And it's that current moment of, well, wait a second.

My life didn't quite meet my standards.

And since I'm the great and mighty odds, I don't have to make peace with life.

I get to fight it forever.

And it's that argument, that sense that life owed me more than it gave me, that's the fighting.

I don't think the heart fights.

I think the heart is designed to relax into now and do its best to stay open.

Fred, I'm already seeing lots of great questions coming up in the chat.

So just to say to the audience, if you want to put questions to Fred later, please use the Q&A function.

I'd like us, if we can, to explore briefly each of forgiving others and then forgiving ourselves, because I think those are related but subtly different.

When it comes to forgiving others, you've already hinted at, you know, that maybe our identity is somehow tied up with the feeling that we were wronged in some way.

And yet somehow I think it feels that to forgive, maybe in the conventional way we think about it, is sort of almost condoning someone's bad behavior.

And especially if that bad behavior is still present or continues to have ripples, it feels difficult.

So what can you say about how we can do forgiving others in a healthy way?

I mean, bad behavior is an experience.

I was lied to, I was abandoned, and I personally had, let's say, family difficulties.

That's all true, but it's part of being a human being.

And a lot of us reject the aspects of human life that we don't like.

We kind of want to have a different life than human beings were offered.

And so that's one mistake we make of thinking, you know, it's okay if there are 800 million people starving to death Today, that's okay.

But don't cut me off in the freeway.

And so we are much more interested in the bad behavior of the person cutting us off in the freeway than we are in the bad behavior of our indifference to massive human suffering.

So there's a little bit of care that needs to be taken from our definitions.

The second piece is for forgiving others.

You need to see things clearly.

So if you wake up in the morning in a home with a roof over your head and a bed and running water and food in the refrigerator and transportation, and you don't include that when you assess your day, then you're simply bullshitting yourself about what the world is like.

You know, you're not seeing it clearly, and you can hold on to any bad behavior you want from anywhere, but that doesn't really mean very much because our perspective can become so jaundiced in negativity or self-pity or taking what happens to us so importantly.

The important piece with all of us that's needed is not so much naming the bad behavior and telling yourself how difficult your life was, but naming it.

Examining it, and then grieving it so that you can let it go.

Grieving it is the deep human experience of shared pain.

And many of us don't want that.

You know, we want to hold on to our particular piece of the puzzle, piece of the drama.

Well, grief is human.

It's based on loss and disappointment.

And everybody grieves.

And when you resist grief, you end up in grievance, not grief.

But grief is a process of softening and opening and allowing that hurt.

The piece that you also mentioned is part of grieving is deeply acknowledging that you have been harmed.

That's just true.

We get harmed by life.

That's just true.

But we don't ask the next question.

Now what?

Like, okay, I've been harmed, now what?

We operate under the delusion that we have forever and that our wounds are gonna matter forever.

We delude ourselves to thinking about that.

So we hold on to stuff that doesn't even exist.

I've spoken to 50-year-olds still pissed at mom from when they were 19 or 16.

And I'm thinking you have to have some delusion of immortality to hold on about that, that your whole adult life is passing you by.

What life do we want now is the happiness and forgiveness question, and the passage is grieving, not grievance.

It feels to me, Fred, that there's something about acceptance within what you said there about letting things be as they are, especially things that are outside of our control, like anything in the past.

It naturally is.

And yet I'm feeling also, especially in the context of forgiving a perceived wrong from others, and I'm seeing a bit of this in the chat, that some of us find it really hard if it feels like the person who has wronged us in our eyes isn't acknowledging that.

They're not taking responsibility.

They're not owning it.

And I'm predicting what you might say here, but I guess I've learned the hard way that we can never really change the behavior of others, we can only choose how we respond.

How do you feel about that?

Well, what does wrong mean?

Like if 10 years ago, somebody did the wrong thing, it's necessary to acknowledge it.

But 10 years later, of what necessity is it to remind yourself that they did the wrong thing?

That's all on you.

That proximate to things happening, our intelligence needs to process and say, yeah, that behavior was not okay, so what do I do about it?

But five years later, it's gratuitous to say, five years ago, that behavior was not okay.

What difference does it make?

Life moves on, everything changes.

So that's really interesting.

I hadn't really thought of the temporal sort of time nature here, but in the moment, when we're in danger, if there's an abusive thing going on, if there's a disagreement, we can respond in the moment and stand up for what we believe in and respond accordingly and tell people that's not appropriate.

And yet, once that's gone in a year's time or whatever, we do little favor to ourselves by clinging on to it.

Is that right?

Well, but you invited this as a conversation in letting go.

So that's what you're describing, is the necessity of letting your own minds holding on to something that has passed, Giving your mind and body a break from your own ruminating about something that has passed.

I've talked to more people than I can tell you who, like, they think somehow that they're getting back at somebody by ruining their life today for what that person might have done yesterday.

Like, I'll show you I'm going to suffer today just to show you how bad what you did was.

and it is hard to think of something more self-destructive.

You know, there's that wonderful saying, a life well lived is the best revenge.

There's a lot of truth to that.

Let me just say that again.

A life well lived is the best revenge.

That's powerful.

I thought you were going to say holding on to anger with the intent of getting revenge is a bit like holding onto a hot coal with the intention of throwing it at the other person.

It's you that gets burned by it.

I've misquoted that, I'm sure.

But what you're saying really is us remaining in a place of grievance doesn't help us or indeed really show the other person or change what happened in any meaningful world.

It's necessary for a while.

Right.

so that you examine the damage.

You know, if your partner leaves you, there's a lot of damage.

And you can't just let that go.

So you have to examine it.

You have to look for your contributions to it.

And you end up also with the partner did some not so good things.

So it's necessary.

But again, four years later, it's old news.

It's like, okay, you don't need to read a newspaper from five years ago.

You can.

But to argue again with the stock market from 2020, like that ain't going to get you very far.

And yet we act as if arguing with our own little personal newspaper from 2020 makes sense.

What it does is cause your body a lot of stress, cause your mind a lot of confusion.

And then the problem is if you blame your bad experiences now on what they did in the past, you make yourself helpless because they have to change or the past has to change rather than acknowledging that how I'm thinking about it and talking about it now Now, that's my problem, not what happened five years ago.

Yes, and that's just really empowering to hear that because it gives us more control and more sense of possibility of things within our grasp.

Fred, before we move towards more questions from the audience, I'd just love to touch on the idea of forgiving ourselves.

I think maybe quite a lot of us might be carrying some guilt for things that we've done, not necessarily the behavior of others.

I'm sure lots of the ideas you've already shared are also equally relevant here, but is there anything more about self-forgiveness that you want to say?

I mean, self-forgiveness has some interception or overlap with other forgiveness.

The biggest distinction of self-forgiveness is we have some agency to help us move forward.

The key ingredients for self-forgiveness have very little to do with how you feel.

And that's people's biggest mistake.

Self-forgiveness has more to do with real remorse.

Like honestly feeling bad for what you did is the crucial underpinning of self-forgiveness.

Apologizing where possible or necessary, making amends where possible or necessary as the 12-step programs are so clear about, and changing.

So self-forgiveness has much less to do than people think with bad feeling.

It has to do with behaving and transcending whatever actions you did that were not in alignment with your best goals.

And the changing piece is the crucial piece.

So if you find out that, you know, I don't treat people that well.

Hating yourself doesn't do any good, just like it doesn't do you any good to hate anybody else.

Remorse matters.

like, wow, I hurt people, or I disappointed myself, or I got drunk again.

I feel terrible.

But the issue is, well, who did I harm so I can make it right?

And what do I have to do to make sure I don't do it again?

Those are the crucial issues of self-forgiveness.

The other piece, which rubs a lot of people the wrong way because they're over-interested in their feelings is the world's problem is not too little self-forgiveness, but too much.

That more people let themselves off the hook for behaviors that they should be on a hook for than give themselves too much grief.

We tend to create bad habits and do the same harm over and over and in some ways forgive ourselves.

We treat people poorly but blame them in some ways forgiving ourselves.

The deep need with all of these things are trying to repair relationship when you can.

So with forgiving yourself, you want to repair your relationship with yourself and maybe with some people you harm.

And when safe, you forgive others so that if possible, you can repair those relationships.

It is such important glue for cultures and families and all sorts of interpersonal relationships.

Yeah, thank you.

I find that really resonates.

And I think in many ways, a theme that you've not said the word yet, but it feels like there's something about love and connectedness, which is important here.

And often when we feel that we don't have those things that we feel some of these grievances.

I think one of the things that's probably going to come up in our questions because I see hints of it in the chat is how does what we've said here relate or change, if it does at all, for people who've experienced what I might say is way more traumatic things than I've had the good fortune to experience myself.

Someone who might be dealing with PTSD after a really traumatic incident, somebody who might have been abused as a child, people who have traumas that can leave them physically and mentally affected for years to come.

How does what you say relate to that?

Because in some ways, we're still carrying challenges in our bodies often, in our emotions that we'd love to let go of, but we find that it's really hard to.

What would you say to someone like that, Fred?

I mean, there's no magic cure for how difficult life can be and how selfish and cruel some people can be.

There's no magic cure for it.

When you look at forgiveness, it's about now.

It's now.

What can I do to free myself now so I have the best chance of opening the door and recognizing it's a beautiful day?

It's, you know, you have a happiness thing.

This is directly related to the quest for happiness.

What can I do now so that I can free my mind enough and appreciate whatever good I have so that when I open that metaphorical door, I'm freer.

And I see that I'm not so prejudiced from the past that I can see the sunshine and children and flowers and people who love me, that's the letting go.

It's the openness now to let life in and not have to simply protect ourselves because things happened back when we couldn't protect ourselves.

But that doesn't mean that that's a life sentence.

I think you've put that so beautifully, Fred, and it is, as you say, a really good fit with our mission to create a happier and kinder world right here, right now, from wherever we're starting.

I know you've offered to do another kind of meditation, building on this theme of gratitude and some of what you were mentioning there.

And we've got lots of people who want to ask you questions.

Which should we do first, questions or the meditation?

I'll do a meditation, but I want to finish responding to one more thing that you're which is all much of happiness, much of life satisfaction boils down to love and connection.

That, you know, the research is pretty abundant.

That the deepest questions of our life are relationship-based.

And the most important work we do is relationship-based.

and the biggest part of whether or not we're happy are the kind of relationships we have.

So this is not an abstract, it's not an abstract issue.

It's the core issue.

Community, connection, and relationship and love.

So that gets lost in people and they tell you that the most important issue is my wounds or they tell you that the most important issue was my abusive parent, I don't think that's accurate about what the most important issue with their life is.

The most important issue with their life is learning to love and learning to be loved.

And that orientation needs to be reminded regularly to human beings.

The corollary to that, and this is where I'll end up with a meditation, is You have to find the good.

That is our responsibility, that our nervous systems will find the bad, but we have to choose to find the good, and nobody can do that for us, and no matter what kind of past we have, we still can try to find the good now, and that's the central corollary, and so that's what I'll do a guided imagery with.

So again, if everybody out there can please, you know, close your eyes for another moment and quiet your breathing and bring yourself back to center, back to your core.

And in essence, you are again softening, gentling, quieting your breathing.

And when you inhale, you need your abdomen to open so that you are open to your nervous systems like flourishing and when you exhale, your abdomen contracts.

And then what I'm going to ask you to do is just look over your last day or two of your life and try to find, in that time, kindness shown to you.

Like what I'd like you to do is look at the last 24, 48 hours simply to slow the tape down, quiet it down, and just look for, was anybody kind in any way?

Did anybody say anything nice to you?

Did anybody offer you any help?

Did anybody make dinner for you or do your laundry or speak nicely to you?

Did they help you in any way?

You want to develop different eyes.

And you want to pay attention for a moment to the goodness that was there that you might have been in a hurry and didn't see.

And then you want to pick one instance in particular of kindness, and then from your center, say thank you.

Just say thank you.

From your center, just say thank you to whomever or for whatever that carefulness was there.

Just say thank you.

And then when that thank you has been, you know, radiated.

Take a breath or two and gently open your eyes.

So I will finish, if you want to do some question, I will finish my piece with two reminders of that.

One, we almost never tell the truth about our life, ever.

Our negativity bias so biases our stories, our perception, and everything that we're so untruthful and almost always it's minimizing the good, almost always.

And then we buy the story that we tell about how tough it is.

And I'm not saying it's not tough.

It's just also wonderful.

It's both.

And the most important thing is to see your life clearly enough so you can hold it both, both the people who were not so kind and the people who were really kind so that you can put appropriate energy to the people who were kind and give some thank yous with the same determination that you give all the grudges and nastiness and negativity that you give.

That's your practice, that's my practice, that's the happiness practice, that's the core of human happiness is being able to see it clearly that.

There's a lot of horror here.

There's an enormous amount of beauty.

And the second piece is that to recognize in the moment what you are co-creating in your consciousness and mind.

If you focus on your grudges, you create one experience.

If you focus on more positive things, you create a different experience, and your body comes right along.

When you create stressful experiences, you have a certain kind of physiology, and when you create more positive experiences, your body comes right along.

Those would be my two sign-aways.

Be careful about what you blame for why this moment is not as good as it could be.

Yeah, thank you.

I very much agree.

And it reminds me of the phrase, pay attention to what you're paying attention to.

And just a couple of personal reflections.

First of all, last night, I couldn't sleep and I was carrying a story I'd been telling myself about something that I felt somebody had done that was frustrating during the day.

I think, and I could feel that my body wasn't letting me relax because I was carrying that story.

And even though I've done thousands of gratitude exercises in that meditation just then, I thought of extra kindnesses that I had missed.

The driver that let me through in traffic on my cycle home, the people in the chat here providing really friendly support for each other.

So many little examples that I just had missed in my busy day.

So thank you, Fred.

Music.

And now, Fred answers some questions from the Action for Happiness community.

And Clifford has asked, can you forgive someone just in your head and move on without actually having to do it face to face?

I mean, you don't have to do anything.

Like, you know, how do I have to?

It's an inner prompting and an inner question.

So, is a relationship safe for me?

You'll never know pissed off because your own mind makes it unsafe.

If you give some time and you forgive and you get your life back and it still feels unsafe, that's a good sign that maybe it's not a place to hang your hat for the future.

But our reactivity and our practice negativity are bad guides because they're designed to be.

Anger is designed to be a short-term response to threat and it's designed to exaggerate threat to make sure that you get safe.

Somebody really does something wrong and you want to move on and not deal with it, wait a little bit unless, you know, obviously not grave danger immediately, but wait a little bit.

And if you calm down and it still doesn't feel right, you can go talk to them.

You don't have to make such harsh decisions.

You can say, hey, can we talk?

Where I am right now is it's not feeling so good.

You can do that.

You don't have to.

So that links really well, Fred, to Aurora's question, which is what role do boundaries play in forgiveness in those situations where maybe we have lowered our guard a bit and tried and then realized actually this relationship doesn't feel right.

How do we stay safe, for example, in an abusive relationship?

Do boundaries play a role?

I mean, when you were young, it's not your responsibility to set boundaries.

You know, so if you had, you know, nasty, incomplete humans as parents, they failed you.

But that's simply true.

It's not necessarily a life sentence.

It's just true.

Your parents failed you.

And it's their responsibility, not yours.

Then the question is, how do I learn proper boundaries?

The questions are always ours as to how we can grow.

So if I wasn't taught boundaries with these not full humanist parents, I have to learn it on my own.

And it's not their fault that I'm 35 and still trying to learn it.

It's just life.

And so the goal becomes then learning boundaries, practicing them, figuring out what's true and not true for you.

Those are life tasks.

and they're not easy and they often require therapeutic help.

Yeah.

Lee's asked, how do you forgive when the person you're trying to forgive triggers you every time you see them?

Well, I mean, there's a couple of sub-questions there.

Do they trigger you simply because you're out of control, or do they trigger you because they're doing something?

If they're doing something, then you either need to tell them to stop or exit the relationship or create a firm thing.

If they trigger you simply because you don't have control over your nervous system, you need to get control over your nervous system and not blame them because you don't have it.

So those are two very distinct themes.

We have found that it can be really helpful to practice short meditation when you get triggered.

So that that practice that i gave you at first one of the things we did and like i know you're in in in england one of the first irish projects we did where we brought people from northern ireland who had had family members killed we brought them to the window at stanford and we We had them, you know, open their arms to the window and have the sunlight hit them and teach them to say thank you.

And that became an alternative source than just the wounding from the loss of their family member.

And we would ask them to do things like that when they got triggered.

Are you feeling, you know, whatever it is, X?

Either take a few breaths, go take a walk, pick a flower, or go in front of the window and say thank you for the sun.

But you may have to counter condition your stress response and not blame the past for owning your nervous system.

Fred marian jealous said well i agree with her first point here every time i hear dr luskin i feel very moved likewise uh thank you her question is how to forgive when there's no reparational validation of one's hurt how can we deal with that you forgive for you you forgive in part because Because you get tired of being trapped in your perspective of the past.

So if they can give you any kind of compensation or thank you or make amends, that's great.

But they don't own you until they do that.

And you certainly don't want to pick people who have hurt you to give them, you know, free rent for the rest of your life in your head just because they don't honor the way you want it to be.

You forgive to free you from the burden of your negativity and resentment.

That's why you forgive.

So let's come to Brian's question because I'd love us to just dive a little bit more into some of the work that we can do.

You've given us a couple of lovely meditations.

Brian's very honestly shared that he's in the middle of a divorce.

It's a grief process.

It's tough.

There's up and down emotional days.

Thank you for sharing that, Brian.

I mean, Fred, as you said, life is tough.

We all suffer.

The question is, how do I work on letting go and get to peace?

So could you share a bit more about the practicalities of how we can find peace when it just feels really hard?

I mean, a divorce is a tough case because often the partners are still awful to each other.

And it may have nothing to do with the past.

It may have to do with like this morning.

It's a big complication.

If it's in the past, then you make a decision, which is, hey, I really want to let this relationship go.

But only you can decide that.

Like, if I'm really going to forgive, one, it takes time.

Two, they may have done really difficult things, which take time to grieve.

But the decision is, do I want to continue to be aroused and frustrated by them, or do I want to reduce that so that I can start to free myself and move ahead?

That's your question.

The second question is, what do I do in the present when I get upset by it?

That harks back to the last question, but you have to answer that question for yourself.

What am I going to do?

And then the other thing that comes in, two other things is I need to start telling a different story about my marriage.

As long as I tell a marriage story that they were terrible and I couldn't get along with them because of X, Y, and Z, I'm never going to forgive them.

But if I start telling the story of, you know, we gave it our best shot.

We didn't know how to get along with each other.

We both screwed up.

Whether they behaved more badly than I did, I chose them.

So now it's this difficult unraveling of a mess we both created.

Changing the story is how we put a container around it.

So i like that as a really practical suggestion because siobhan's asked another question which i think you've really covered around the question is all about when we're triggered by the past trauma in the present and you know that as you rightly pointed out we're not doing ourselves any favors by holding on to past wounds but actually often we feel that really viscerally and we we can't necessarily choose whether we feel you know triggered to use that word that others have shared.

So you've mentioned breathing exercises, and also that changing the story seems like a powerful way of doing that.

Are there any other things in that moment right now when you feel that feeling of being wronged that you can do to sort of calm your nervous system?

How else can we respond wisely in those moments, Fred?

I mean, the other thing besides a meditative thing is some reminding yourself of the famous Rolling Stones song, I Can't Always Get What I Want.

You have to have a cognitive component also, which is I can't even get, I don't always get what I want because we define forgiveness now as making peace with the word no.

Like that's where it comes full circle.

Forgiveness is making peace when you didn't get what you want.

And that reminder of the Rolling Stones song is, I can't always get what I want.

And that's just truth.

We're out of time.

And I always love ending an event with a Rolling Stones reference.

So that's wonderful.

I like giving up hope for a better past.

And really what you are telling us or encouraging us to do is sort of reclaim our hearts a little bit.

So we're not kind of denying the harm that's happened.

We're just refusing to let it define who we are and what we do now.

And so I'd love to just hand back to you as well as saying a very warm thanks on behalf of everyone here, just to offer you the chance to share one final thought or leave us with your final message for today.

I mean, the good news from our research is forgiveness is a teachable skill.

It's not like esoteric or weird you can practice it and get better at it like anything else, well you've helped us all take steps in that direction it's been really thought-provoking and also quite emotional and i'm really grateful to you fred for your wisdom and your honesty because these are challenging topics but i'm also really grateful to this community and the the wisdom and the kindness and the great questions and challenging points that people have had the courage to raise today so thank you everyone for being here and special thanks again to you, Fred.

Really appreciate it.

Thank you, Mark.

See you again.

Thanks, everyone.

Bye-bye.

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