Why It Hurts to Hold a Grudge — and How to Let Go with Dr. Fred Luskin | The Happiness Lab

Key Takeaway

Forgiveness isn't about forgetting or condoning—it's about making peace with the word 'no.' When we hold onto grievances, we live life looking through the rearview mirror, letting the past colonize our present and future. Dr. Fred Luskin's research shows that forgiveness reduces depression, physical pain, and stress by up to three times. The key insight: forgiveness is a messy, gradual practice of unsticking the deed from the doer, allowing you to see the sunshine that never actually went anywhere.

Episode Overview

This episode explores the transformative power of forgiveness as a form of spring cleaning for your mental and emotional well-being. Dr. Fred Luskin from the Stanford Forgiveness Project shares research and personal experiences showing how holding onto grievances creates suffering, while forgiveness—defined as 'making peace with the word no'—leads to reduced depression, less physical pain, better sleep, and renewed capacity for joy. The episode also features theologian Miroslav Volf's family story of forgiving the soldier responsible for his brother's death, illustrating that forgiveness is not a one-time event but an ongoing practice that releases us from being held captive by the past.

Full Transcript

Transcript of Why It Hurts to Hold a Grudge — and How to Let Go with Dr. Fred Luskin | The Happiness Lab from The Happiness Lab. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

Hey, Happiness Lab listeners. It's finally spring, a season that's all about renewal and new beginnings. And of course, spring cleaning. As the weather gets a little warmer, we naturally get the itch to begin rejuvenating. This is the time of year when we say yes to clearing out our closets and refreshing our homes. It does feel great to freshen up our physical spaces, but could we take a similar approach to refreshing our well-being? Could we turn that spring cleaning urge towards pruning our junky habits or sweeping out our negative thought patterns?

We usually think of January 1st and the start of the new year as the time for goals like these, but studies have shown that the beginning of spring is also a great time for a happiness restart. Take one of my favorite studies by my friend, the psychologist Katie Milkman. She recruited a group of people who said they had a personal goal that they'd been putting off for a while. She then offered them the chance to receive a formal reminder that it was finally time to get started.

Half the participants were offered this formal reminder on some random day of the year. But the other half was offered that reminder on a day that felt like a new beginning, the first day of spring. What did Katie find? Well, more than three times as many people wanted to tackle their goal on the first day of spring rather than on some random day. I love these results because they show that our minds are always on the lookout for what Katie calls temporal fresh starts. Those special moments during the year when our motivation to make positive changes gets a boost.

So, in this new season of the Happiness Lab, we'll be harnessing the motivational power of springtime. We're going to apply the spring cleaning energy that we take to our closets to all the stuff that's cluttering up our minds. Over the next few episodes, we'll be exploring how you can freshen up your happiness strategies, tidy up your busy schedules, and purge all your harmful beliefs. And in honor of true spring cleaning, we'll be doing a bit of our own closet refresh as we go back into the Happiness Lab archive to find old school episodes and insights that you might have missed.

And in this first episode of our new spring cleaning season, I'm going to recommend that you start out by airing out your resentments. Today, we're going to hear about the mental cleansing power of forgiveness right after the Happiness Lab returns from these quick words from our sponsors. Grievances. They're pretty much part of human nature. When people hurt us or say mean stuff, the pain they cause tends to stick around, often for a long while. We might even spend years feeling angry or betrayed. But in the spirit of spring cleaning our happiness, what if you chose to drop each and every one of your painful grievances through the power of forgiveness?

Luckily, we have just the guest to help you get started on that journey. Well, hi. I'm Fred, director the Stamford Forgiveness Projects and um I taught at Stamford for decades. Fred is Dr. Fred Luskin, a psychologist and counselor who spent decades studying the psychological effects of forgiveness. Fred studies people who've survived bitter relationship breakdowns, physical assaults, and violent conflicts, as well as people who've had the usual tiny sorts of fights with their neighbors or co-workers. And in all these cases, he finds that forgiveness can be an unexpected path to peace.

But Fred's not just a scholar of forgiveness. He's also experienced the positive effects of this practice firsthand. It's often said that all research is research. Fred admits that this adage is definitely true in his case. A very close friend betrayed and abandoned me. abandoned me. abandoned me. Oh, I'm so sorry. I simply did not have the skills to cope with it. I developed an agitated depression. I kept busy. I moved. I became so much less hopeful. I had a a wife at that time and a child.

And I could no longer see the beauty of that. And I functioned. I mean, I was in the world. I was working, but not well. One day, my wife came to me and she said, "Fred, I love you. I just like you less." And it was a kick in the ass. And I started to look at what the hell was I doing ruining years. And I stumbled upon two very simple things. One, I could be grateful for what I had or complain about what I don't.

And second, I had been trained as a cognitive therapist, but I didn't use it on myself until that moment. And those two things helped me let go and develop the Stanford forgiveness project. project. project. And what's the Stanford forgiveness project? project? project? I did my dissertation on forgiveness. We got a big grant from the Templeton people to research forgiveness. I did work in Colombia and Sierra Leon. We brought people from Northern Ireland. I mean just all over the place. Because I'm at Stamford and Stanford has such a good name.

My work was publicized in a way that I had an opportunity to talk about forgiveness literally all over the world. And now I'm back again at the very end of my career trying to do a little more research to show that this stuff has value. To prepare for my interview with Fred, I read up on the Stanford Forgiveness Project and all of Fred's work with people who were caught up in the brutal conflicts in Northern Ireland. I found one story particularly moving. It involved a woman named Patrician McGee.

Patrician's brother was beaten to death in the early '90s. His killers were caught but soon freed from jail. They wound up living not too far from Patrician's home. Could you imagine having your brother's murderers living up the street from you? Just going about their daily life as if nothing had happened. That level of perceived injustice took a huge psychological toll on Patrician. She felt isolated and depressed. She couldn't even talk about the situation without falling apart. At first, she was reluctant to join Fred's forgiveness class.

She feared having to talk about her brother's killers. But that's not what Fred's program required. In class, Patricia met other Irish women who'd also lost loved ones to violence, and together they worked through their feelings. Afterwards, Fred measured the women's levels of depression, anger, and perceived stress. He also surveyed the degree of pain they felt over their loss. He found that the women's scores improved dramatically, and they weren't just feeling better. They reported having fewer headaches, less back pain, and even better sleep. Patrician was initially worried about the act of forgiveness, but the process of airing out her pain transformed her.

She was even able to talk about her brother without being reduced to tears. Examples like these are so powerful. But what does Fred's process entail? What's the kind of forgiveness Fred is recommending that we all pursue? There's a couple of definitions of forgiveness. Um, one more Webster like you know to give up resentment and to forswear forswear forswear holding on to bitterness. Our definition is making peace with the word no. And this came from literally years of working with so many people and hearing so much suffering and so much angst that we tried to look for what was the common denominator of all the suffering that we heard and what we came to was everyone there was saying I didn't get something I wanted and sometimes what I wanted I wanted desperately and I got no and I am unwilling to let go of that no to make peace.

I am going to complain till hell freezes over that I deserved a yes. We watched and realized that that was kind of a unifying thing around all the variety of stories and complaints that we heard. So my evolution of that is that forgiveness I now define is simply being at peace with your life right now, right here in total. I can be okay. I think misconception we have about forgiveness is that you have to connect with the person that you're forgiving. Can we have forgiveness without that moment of reconciliation with the person that hurt us?

The way we went through that was very simple. Can you forgive a dead person? The answer is yes. So that's the answer to your question. Um, you can be married, your partner can have an affair, affair, affair, you can reconcile and you can go home to them every day and hate them. Or they can have an affair. You can completely release them from blame and bitterness. You can open your heart back up to life and tell them, "We're done." So you can have complete forgiveness with no reconciliation.

reconciliation. reconciliation. They're not the same concept. I've also heard you talk about how forgiveness is about a change in your story. What What do you mean by that? That's another I guess learned clinical kind of thing. I mean, I started so long ago as a boring academic and I had these ideas about what forgiveness was and wasn't and then talking to like zillions of people who had horrible things happen and others who got bent out of shape because someone had built a fence an inch and a half onto their property line.

What I came to see that they actually brought was not what happened but their story. They brought a story about forgiveness or unforgiveness. or unforgiveness. or unforgiveness. And what we were trying to do was help them create a different story. So many people came into forgiveness with this sense of you forgive and forget. forget. forget. Mhm. What we understood was you forgive by remembering differently. You don't forget. You can't forget. We've I've dealt with many many people who have had family members murdered or, you know, people shot by 10year-olds with machine guns.

You don't forget, but if you're lucky and good, you can remember it differently. you reframe it enough and you quiet down your arousal so that you tell a different story and you believe a different story. I love that you brought up this idea that forgiveness isn't forgetting because I think that's a misconception that people have, right? That you need to forget the wrong or maybe trust the person. person. person. Can I tell you something that you may find peculiar at this point? If I walk with people, groups, individuals, at least a third of what we do is helping them understand what forgiveness is and is not.

But there is so much wrong understanding and even so much hostility. hostility. hostility. Yeah. It almost feels like sometimes I hear this idea that forgiveness is for suckers. It's weak. You know why? Why is that? Well, explain why that's wrong to the listeners. Well, if you view forgiveness as condoning bad behavior, then it seems weak. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But if you view forgiveness, and I'll give you two simple streams around this. One is One is One is fully grieving your wounds so that at the end of the grieving process, you can release that suffering.

Then you see that forgiveness is not such a weak thing. It takes real strength to feel the pain of being the human being and releasing that pain when appropriate. That takes real strength. The other thing is I mean having been a meditator or even as a therapist for decades, decades, decades, most people don't get better by avoiding pain. There are a lot of people stuck in peververative anger and endless resentment. resentment. resentment. None of them are appropriately feeling it, holding that suffering, knowing that something wrong has happened and letting go and moving on.

That's not weakness. That's brave. That's the right word. It's brave. So when we teach that's what we do. You're being brave. You're not being weak at all. But it is hard, right? And I think the fact that it's hard means we need to talk about the benefits of forgiveness or maybe what are the bad things that happen when we don't forgive. What's the value of it? Yeah. Or so what are the consequences for our mind and our body if we don't forgive? forgive? forgive? The first part is just because something is hard is hard is hard at some level we might benefit from growing up.

growing up. growing up. Yes. Yes. Yes. And not resisting everything that's hard. hard. hard. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm. It's hard in part because one, we have untrained minds which do not know how to separate wheat from chaff. you know, between the chatter and maybe more centered contemplative thinking. So, anything that asks us to do that is hard. Secondly, forgiveness is hard because we're acknowledging a world where painful things can happen and that we are vulnerable. We are absolutely vulnerable. And so instead of opening to that vulnerability, vulnerability, vulnerability, we create this massive complex of no, stop it, it's wrong, I can't take it, all the distortions.

But it is very hard for a human being to admit that they can't protect themselves or their loved ones from certain things. So that's the hard part. The forgiveness piece of moving through it without coming at the end with bitterness and maybe even a story that talks about the growth. the growth. the growth. That leads to less stress. It leads to more hopefulness. more hopefulness. more hopefulness. We've shown that in our research for people who have been really badly wounded. It leads to less depression. It reduces pain and that's in part because the pain systems between emotional pain and physical pain once that becomes chronic they're joined.

So forgiveness is a a release. We stop making our life worse. And so you mentioned in your origin story this kind of awful story of being betrayed, but it seems like you also came to forgiveness from more of a spiritual practice, too. You talk about being a old hippie. And so I want to see how that fits into the forgiveness story. story. story. I started the project but my advisor, he was very helpful cuz he had decades of contact and I was just a graduate student.

We had a discussion as to whether we wanted to do only a secular training or a religious training as well cuz we didn't know enough. So I went around, I started to talk to religiously oriented people and they were almost impossible to engage with because they were so rigid on their religion being like the only religion. So I would give talks a little bit to Christian places and then say, "We like what you do. There's not enough Jesus." And I'd give talks at Buddhist places and that's great, but there's not enough Buddha.

Why are you talking about other people? I went to yoga centers. I was like, wonderful, but yoga says this and you said that. So, we dropped the religious thing pretty quickly. It was like living in the United States now between red states and blue states where there's such a mistrust and such a righteousness. righteousness. righteousness. Anyway, I personally and my mentor had a meditation practice when we started and a very simple spiritual belief that there's something essential and unchanging and similar that joins everything. I don't teach that directly, but it informs how I see things.

I found Fred's point about religion really interesting. Many religious faiths recommend that their followers practice forgiveness, but hardly any of us think deeply about what that act really means. After the break, Fred will share some examples of real world forgiveness. He'll also give us some tips on how we can start forgiving right away. The Happiness Lab will be right back. Dr. Fred Luskin has run workshops as part of the Stanford Forgiveness Project for decades. He says it takes quite a mind shift to truly understand what forgiveness entails and the benefits it can offer us.

But he does have a few practical tips for getting there. One is start small. practice on your own before you do anything. Like when you're in the shower, just talk. Can I forgive them? What might that look like? What would that mean? And third, the best place to start is where it really matters with people who you love and love you because that's the most important work you have to do is to build your relationships and maintain them. And there's good research that forgiveness is at the heart of marriage maintaining itself.

Okay, that's the first stream. The second is the practices are very easy. Probably the first and most important practice is gratitude. If you can not just look at what the world didn't give you, but balance it with what the world did give you, then maybe you can see things more clearly. So that's one. Second is some kind of cognitive piece. The simplest is just to repeat to yourself the rolling stones. I can't always get what I want. I I mean that as simple as you can make it.

I can't always get what I want. Third is what we talked about before. Simply try out different stories. One of the ways I kept myself miserable was telling the same story over and over and over and over. And then you think it's like you're Moses carrying up the tablets rather than just a cranky pain in the butt. And the fourth piece is in understanding understanding understanding that forgiveness is about the past or the grievance is about the past. Your life is in the present. So you need to have more of your stories, your focus, your awareness on your present and creating a future than about what did or didn't go right in the past.

Those are four incredibly simple practices. When we combine that with what forgiveness is and isn't, and isn't, and isn't, many people take that and make improvement. improvement. improvement. You've also talked about how forgiveness is embodied, like using the breath to forgive. forgive. forgive. Oh, absolutely. So, what are some strategies we can pick up on there? I mean, I'm sure we're in alignment with this considering what you teach and what I've teach. It's hard to fully separate the mind and the body, whatever the soul is, our emotions.

You know, there's a brain and the gut. We don't have accurate words to understand all the linkages, but we know that there is a link between mind and body and between thoughts and emotions. So the two things that we have found really help people to forgive is to remind them that when you're upset, calm down. But calm down for at least me had two pieces to it. One is the simplest. Anchor in your center. Take a couple of breaths. Activate a different thing than the fight orflight response and learn some ability to manage your breathing.

Second is touch something positive, love, awe, kindness, goodness, whatever, and hold it. Just hold it inside. And when you practice that, as your body arouses, you can counter condition the stress response. So it's simple, but that's often how we start. So let me tell you one story about that. We brought brought brought men and women from Northern Ireland who had had family members murdered in their violence. We brought Catholics and Protestants. and they came and about I don't know how long into it they were telling their story and we took a break and we brought them over to the window at one of the buildings at Stanford on the fifth floor and these people you know they had all had horrible things and they had just flown in from Belfast and what we had them do is open their arms pulled all the windows open and said feel the sun's rays and welcome it.

Welcome that warmth. Welcome it. Open yourself to it. And just recognize that you can do this at any time. And when you do that, your nervous system quiets and it gentles and you're not the same agrieved person. agrieved person. agrieved person. It's a body experience, too. You mentioned your experience in the origin story about feeling betrayed. During that period of feeling betrayed, what was going on for you physically, mentally? You know, you talked about how your wife was noticing an I would like rope in people from the street and say, "You wouldn't believe what this jerk did." Always talking about how bad he was.

Regularly, I sat my wife down and said, "You wouldn't believe what this jerk did. Poor me." She would tell me things about how life is not that bad. I would rebut them. I took my friends that were loyal and took them for granted. I would go into places of beauty and miss it. So those actions created in me a sense of alienation, a inability to experience that much joy and demanded of my wife and my friends who could still tolerate me great forbearance. forbearance. forbearance. And I think everybody who's listening right now can relate a little bit, right?

Because when you're in your own head and you're feeling so agrieved, you don't treat the people around you very well. well. well. Do you know one of the reasons that I could do this was when I started teaching forgiveness and at that point there were maybe three studies in the field. So it it barely existed. I could sit with people who had the most awful things happen to them. I couldn't relate to what had happened, but I could relate to the suffering that they were causing themselves.

And that empathy and whatever that's how the forgiveness project flourished because I wasn't interested in the content. content. content. Like I knew that there were so many ways that people can be hurt, but the content wasn't the issue. What I saw was the process because I had done it myself. So I was like one of the sponsors in AA where I knew every piece of that people would put out. I knew every crevice of denial and lying and self-absorption. self-absorption. self-absorption. I had been to everyone and milked it for all it was worth.

That's where my empathy and that's where my strength came in. came in. came in. And so what's on the other side if you can get to forgiveness? What's the opposite of being the for you and maybe for everyone you've taught to forget? forget? forget? If I can do it, they can do it. Yeah. No, just like what emotions are on the other side of getting past it. What emotions are on the other side? They're not just emotions. There's cognitions with the emotions. The biggest is efficacy is a sense of peace on the one side and less fear on the other because I no longer was so frightened about what people could do to me.

I recognized that I had been through a crucible and I had come out the other side. So there was less fear and more peace. But there was also a cognitive thing of Fred, you can do this. So you don't have to run away from people. I had developed mistrust and bitterness. Well, Fred, you don't need that so much because you're not so weak. The second was a deeper appreciation for what was good. Because once you've handled what is a for me at that time a devastating wound this was my closest friend almost a brother I mean good news is we're the best of friends again 100% forgiveness 100% reconciliation it's now water under the bridge it means nothing there's not a ripple of anything but it took quite a bit to get there.

But I I became more thankful and more appreciative appreciative appreciative of when people do good to me. But I realized that that was what forgiveness facilitated facilitated facilitated because I could now respond to all that was there that my wound had obscured. So the metaphor I created for that was a grievance was like an eclipse of the sun. sun. sun. So you have the sun, it's shining. All of a sudden I put my friend there. There's no sunshine anymore. I blame my friend even though the sun didn't go anywhere.

All I have to do is walk a a mile and the sun's there. That's how I defined what forgiveness is. You take your eclipse away. You move away. And the sun never went anywhere. So the beauty never went anywhere. The love never went anywhere. All the world's goodness still intact, but you can see it again. it again. it again. I absolutely love Fred's metaphor here, that forgiveness can give you the opportunity to see all the hidden warmth and beauty that never really went anywhere. But what does it really look like to find that warmth and beauty in practice?

To find out, we'll turn to the Happiness Lab archives and one of my favorite stories of just how tough and rewarding true forgiveness can be. You'll get a chance to rehear that powerful story when the Happiness Lab returns from the break. I can hear you. Great. Yeah, that sounds good. This is my Yale colleague, Mirislav Wolf. Wolf. Wolf. So, I think we are on. We are recording. Miruslav is a theologian at the Yale Divinity School and the author of free of charge, giving and forgiving in a culture stripped of grace.

Miruslav joined me on the Happiness Lab a few years ago for an episode on the power of forgiveness and his experience growing up in the former socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. I still find myself regularly thinking back to his family story. So, in the spirit of our new spring cleaning season, I've decided to pull out his interview from deep in the happiness lab closets and reshare this Vulf family tale of both awful tragedy and the healing power of forgiveness. My older brother, who was five at that time, was one of the liveliest kids in the neighborhood.

He loved to connect with people and in the vicinity of where we lived the soldiers were stationed and he befriended those soldiers. They loved him. They were his soldiers and he was so proud of them. And often what would happen is that they would play with him. And at one point they took him driving in the horsedrawn carriage to have a ride with them. And as they were driving under a doorpost, his head got stuck between the doorpost and uh that uh that that carriage, my father carried him for about 15 20 minutes, ran with him to the nearby ambulance, and by the time they arrived, he had died.

I mean, I'm sure it was awful, but what was that moment like for your family? U kind of utter devastation, obviously. Especially for for for my mother, there were a kind of sense of almost a rage about what had occurred. And I think one of the most significant things that happened in that story is that after my brother was killed, both my mother and my father independently of each other decided to forgive the soldier. They sought also the soldier and to talk to him so that it doesn't remain simply something that happened within their their own selves but became a gift that they offered to him and it was both incredibly freeing for them at the same time especially for for my mother to transcend the inner rage to transcend this deep sorrow that gripped her.

It was one of the most difficult things that she had done. One of the biggest insights I remember from my initial conversation with Muslav was the way his family's experiences helped him to fully rethink the way he defined the act of forgiveness. Forgiveness has a structure of a gift. Somebody gives something to somebody else. Now the one who gives is the one who has been injured in this case. The one who receives is the injurer. And what one gives is forgiveness. And the content of forgiveness is not counting the wrongdoing that a person has committed against them.

You can put it this way. To unstick the deed from the door. That's what forgiveness does. Forgiveness is this very arduous process at the end of which there is a sense of release. release from the burden of the internal turmoil. A sense of having done something that deep down within us many of us feel is right thing to do but that it is very difficult to do. A kind of release into new possibilities for the future that precisely this wrongdoing has robbed us from. I mean if I think of my mother's example, it turns us completely backward.

We are fascinated, we are captured, we are held captive by that which has happened in the past. We return back to it and pretty soon we start living our lives in such a way that we look not ahead but through rear view mirror. So that this kind of colonization of our present and of our future by the past is a very troubling and difficult experience. And I think one of the things that forgiveness does it makes it possible for us to open and have wide horizon and not always look into the future filter through the past.

Life becomes better when we are able to forgive. when we are able to transcend preoccupation with the self which injury often understandably causes. And so this moment of self-trcendence of transcendence of the self that has been injured and growing into something that is beyond that which the injured self is is a therapeutic as an act itself and it has this important positive consequences for the rest of our lives. And so talk about how that's helped your family heal after your brother's death. For my mother in particular, but for both of my parents, there was a sense of being able to turn from the injury to the life as bits being lived.

And very early in the experience, she was uh she was mourning. And mourning of course closed her within her own world. Nothing else mattered than the loss that she had just suffered. But at the same time, she had two kids who needed her attention. And forgiveness made it possible for her to shift and to recognize the good which was around her, to invest herself into the good which was around her, you know. And in some ways this is this is really a strange and a little bit burdensome to think of it uh that way that I who was then one years old when that occurred.

I have probably benefited from the attention that was given to me both by my nanny and by my mother after my my brother's death. But it was for her release into the future, giving of the hope and possibility to invest herself in something that matters and that that affirms the good. But her experience and my study of my experience and my study of forgiveness um always says that it forgiveness isn't one-time event. You forgive and then you start moving forward. You always return to it. You forgive and then you take back what you have forgiven at at moments and then you forgive again.

You forgive some parts of it but not the whole of it. It's a messy process of forgiveness. And if we are not happy with the messiness of it, we want to have it clean. We probably won't ever get to forgiveness. And it's in this messiness in this gradual character of forgiveness that we actually grow into forgiveness. Then forgiveness ends up not being so much an act as it ends up being a practice. What an important insight. Like so many of the other happiness strategies we talk about in this show, forgiveness is a practice, a skill that we can build up over time if we're willing to put the work in.

But as you've heard from our two guests today, the benefits of airing out all our leftover grievances are much more powerful than we usually expect. Let's face it, we're all going to get hurt by somebody at some point. But we only make that hurt worse when we hold on to our pain, letting grudges blot out all the good things we still have in life. So this springtime, why not take a look at the grievances, big and small, that might be sitting there in the back of your emotional closet?

Why not ask yourself how much lighter you'd feel if you cleared out all that unnecessary junk suffering? Why not give yourself the gift of forgiveness? forgiveness? forgiveness? In our next episode in this new season on spring cleaning your well-being, we'll turn back again to the Happiness Lab archive. We'll get some throwback insights about successful strategies for clearing out our bad habits, and we'll hear some evidence-based tips to make new space for the healthier kinds of goals that we all want to pursue. When you observe people, when they are being effective at controlling their behavior and doing the right thing, they're not exerting willpower.

What people do is they set up the situations around them to make it easy to repeat the desired behavior. We don't realize how much of that we really could harness if we just knew how it worked. That's all next time in our special spring cleaning season of the happiness lab with me, Dr. Lauri Santos.