Forgiveness and Health
In the film we meet two researchers, both psychologists, who have been spear-heading forgiveness research for years. Their findings support the connection between forgiveness and better health.
Kathleen Lawler Row asks her subjects to relate an event or incident that offended them. She takes their blood pressure and pulse readings and records them as they speak. In most every case people’s signs go up as they relate their story. But what she has found is that some people tend to resume normal readings after a short while and others seem to continue in an altered state for a much longer time, regardless of the seriousness of the offense. This led her to develop her theories about forgiving and unforgiving personalities.
Everett Worthington talks about our tendency at times to “ruminate” over our grievances, bringing them up every once in a while and chewing on them again, as it were. “Ev” is working on ways to measure unforgiveness - the amount of grudge and resentment we hold over an event.
He has developed some techniques that prove useful. One of them is the two-chairs technique. Someone with a grievance sits in Chair A and addresses a real but absent offender sitting in Chair B, telling him how he feels. The subject is then asked to move to Chair B and respond as the offender might. Sitting in the offender’s place to explain why they acted as they did, the offended subjects are forced to think “outside the box,” to put themselves in the other’s place, perhaps seeing for the first time circumstances they had previously overlooked. This can open the way for seeing both sides of the story, and, eventually, to forgiveness.
