#1 Forgive for your own sake. We often talk about forgiveness as if it’s a gift to bestow on someone once they have apologized or made restitution. I suppose that paradigm works fine for everyday injuries like dinging a car door. But how could anyone ever make restitution for killing a person’s family member or terrorizing a nation? They can’t. That’s why it is important to grasp that “forgiveness is for you and not for anyone else,” says psychologist Frederic Luskin, director of the Stanford Forgiveness Project, a series of workshops and studies for people affected by everything from office politics to deadly international conflicts.
Forgiveness—deliberately letting go of negative feelings toward someone who has harmed you—appears to have significant health and wellness benefits for the person giving it. In an early seminal study, Luskin and his colleagues led a workshop for five women from Northern Ireland who had lost children to sectarian violence. After one week, not only did the women feel dramatically less hurt, their depression scores fell by 60 percent. Six months later the women reported feeling half as stressed as they had before the workshop. Many other studies since have come to similar conclusions: a 2014 meta-analysis of 54 studies linked increased feelings of forgiveness with significant reductions in depression and anxiety.
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