Berkeley Talks: How forgiveness changes you and your brain

(Music: “No One Is Perfect” by HoliznaCC0)

Anne Brice (intro): This is Berkeley Talks, a UC Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at Berkeley. You can follow Berkeley Talks wherever you listen to your podcasts. We’re also on YouTube @BerkeleyNews. New episodes come out every other Friday. You can find all of our podcast episodes, with transcripts and photos, on UC Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.

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Emiliana Simon-Thomas: Welcome everyone. We are so pleased that you’re joining us for this special and exciting webinar on How Forgiveness Changes You and Your Brain being offered by the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. I am Emiliana Simon-Thomas. I’m the science director of the Greater Good Science Center. My background is in neuroscience and social psychology. I’m particularly interested in pro-social emotions, feelings like compassion and gratitude, and of course, the kinds of experiences that help us reconcile differences in conflict like forgiveness. 

I am so lucky to be joined today by friends and colleagues with a tremendous amount of fabulous expertise in the science and practice of forgiveness. But before I get started, I’m curious who’s here? Where are you joining us from? I wonder if folks who are here in the webinar with us would be willing to post in the YouTube chat or the LinkedIn chat, who you are, where you’re coming from, and maybe something about why you’re interested in the science and practice of forgiveness.

All right, super exciting. Looks like lots of people from all around. So forgiveness, this is this idea that most people endorse, most people feel like is a virtue or the right thing to do, but can often be more challenging than we expect in actual day-to-day life. So we’re here to talk about why it is actually worth aspiring to and maybe some of the special approaches and strategies that folks might use to incorporate more forgiveness into their daily lives. 

So what does the science tell us about how forgiveness works in the body and in the brain? And how can mental health care professionals and also just anyone move towards forgiveness in ways that feel safe, that feel empowering, and that are grounded in our true lived experiences? These are the questions that we’re going to be talking through together. Again, I’m so fortunate to be joined by Allison Briscoe-Smith and Melike Fourie, and rather than introducing them with my voice, I would like to invite you, Allison and Melike to introduce yourselves to all the folks who are joining us in this session.

Allison Briscoe-Smith: Sure. I’ll introduce myself first. My name is Allison Briscoe-Smith. I am a child clinical psychologist and a senior fellow at the Greater Good Science Center. So the bulk of my work is serving kids and families who’ve been deeply impacted by issues of trauma and oppression, experiences of violence, and it’s through that that I have learned a whole lot about forgiveness.

Melike Fourie: Thank you. Thank you both for that warm introduction. So my name is Melike Fourie. I’m from the Neuroscience Institute at the University of Cape Town. We recently developed a new Master of Neuroscience program, which I convene there. I’m also a clinical neuropsychologist, but my research concerns social phenomena so I’m a social neuroscientist. I’m interested in affective phenomena, things like guilt and pride and empathy. I’ve done a lot of work on empathy, but more recently I’ve really become interested in intergroup processes and things that play out in that space. And that is also where I’ve come to work with forgiveness and processes like humanization. But yeah, all in a social context between individuals and between groups.

Emiliana Simon-Thomas: Well, again, I want to express my sincere and heartfelt thanks to both of you for joining us and providing your extraordinary expertise in this space. I think to get everybody oriented, I would love to invite us to discuss just a definition. What do we mean? I think forgiveness can mean different things to different people. Some of the reasons why forgiveness might feel particularly challenging can be because people define it in a way that maybe is overwhelming or inaccessible. So I’d love for us to share this foundational shared understanding of: What do we mean when we say forgiveness? How do we define it scientifically and clinically?

Melike Fourie: Great. That’s a very good place to start because forgiveness is one of those complex phenomena that has actually been plagued by definitional controversies for so many years. For years, research has been wondering: How do we define it? How do people forgive and why do we forgive and whether or not there’s actually a religious phenomenon that should be confined to their religious inquiry. But more recently, I would say in the last 25 years or so, we’ve started empirically examining forgiveness. Before that, you wouldn’t have found a single psychological study on forgiveness and trying to measure it. So now, and this is Allison where I’m going to ask you to share that slide. So what does science say? How do we try to bottle smoke at the moment?

So the first thing to understand about forgiveness is that it’s multidimensional. This is what tends to happen when we try to define very complex social phenomena. They consist of component parts. It’s not just one thing. So the definition you see there is one that I really like and I’m going to read it out. It defines forgiveness as a shift in interpersonal motivation away from retaliation and avoidance towards increased goodwill with a perceived wrongdoer. And if you kind of take that apart, you can see three attributes emerging there. The first part is a letting go. So letting go of the negative effect of ruminative thought. The second part, and the part that’s harder to do for most of us is the altruistic gift to give forgiveness in essence is actually viewed as a gift to someone who has harmed you. And that is the changing in motivation away from the negative affect towards increased goodwill for the person who has harmed you.

And then the third attribute is something that we also lose thought of, and that is the temporal unfolding, what we call the calculation time. And that it’s so important to understand that forgiveness takes time usually depending on the level of harm that’s been inflicted, but it tends to involve working through the pain. And it may start with a decision to forgive, but it’s only complete once. All those sort of feelings of resentment and retaliation maybe have been put aside. And then I want to just highlight two different kinds of forgiveness that we distinguish between. The one is decisional forgiveness, which is a more sort of a cold, cognitive kind of forgiveness.

I think this is typically what we do when we forgive strangers or people who we don’t stand in a relationship with. We decide to forgive them, but it’s not necessarily that coming full circle that necessarily feeling warm towards them again, which is more what emotional forgiveness involves when we truly want to forgive someone that we stand in relationship with or whether that we expect to continue affiliation with loved ones typically so that when we forgive those a more multifaceted change in cognition, affect, and motivation to sort of get to that authentic place where you can really say you’ve let it go and you forgive that person. I’m going to stop there. I think Allison has things that she wants to add in her experience.

Allison Briscoe-Smith: Sure. I think the big piece to think about is even defining forgiveness. What I see so often clinically is people’s struggle with particular ideas, notions about what forgiveness even is and actually including some myths around it. And so some of the common kind of myths are that forgiveness means that I have to continue to be hurt or that I have to forget or that it’s dangerous, but those aren’t the same kind of definitions. And so again, I think a lot of it is really just figuring out what it is. And I think Melike has provided here a really wonderful definition, a definition that we can hold onto. And if you actually decide, OK, it means letting go, it means kind of my motivation is not so much toward negativity toward them, but perhaps actually kindness toward myself. There’s a way that we can sink into this definition.

But again, what I see coming up as a therapist or within communities is that we are burdened with problematic ideas about what forgiveness means. And even the talking through of what it could be can be really helpful. We received lots and lots of questions that were really about this point about, well, what is it and when I forgive them and am I letting them step all over me? No, that’s not … Let’s define it together. This definition, and this is both one that’s kind of empirical and science, but it’s also one that’s really helpful for us to not carry such a heavy burden about what we think forgiveness really is.

Emiliana Simon-Thomas:

One thing that’s so interesting about the definition that you shared, Melike and Allison, your reflections on it is that no part of the definition refers to the harm doer or to the other person or any substantive impact or change in them, right? I think one of the myths about forgiveness or barriers to the urge to forgive is that somehow not forgiving is impacting the other person. And by forgiving, you’re actually also impacting the other person. But truly what I’m seeing in this definition is that forgiveness is about the self. It’s about your own emotional experience. It’s about changing how you’re thinking about yourself and another person.

It’s changing or reframing your residual feelings about a particular and shifting those feelings and thoughts in a way that is truly beneficial to yourself. Not necessarily I’m doing this for the benefit of the other, but really for yourself and perhaps the altruistic gift part, there is a dimension of that as the kind of advanced sort of final stages of forgiveness play out that maybe does influence the other person if they happen to be proximal or still part of your lived experiences. But for all intents and purposes, even that altruistic gift is something that you’re doing for your own sense of contentment and balance and worth in this particular context. Does that sound right to you guys?

Allison Briscoe-Smith: Yeah, definitely. And I think there’s even some initial research to suggest that that altruistic gift, which I think you said something that’s really important might happen at the end of this journey, might be late in the temporal unfolding. But there’s a sense that actually when you are sitting in that place of like, “I’ve offered this kind of gift of my forgiveness to somebody else,” you feel better, your esteem kind of comes up. So you feel like you’ve got the kind of integrity and our values and virtue to align with how you want to be. But again, the piece that’s really helpful in this definition is this takes time, temporal unfolding and lots and lots of work. But I’d love to hear what you think, Melike.

Melike Fourie: This is such a wonderful conversation. You guys have both brought up such important points. One thing I want to add to that, especially to what you said, Emiliana, is that the common misperception that people oftentimes have is that they confuse forgiveness with reconciliation and forgiveness stops before that. So prosocial affiliation, I mean to use all these big science words, is the downstream behavior from forgiveness, but it’s not necessary. So you can forgive and let someone to go and wish them well and decide that this relationship no longer benefits you. And that ties in with the personal benefit. So forgiveness really is, I mean it serves an evolutionary role in sort of preserving our social bonds, but it also preserves your own wellbeing.

Emiliana Simon-Thomas: Yeah. Wonderful. So on that note, what does science really reveal or have to say? And specifically the neuroscience, what’s happening in our bodies and our brains when we decide and/or go through that emotional process of releasing in order to forgive, and I’m curious both for the kind of low stakes forgiveness around maybe being interrupted by a colleague at a meeting in a way that’s embarrassing or the higher stakes forgiveness for life events that, Allison, you have worked with in the course of your professional services. What does science have to say? And Melike, I think you have some slides around that.

Melike Fourie: Great. So let’s jump into a little bit of the neuroscience. I’m going to make this really simple so that you get a general sense. I think it’s really helpful to break forgiveness down into these components because it also creates awareness for us in terms of how to understand it better and how to regulate ourselves better. So in doing this, we did a net analysis or a review of several neuroimaging studies, basically all the ones that’s been conducted up to date and we tried to, together with the psychological literature, sort of pass those into components that tend to come up a lot in these studies. So the first component that maps onto defined neural circuitry is that of cognitive control. You may be familiar with it, and this is a very important aspect of forgiveness. When one wants to forgive or one would like to forgive someone, you need to overcome strong negative emotions, remittative thoughts or even vengeful impulses.

And this is the part that usually creates the negative sense of self associated with the stress related outcomes for people. So various lines of evidence support this. So people with greater dispositional cognitive control are also less likely to show aggressive behaviors against transgressors and they score higher on forgiveness measures. So the neural areas that typically are involved in regulating our emotions, it’s a very much a top-down cognitive effort. So it’s neocortical areas that are involved in this is the lateral prefrontal cortex, both the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. And then also if you split the brain down the middle, the anterior cingulate cortex, shown there in yellow. So whereas the lateral areas of the cortex are involved in goal-directed or top-down regulatory control, the anterior cingulate cortex alerts us when there’s conflicting responses or when we’re unsure how to respond to different stimuli. If we might be torn between vengeful impulses or appeasement or not harming someone, you’ll probably see this conflict area lighting up.

So I’m sure all of you can see how this component is involved in forgiveness. Allison, we can go to the second one, which is perspective taking. So this is a really important part of forgiveness. 85% of the studies that we reviewed had some areas involved in this network activated when people demonstrated forgiveness. So maybe I should backtrack a little bit. 

All of us have the capacity to attribute mental states to others. This is called theory of mind. We all have desires, intentions, and this is something that we do seamlessly. So perspective taking is a little bit more deliberate when we effortfully try to understand someone’s perspective. When we put ourselves in somebody else’s shoes and we try to understand why they did something or what maybe triggered something for them, what was their background, what was their situational context? And as I’m talking, I’m sure you can understand why this is an important aspect of forgiveness because one often wants to know the intentions of the wrongdoer.

Did they mean to harm me or was it an accident? And that plays a very important role in our decision to forgive. So in the brain, the neural network that is involved in this mentalizing or perspective taking is very well-defined. It includes the mesial aspects of the prefrontal cortex, the medial prefrontal cortex, and then also going further along the medial axis there, the precuneus. And then if you go to the outer surface of the cortex, the temporal parietal junction, it’s that piece of the brain that intersects with the parietal, the temporal and occipital lobes. That area seems to be really, really important. And when we try to imagine somebody else’s perspective, when we make distinctions between self and other.

And then the last component is something that we have called social valuation. So one of the important things to understand about forgiveness is that it’s really exquisitively context dependent, which means that it cannot be predicted. And science, we say it’s unconditioned by the behavior that provoked it. So one can never say these kinds of behaviors are forgivable, and those kinds of behaviors are not forgivable. It really depends on every situation, on every individual. And through our evolutionary history, we develop the mechanism to decide when is it worth our while to forgive someone when there’s benefits for us, when it makes sense? And this sort of implicit value tagging, this cost benefit analysis, we can ascribe to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. It’s a very important area in assigning subjective value to stimuli. And it’s also very important in moral and social decision-making.

So some theorists would argue that forgiveness lies somewhere between two decisions. The first being how important is this relationship to you? So the relationship value, and the second being how likely is this transgression to happen again? So is there a possibility for being exploited again in future? And all of these things to consider play into your decision of whether you would eventually forgive someone. Things like apologies, did the perpetrator sound sincere? Was the apology costly? Did it cost them something? Or was it sort of a cheap apology? Did they look like they regret the action? All of those things we use to get to these questions, is it likely to happen again? And how important is this relationship to you?

So the last slide, if we put all of that together, we’ve just kind of made a map here of the different areas that are involved. So the red and orange areas, they are the ones involved in the top-down cognitive control. So controlling our ruminative thoughts, controlling that negative effect, and sort of making a conscious decision that we want to down-regulate those. The blue areas are those that are important for perspective-taking and mentalizing, effortfully or deliberately trying to understand somebody else’s perspective and what potentially played into the decision or the act that harmed you. Maybe it was unintentional.

And then the green era there, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex that’s intricately involved in value tagging and sort of that decisional forgiveness, the cost-benefit analysis. What decision is going to be best for me? Is it going to be worth my while to restore this relationship or not? And then the last thing I just want to highlight is that forgiveness is likely to be greater than the sum of its parts. We talk about the emergence of forgiveness. It’s not something that you can predict, but it’s interconnected between these different systems and how they play out over time. And I think we’ve already touched on forgiveness versus reconciliation.

Emiliana Simon-Thomas: We are so remarkably fortunate to hear that succinct and concise overview of these neural systems, structures and pathways that are involved when people experience or intentionally go through a process of forgiveness. And one tiny thing that comes up for me is that it’s not just the case that these processes, cognitive control, perspective taking, social valuation, have to happen in order to support forgiveness just for forgiveness, but actually exercising those pathways, engaging those systems and structures has benefits for mental health writ large. There are ways that being better at regulating our emotions in any difficult situation is beneficial and exercising those skills of perspective-taking and tuning into how we value social relationships and opportunities and go through that kind of cost benefit process, which sometimes can be kind of habitual and automatic, actually tuning in and noticing how we do it and being more intentional about it is a process that can really strengthen our social relationships writ large.

We can get better at forming those long-term meaningful social bonds that make us live longer, healthier lives. So on that note, Allison, I’d love for you to share what some of the approaches are that you might take to help someone decide to forgive. Some people on this session might go, “OK, got it. The brain science convinced me. I’m ready.” But for a lot of us other kinds of guidance and help taking some charge of our emotions and thinking about a past harm in a particular way might shift us in a positive direction. What do you do?

Allison Briscoe-Smith: Yeah, so in the context of the ways that I work with folks who have typically suffered childhood trauma and/or have suffered from other types of violence or harm, I have to say that the majority of the time, I’m not the one that brings up forgiveness as a therapist. It’s not that I’m leading them to that kind of space. I have to say it’s something that I’ve seen and witnessed folks moving to a journey on their own. And I think you kind of mentioned it, a lot of what I do and a lot of the approaches that we have about treating trauma happen to focus on cognitive control, affect regulation, perspective-taking and social evaluation. We are in our space, we’re actually talking about how do I get in touch with and manage my overwhelming sense of harm? How do I think about myself, in relationship to that harm?

What are the ways that we do this? And so we can think about, and many folks listening might actually think about kind of an avoidance and that what we do in trauma therapy is that we help people tell the story and no longer avoid. There’s lots of different pathways to that, whether it’s trauma-focused, cognitive behavioral therapy or narrative therapy or EMDR, we can name them all, but they all require us to tell the story about what happened and what happened to us. Then we also have to do this layer about understanding the context, understanding the kind of impact. So we’re actually exercising each of these components as Melike kind of talked about. And then what I’ve seen and learned, and I’ve been really actually quite impacted by as a person is watching and seeing folks who have been so incredibly harmed, incredibly harmed by people that they were dependent upon, harmed by their parents, harmed by folks that they had to rely upon how they have moved towards forgiveness.

That doesn’t mean, as was said, reconciliation, and actually what it’s meant in every of the cases that I’ve kind of worked with, it has meant a clarification of boundaries, a clarification of what harm has manifested, has emerged with folks being safer. But again, and we’ve kind of talked about this, it has been one of the most compassionate offerings that these folks are offering to the people who harm them. But more importantly for healing of themselves. The weight that is lifted and how good they feel about themselves, when I have worked through this journey, I know how to be in or out of relationship with this person, I have an understanding perhaps, or I’ve let go of the need to have an understanding about why they’ve harmed me.

It has happened in places where I didn’t think it was possible. I know we got a lot of questions about, “What about in the context of trauma? What about in the context of childhood trauma?” I just have to say that I’ve been blessed to be on this journey with so many folks that find that on their own, and it’s really, really helpful, I think, not to have had them pressured, “You better forgive.” Forgiveness is not a requisite, I don’t think, for their healing or their ability to tell the story. So that’s just some of the kind of meanderings that I have in mind. But the breaking down of these components I think is incredibly, incredibly helpful to just sense of.

Emiliana Simon-Thomas: Yeah. Melike, did you have any thoughts in this same area? I know that you have experience working with clients and interacting around forgiveness opportunities, any reflections from you?

Melike Fourie: So maybe one thing I could add to that, because I think it’s really difficult to see forgiveness as a 10-step process and then you’re going to get there. So I’ve tended to think about what helps forgiveness, and we’ve talked about time, so I think we tend to forget about time, but time heals. But the other thing that I’d like to bring into this is space. And that is creating spaces where people can have facilitated conversations and where there’s a real opportunity to listen and for dialogue. And I know thinking back about my own life experiences, the audience might go, “Oh yeah, wow, that’s not going to happen.” But I think if one is in a room together with a person who’s harmed you and there can be a facilitator, there’s a real opportunity to engage with the why, to maybe reframe, to understand the context.

It can even be the sociopolitical context of the harm that was perpetrated. And then there’s a real, and if you don’t come into that space with the idea that I’m expecting forgiveness by the end of it, but if you just let what should unfold, unfold. There’s an opportunity there for what my previous colleague, Professor Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, she’s termed the “empathic repair.” And in that process of empathic repair, there can be healing and mutual understanding and recognition of the other.

So I’ve seen in my work, in her research unit, there’s often been situations where we either saw videos but of victims and perpetrators. So these were gross human rights violations. So it’s a little bit different, but the most terrible acts were committed. And in those spaces, very often the victims found it in their hearts to forgive and it really set the perpetrator free. But having said that, you can’t get into a space like that and expect it to unfold. But on some small level, I think even with our loved ones with those really hard relationships, if it is possible, I think a facilitated space to kind of process that might be helpful.

Emiliana Simon-Thomas: Wonderful. What I’m hearing from both of what you’re sharing is that there’s some great promise in hearing stories from one another. And in particular, I’m often drawn to really profound and inspirational stories of forgiveness and Melike, you were alluding to some of those bigger global geopolitical scenarios where groups or communities have elected or decided that forgiveness and restoration is the path of interest. So I’m curious about that as a strategy that connecting with the possibility or hearing stories of forgiveness that really inspire a person in day-to-day life, maybe a person who is in this session now who might not have access to some of the spaces that you’re talking about or the clinical services, or maybe they don’t feel like their residual harm is serious enough to warrant some kind of clinical intervention. So knowing that forgiveness is this complex process and it takes time and that there are things that anyone can do in their day-to-day life to cultivate forgiveness.

For example, maybe just exercising, doing a practice of perspective-taking or about a perpetrator or a harm doer, where you visualize them as a small vulnerable child who has made a mistake. Generally adults will interact with that context in a more generous and compassionate way and more understanding way, “Oh, it’s a child they didn’t know, or their mistakes are somehow easier to embrace.” So that’s one example. But what are some other practices or activities or strategies that folks might take just in their day-to-day life to get closer to the possibility of finding forgiveness? And if you want to guide something for all of those who’ve joined us, please, that would be wonderful.

Allison Briscoe-Smith: Well, I think there’s so many different kind of pathways and options. So I think that’s also one of the kind of pieces is to kind of offer. There are multiple pathways and options. It would be great if there was a recipe for it. I think Melike has kind of said, it’d be great, “These are the four steps to kind of do.” But again, because of the piece that Melike kind of highlighted in the way that our brain works, the context dependence is really, really challenging. So there’s two things I would like to say around that, one of which is I think getting in touch with the stories of forgiveness are really, really helpful. Can you read a thing? Can you listen to a blog? But I also want to encourage folks, if you see that, get curious. Because what I often find is that people will hear the story and they’ll say, “That could never be me. That could never be me.”

So let’s get curious around, “I wonder what that was like. How hard was it? What did it take to get curious?” Sometimes what we’re getting is the TikTok memeification of a forgiveness kind of thing in 60 seconds. And what ends up happening so often is that people turn that in on themselves. “I must be a bad person because I can’t forgive.” So one, seek out the stories, but get curious about the stories. Know that you’re only seeing 60 seconds of it. Really, if you can capture or hear more of the nuance about what that was like, look for it in movies, look for it in storytelling, there may be that.

The second kind of practice that I would really kind of think about is honestly self-compassion. There’s tons of wonderful research and lots of good resources. But very simply, it’s the idea of slowing down, taking a pause, being mindful and present, getting in touch with how you feel and offering yourself kindness. It’s also about understanding common humanity. This is hard for people to do. No wonder I feel kind of upset, but I think offering ourselves the grace and internal mercy for ourselves is really a helpful piece of this, that to let go of, “I’m angry that I’m so angry.” Lots of people would be angry in this circumstance. I’m going to just take a moment to be there with my anger and offer myself kind of kindness around it. So what things can you kind of offer to yourself?

An analogy comes to mind, and I’m sure this has been written about and there’s better analogies out there, but it’s as if someone has taken a knife and harmed you and you’ve grabbed onto that knife and you hold onto it and you hold onto it and you hold on tight. A compassionate self-compassion or forgiveness is letting that knife go. It’s not ignoring the knife, it’s not dodging it when it comes back, it’s not getting out of the room, but just letting it go because we tend to hold on so tight that it just cuts.

And so a compassionate form of self is, “I don’t want to be hurt by this anymore. Let me let it go.” Not forget, we’re not talking about all those reconciliation kind of things, but to not hold it as tight. Not to say that it’s not important, but there’s ways of, I think, doing that. And I think a compassionate view of what is holding this knife doing to myself might be a way of leaning into that. So my two practices, listen to those stories, but get complex around it. Exercise those muscles. And then anything that can be done around offering yourself compassion and grace.

Emiliana Simon-Thomas: Fabulous. Melike?

Melike Fourie: I’m not a clinician in that sense of the word, so I’m going to say that I wholeheartedly agree with Allison. I read a story of a woman who forgave a perpetrator who harmed her. He killed her mother. And she also described it as at some point she realized by not forgiving him, she keeps being tied to that perpetrator and she’s dragging him like a dead weight with her through her life. And at some point, you want to set yourself free and set the other person free as well. I think unforgiveness ties you together until eternity. But other than that, I’m also really interested in compassion practice, and not just for the self, but in a contemplative sense.

In a recent study, we did that, and I think that a real muscle that we can all benefit from strengthening is to shift that loving-kindness to include others into our self-concepts. And you start small, you start by having compassion for yourself, and then you work your way up to those that you don’t like and even people that haunt yourself. And I think the piece that you offer despite viewing someone as a child helps with that, including people in your compassion practice that you have real difficulty doing that. So I don’t have any other magical tips I’m afraid to say, but I think the advice that Allison gave is really great.

Emiliana Simon-Thomas: One of the things that I heard you say, Allison, was to get curious when you hear of other people’s experiences or shared stories around forgiveness. And often when I’ve encountered those stories, one element of them is that forgiveness has actually fueled a deep and profound sense of meaning and purpose. That ultimately trying to understand, using those perspective-taking muscles to understand a perpetrator’s motivation or drive for whatever it is they did, or even contextual factors that might have contributed to their willingness to do something that was harmful to you or others.

That forgiveness lets you kind of take an approach of addressing those contextual factors instead of narrowly and myopically targeting the perpetrator for a long time and feelings of hostility. There’s a potential for, well, what’s wrong with the situation that leads to this scenario where somebody is causing harm? And how can forgiving that person sort of maintain energy and intensity of feeling, but redirect it towards addressing the contextual factors that might be causal to the harm? Is that something that you encounter?

Allison Briscoe-Smith: I mean, I have a unique perspective on this in part because the majority of the patients that I serve of are lawyers and because they have pursued justice, their experiences, their understanding and what they’ve done and whether it’s on the defense or they’re on prosecution, they have a nuance, they have exercised the muscle, the cognitive muscle of perspective-taking and seeking justice and understanding in very complex ways. So that wasn’t purposeful. That kind of happens like that, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence. So yeah, but also in the other spaces that have been, people have sought out justice and meaning making in many different ways. Maybe the justice, and this is slightly different, the forgiveness, and then justice is a second kind of other place. Maybe it’s up to legal things. It may not have happened for themself, but they are seeking it on behalf of others or they’re trying to make sense and create and understand a world that was unjust and to kind of come back to how they can not have this happen to other folks or help other people.

So in short, yes, I do think that a sense of meaning-making in big and small ways, which is today I will be kind, even if I don’t feel like it to I’m going to make a career out of seeking justice and helping those who’ve been harmed are options that come along this pathway of moving towards kind of forgiveness, maybe even moving towards people who do the work of reconciliation often have unique perspectives about what this has felt like. They themselves have been people who’ve committed the harm or been harmed themselves. I also want to just pause and think about that kind of distinction. I think that’s a humanizing distinction. And we sometimes think about perpetrators and victims. It gets a little bit more complex. I’d like to ask the audience members, have you ever done something wrong or harmed someone despite what you want, purposely or not?

And how do you come to be able to move towards accountability and justice? It’s a false distinction, and I think that human … I love that Melike pointed out the humanization part of our brain that needs to be exercised, that’s a human, that’s a person. We invoke a tiny child to help see them as human, but we can do that in a number of other ways. That’s a person we’re talking about, and we have to fight the urge to not do that, to see bad and good. So I think that’s the kind of complexity of the habit that we could move towards. I got excited about that part. Yeah.

Emiliana Simon-Thomas: We did get a number of questions about how do I forgive? Does it mean I have to make friends with the person? Does it mean that I’m letting them off the hook? Does it mean that I am endorsing the harm that happened originally that I’m so upset about? And I’ve heard all of us say that absolutely not. Forgiving doesn’t mean that you’re choosing not to hold someone accountable. You can still hold someone accountable for a harm that they’ve committed and not revive and accentuate your own feelings of anger about it. For me, when I think about forgiveness, something that is helpful is invoking the nature of emotions writ large, right? Emotions are meant to be brief, directive and a multifaceted phenomena that help us solve an immediate problem. But as humans, with our big brains and prefrontal cortices and et cetera, we ruminate and kind of rekindle emotions to extend them in lengthy ways that sometimes they’re adaptive.

Sometimes it helps us remember that that red berry is poisonous. I should not seek it again. But sometimes overusing that extension of an emotional experience is actually … the biggest harm is to ourselves. And I think that’s part of the story of self-compassion that I heard you sharing, Allison, and that part of self-compassion is knowing what is really good for you, just like you kind of have a sense of what’s really good for your close friends and loved ones. If somebody is very upset, you come to them with a nurturing and sensible supportive stance. And self-compassion is applying that same sensibility to your own struggles and difficulties. And so I love that you brought up self-compassion as maybe a starting point as an initial practice that could open the door for the possibility of forgiveness. The other thing I heard was this idea of self-forgiveness, and we did get a couple of questions about that. How do you do that and what might be some practices or strategies for self-forgiveness and what does it even mean? Do you guys have thoughts on that?

Melike Fourie: I can jump in quickly. I think they’re very related, and that always comes up. We struggle with a self. And so I think at how it works, it’s a little different because we know ourselves, so we don’t have that perspective taking and we know why we did stuff, and we’re not in relation in that sense with ourselves. So it’s not all the same components that work for forgiving others. But I think for the self, you deal with all that sort of ruminative self-blame, all that negative affect is very much the same and has to be down-regulated.

I’m not an expert on self-forgiveness, but from what I understand, I think it’s really important to acknowledge the harm, but then also to kind of see what you’ve done as not necessarily part of your self concept or part of your identity. It’s also the distinction between guilt and shame like we might feel really guilty about what we’ve done, but forgiveness is saying that we’ve done something that maybe caused someone harm or that wasn’t good, but I’m not incorporating that into a stable identity of this is me, I’m a bad person. So it’s acknowledging that yes, but also not incorporating it as a sort of a lasting trait. Having compassion for we all do wrong and moving on.

Emiliana Simon-Thomas: Do you think that part of the challenge of self-forgiveness is that people are actually seeking forgiveness from the other person and not receiving it? So if I’ve committed a harm, which of course, I’ve made mistakes and done things that led to bad outcomes for others, and if I really want someone to forgive me, I want to be forgiven, how do I get started with that? What are some of the strategies either if that’s impossible? Because sometimes we want to be forgiven by somebody who is no longer available or it is possible, but it’s not happening. Any insights from your experience on that?

Allison Briscoe-Smith: I think Melike has offered a lot of wisdom by just even … I hope folks are sitting and thinking about like, “Wow, my brain’s got to light up over here. I got to do some of this over there. I’ve got to practice this.” It’s not just one thing, the complexity, and I hope that actually offers a little bit more spaciousness to think about why forgiveness is hard. And so why when I’m seeking it from others, it might be hard. They may not be ready or ripe or rip for it. I also have to think about do I have to or how am I trying to seek accountability? How am I trying to make the right out of this kind of place?

And I think that’s where processes like restorative justice can be really, really complicated, nuanced and helpful for that kind of piece. But just to kind of say, “Why do I want forgiveness so bad? Have I done the work to earn that forgiveness?” And if I have and the person isn’t ready to give it, let’s think about all these other kinds of pieces that are there. And then to figure out how do I come to peace with myself with that? All of that sounds pretty tough. Sounds pretty complicated. Might not be offered. Yeah.

Emiliana Simon-Thomas: Well, and going back to our earlier conversation, it just takes time. And there’s a patience element here, I think, that is super important, both with ourselves as forgivers and with being in a position where we’re seeking forgiveness from others. We did get a question that I think is super interesting, which is does forgiveness come and go? In other words, I might feel like, “OK, I’ve forgiven, I have given this warm glow sentiment to this person who has harmed me, but then two days later wake up and again, feel tense and just unpleasant and maybe even vengeful towards that person again.” Any thoughts on that, Melike?

Melike Fourie: Yeah, so absolutely. I’ve encountered people who actually self-reported that they had to wake up and decide to forgive every single day all over again. And that is part of that temporal unfolding that we spoke about earlier. So it’s not that if you make that decision the first time that that is going to put to bed all of the negativity and all of the stuff you’re needing to process, you might literally …

Again, I’m not saying it’s going to be that hard, but I think that is quite typical and the process is only really complete once you find that you actually can wish the person well and your motivation has now shifted towards letting them go and wishing them well on their journey. If I can, I just wanted to say something on the previous question that I felt that we haven’t touched on yet. And that I think is also really important to take into consideration the cultural aspect because different social contexts might have different definitions or different assumptions about forgiveness and what it is and what it entails.

And so there can very often will easily be a mismatch in terms of if you seek forgiveness from someone and their idea of what forgiveness or saying sorry entails is different to yours. So in South Africa, we typically have this thing of saying sorry versus doing sorry. So I just wanted to highlight that even the definition that I offered it’s a scientific definition. So different cultures might look at forgiveness in specific ways, I think in the ways we look at it in a more individualistic way, whereas in other countries it might mean something a little bit different if you want to receive forgiveness or you want to offer forgiveness.

Emiliana Simon-Thomas: That sounds like another invitation to be curious as you undergo a process of considering forgiveness, of being forgiven. If it isn’t going as expected, there are lots of reasons and cultural differences and even just perspectives. We all experience the world in the way that our own nervous systems detect and interpret, and that is different from another person’s experience. And we’re also exquisitely equipped to communicate and understand and empathize and perspective-take. But like any other skill, learning to play the piano, becoming good at an athletic activity, it requires practice and repetition. And I don’t think there is an end point.

It may look that way when you see a famous tennis player do things in ways that look really easy, but they’re practicing every day and throughout their lives in order to maintain that degree of expertise and capability. And I think sometimes people get the idea that mental processes aren’t like that, but they absolutely are. And to change how your neural pathways are processing and interpreting and valuing takes repetition and practice. We also got, I just want to take a very brief time to say a few things about this or invite you to, somebody wanted to know, “Well, OK, fine, but why? What happens when we don’t forgive? What’s the harm in not forgiving?” And I don’t know, maybe there’s just a quick list of undesirable outcomes of not forgiving that comes to mind.

Melike Fourie: I can jump in very quickly with kind of an evolutionary take on why the whole thing emerged in our development. And then Allison, maybe you can talk about the clinical component. So I think it’s really interesting very, very quickly to look at: How come this process is embedded into our neural systems and why it’s there. So evolutionary researchers view forgiveness as a secondary adaptation to revenge or vengeance. So with the idea that that revenge was our first way of dealing with conflict, and if you think about revenge, it can be useful if you harm someone back, they might think twice before harming you.

And it’s very useful in the animal kingdom, right? But in humans, it has severe … it carries severe consequences. So revenge has all of that negative effect that we spoke about. So that’s not going to do you any good, but it also severs the relationship and it can also spiral into sort of a consecutive retaliatory action. So you harmed me, I’m going to harm you back worse, and you’re going to do that back. So there’s really no benefit, there’s no point that it ends. So if forgiveness was meant to kind of just end that and be a way to deal with both your personal emotions and at a social level to facilitate relationships to preserve the good that there is in a relationship because we need each other. We’re out of time so I’m going to swap to Allison quickly.

Allison Briscoe-Smith: Yeah, just real quick to kind of think about, there’s some initial evidence that folks that are practicing or have forgiven on a particular kind of thing have better physiological, less reactivity, better blood pressure, et cetera. So some on that, but we’ve got tons of research that perspective-taking, empathy, compassion, those components are directly linked to better health and mental health, that these are the practices that are helpful in the context of anxiety, depression, PTSD, trauma, but also helpful in the context of better relationships relatedness. So if we take those kinds of components of affect regulation, understanding of the kind of self, cognitive reframing, we can take each of those, those ones have direct lines. So that’s a nerdy way of saying probably just because you feel better, probably because it helps us to be in relationship. And what we do here is that people, when they do move into places of forgiveness, they feel better.

Emiliana Simon-Thomas: Well, I think that’s a wonderful and inspiring place to come to closure. Forgiveness helps us flourish. I want to thank everybody for joining us this morning or whatever time of day it is for you, wherever you’re joining us from. It is my honor and privilege as a science director at the Greater Good to invite wonderful forward-thinking, pioneering scholars in the space of all things pro-social and well-being promoting that we cover at the Greater Good Science Center. We will be posting a recording of this session in a couple of days and would love anybody’s willingness to share that video with anybody who they think could benefit from what we shared during this session. Thank you again for joining us. I know you have lots of other things you could be doing with your time. It is an honor and a privilege for us to be sharing. And thank you, Allison, and thank you, Melike, and thank you to the rest of our team who behind the scenes have been making this webinar run smoothly and available to our global audience. Thank you.

Allison Briscoe-Smith: Thank you.

Melike Fourie: Thank you from my side as well. Thank you for all the knowledge and it’s a privilege. Thanks.

(Music: “No One Is Perfect” by HoliznaCC0)

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