Forgive for Good -- book review

Luskin gives a lot of examples in his book of people who have held on to a grudge for decades and for whom a grudge has defined and ruined their life. He talks about spouses who were cheated on and then can’t stop telling everyone about how much of a scumbag their ex-partner is. He talks about people who feel like they’ve been unfairly treated at work. He talks about people whose children were killed in a violent conflict. Or people who were abused by their parents.

We experience pain when we ruminate on how our “unenforceable rules” have been violated. Rules like:

• My spouse should love me and not cheat on me.
• If I work hard and do a good job, I should get the promotion.
• My child must be healthy.
• It’s unfair that I was raised in this type of family.
• You will care about the ways that you’ve hurt me, and apologize for them.

We experience pain when we ruminate on ways that people failed to live up to our expectations. Expectations like:

• I will listen to you when you’re hurt.
• You will not lie to me.
• You will show up on time to an appointment with me.
• I shouldn’t have taken this stupid action.

It is normal and healthy to feel hurt when you are, for instance, betrayed or when a way that you dearly want the world to be has not come to pass. I think one could not truly want things if they weren’t willing to experience some pain at not getting them; trust cannot be present if there is no way that the counterparty could hurt you. So, the ability to feel some pain seems good. How should you deal with sadness? suggests talking to a friend about your pain. However feeling this pain, some people will choose to tell a grievance story for a long time and others will choose to find a forgiveness story.

A grievance story has a villain and a victim, namely you. Why do people tell grievance stories?

• Maybe if you rehearse the story of the villain’s terrible actions enough times, then someone will bring them to justice.
• Maybe if you don’t rehearse the story, you’ll forget about what happened and be hurt in the same way in the future.
• Telling a grievance story, at least initially, may elicit sympathy and support from friends.
• Telling these stories can replace pain with fury for a while, which might feel better.
• Telling a grievance story is a misguided way at holding onto something that used to be very precious to you.
• Some might hope that obsessing over a grievance story for long enough could cause someone to apologize to you, even if they are unlikely to actually do so.
• As long as you tell a grievance story (things you’re not responsible for, things it’s someone else who has hurt you with), maybe you don’t have to face the daunting tasks ahead.

Retelling a grievance story over and over again won’t undo the past. In many cases retelling the grievance story won’t help the perpetrator come to justice nor will it make the perpetrator apologize to you.

Luskin proposes replacing grievance stories with forgiveness stories. A forgiveness story has four parts. I’ll illustrate them by talking through how we could transform a grievance story about cheating to a forgiveness story. Let’s start with the grievance story of “my spouse should not have cheated on me, he’s a terrible person, he doesn’t care about me at all”.

Here’s the forgiveness story.

1. Articulate the particular instantiation your positive intention.
   1. I hoped to form a loving relationship with Bob.
2. Acknowledge that the universe was not required to make your positive intention come true.
   1. However, not all marriages continue happily.
3. Recommit to your positive intention.
   1. But I still hope to form a loving relationship (with someone else), it’s still valuable to me even though this didn’t work out.
4. Plan how to make the perspective change long-lasting.
   1. I’m going to stop complaining to everyone about how Bob cheated on me, and I’m going to ask my friends to hold me accountable to this decision. I’m not going to let myself think about Bob except between 2 and 3pm.

You can maybe remember this better as

• Hope
• Educate
• Affirm
• Long lasting

My thoughts on forgiveness prompted by the above

One frame on why we feel bad when we tell a grievance story is that we are having a cognitive distortion, namely we’re inaccurately thinking that the universe is supposed to be fair, and that things are supposed to go the way we wanted it to. We feel upset because we just keep endlessly replaying events maybe in hopes that they’ll go differently or that something will change.

I’m in favor of seeing the world accurately. I think life is more beautiful when I remember my positive intentions, acknowledge that they weren’t guaranteed to be fulfilled and recommit to striving for the positive intention in the future.

When you can’t forgive the universe feels fundamentally wrong, you’ve derived a contradiction and can’t go on with normal life because it doesn’t even make sense anymore. Forgiveness is locating your erroneous assumption about how the world works. Initially forgiveness feels like “deflation”. You were a pressurized container, very angry at the world, and then you realize that this anger is futile, it’s not actually going to change what happened or make you feel better. But, forgiveness is not just this deflation. It’s also hardness and strength. Steel-liy resolving that although things have not gone as you wanted them to here, you will keep striving for your positive intention. But it’s not just steel. It’s also a flame flickering in the windy air, and butterfly flapping it’s wings on some green hills. In plainer English, it is a fragile yet beautiful hope.

Prefill

I’d like to have the following prefill.

Trigger: I’m telling a story about how something didn’t go the way that I’d hoped. Response: Instead of retelling my grievance story, articulate my positive intention, explain why it wasn’t guaranteed to be fulfilled, reaffirm my commitment to my positive intention, and think of if there are any interventions that are expedient to take in service of the positive intention.

Practice is also important. Practice redacted.