Tim Herrera
NYT
One of my favorite party games is to ask a group of people this question: What is your oldest or most cherished grudge?
Without fail, every person unloads with shockingly specific, intimate detail about their grudge. Career slights (intentional or not), offhand-yet-cutting remarks, bitter friendship dissolutions; nothing is too small when it comes to grudges.
But what does holding onto grudges really get us, aside from amusing anecdotes at parties? And what could we gain from giving them up?
I posed this question on Twitter last week, asking if people had ever given up on a grudge and, if so, how that made them feel. The responses were delightfully all over the place.
“Yeah pretty much most of them since entering my 30s,” one respondent said. “It feels cleansing to free up the brain space.”
“Literally not once,” another said.
“I felt neutral!!” one more wrote. “Like I just couldn’t be bothered anymore but also I didn’t feel relieved or anything. Just indifferent.”
But my favorite response was the most introspective one I got: “I felt very, very mature. I admitted that my feelings were valid for my situation at the time, but allowed myself to reshape my thinking/attitude based on my personal growth experiences since then. Physically, I felt lighter, but that sounds cliché haha.”
Yes, it does sound cliché, but it’s also a feeling that is backed by the science and research of forgiveness. Really.
A 2006 study, published in the Journal of Clinical Psychology as part of the Stanford Forgiveness Project, suggested that “skills-based forgiveness training may prove effective in reducing anger as a coping style, reducing perceived stress and physical health symptoms, and thereby may help reduce” the stress we put on our immune and cardiovascular systems. Further, a study published this year found that carrying anger into old age is associated with higher levels of inflammation and chronic illness. Another study from this year found that anger reduces our ability to see things from other people’s perspective.
“Holding onto a grudge really is an ineffective strategy for dealing with a life situation that you haven’t been able to master. That’s the reality of it,” said Dr. Frederic Luskin, founder of the Stanford Forgiveness Project.
“Whenever you can’t grieve and assimilate what has happened, you hold it in a certain way,” he said. “If it’s bitterness, you hold it with anger. If it’s hopeless, you hold it with despair. But both of those are psycho-physiological responses to an inability to cope, and they both do mental and physical damage.”
At the same time, he said, the converse is true: Full forgiveness can more or less reverse these negative repercussions of holding onto anger and grudges.
O.K., so getting over grudges is good. But how do we do it?
In broad strokes, full forgiveness has four actions, according to Dr. Luskin. But before that, we need to recognize three things: Forgiveness is for you, not the offender. It’s best to do it now. And it’s about freeing yourself — forgiving someone doesn’t mean you have to like what they did or become their friend.
From there, here are four tactics to use:
1. Calm yourself down in the moment. “You have to counter-condition the stress response when it happens,” Dr. Luskin said.
2. Shift how you think and talk about the source of your grudge. “Change your story from that of a victim to a more heroic story,” he said.
3. Pay attention to the good things in your life to balance the harm.
4. Remind yourself of one simple truth: Life doesn’t always turn out the way we want
