My experience studying forgiveness deeply informs my mindfulness teaching and clinical work by providing an understanding of how we can relate to the past to live more fully and freely in the present.
As Research Director for the Heartland Forgiveness Project, I helped conduct research to understand and measure forgiveness from a psychological perspective. We defined forgiveness as a process of transformation. When you are hurt by a person, a situation, or even yourself, your natural response is often negative. Forgiveness happens when those negative thoughts, feelings, and behaviors gradually shift to become neutral or even positive. Importantly, this transformation doesn't mean the original event was okay, but rather that its grip on your current life changes and softens.
To study forgiveness, we created the Heartland Forgiveness Scale (HFS). The HFS is the most widely used measure of dispositional forgiveness around the world. It assesses a person's tendency to be forgiving of themselves, other people, and difficult life situations (such as an illness or a natural disaster). It has been translated into over 20 languages.
In this 2024 Harvard Thinking podcast, Samantha Laine Perfas, Tyler VanderWeele (public health expert), Matthew Ichihashi Potts (theologian), and I talk about the challenges of forgiveness, and why it may be worth the effort. We discuss how forgiveness isn't about condoning harmful actions or excusing bad behavior. Sometimes people find the concept of forgiveness to be too laden with expectations. Thus, for some, it can be helpful to think of it as "grudge management." Forgiveness is a process of releasing ourselves from the grip of past wrongs to experience meaningful mental and physical health benefits.
I wrote a book chapter providing a comprehensive review of the many different questionnaires and tools researchers use to measure forgiveness. It also explores important challenges in studying forgiveness, such as making sure that genuine forgiveness is not confused with simply excusing bad behavior or shifting blame, and ensuring that research captures the complex, multi-layered nature of how people actually experience forgiveness.