What Happens When & If We Choose to Forgive?

Jennifer explores the benefits of forgiveness on emotional, psychological, physical, and organizational health. She discusses the neural changes associated with forgiveness. She also shares her personal experience with forgiveness on her health. The conversation emphasizes the importance of understanding forgiveness as a process rather than a one-time event, highlighting both its potential benefits and limitations.

• Forgiveness is associated with reduced anger, depression, and improved self-esteem.
• Meta-analyses show that forgiveness interventions can improve emotional wellbeing.
• Chronic pain and physical conditions may be alleviated through forgiveness interventions.
• Forgiveness helps manage emotions.
• Organizational forgiveness can enhance trust and productivity.
• Cultural factors can influence the effectiveness of forgiveness interventions.

The Body

• Toussaint et al. 2016
  https://doi.org/10.1007/s10865-012-9441-2
• Jennifer P Friedberg, et al. The effects of forgiveness on cardiovascular reactivity and recovery. International Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 2009.
• Lee, Enright, & Song 2014
  https://doi.org/10.1037/scp0000025

Mental Health

• Akhtar & Barlow 2021
  https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27009829/
• Worthington 2024
  https://doi.org/10.1080/00207284.2024.2340593

Organizations

• Wenrui Cao, et al. Forgiveness in the workplace: A longitudinal study of forgiveness climate and work outcomes. Frontiers in Psychology, 2021.
• Gelfand & Baumeister 2012
  https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2010.0497
• Cameron & Caza 2003
  https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/107179190200900103

Neuroscience

• Xiaoyan Li, et al. Trait forgiveness is associated with resting-state functional connectivity of the default mode network. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2017.
• Strang et al. 2014
  https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0087654
• Neural mechanisms review 2022
  

Exploring what it means to live and lead with dignity at work, in our families, in our communities, and in the world. What is dignity? How can we honor the dignity of others? And how can we repair and reclaim our dignity after harm? Tune in to hear stories about violations of dignity and ways in which we heal, forgive, and make choices about how we show up in a chaotic and fractured world. Hosted by physician and coach Jennifer Griggs.

For more information on the podcast, please visit www.thedignitylab.com.
For more information on podcast host Dr. Jennifer Griggs, please visit https://jennifergriggs.com/.
For additional free resources, including the periodic table of dignity elements, please visit https://jennifergriggs.com/resources/.

The Dignity Lab is an affiliate of Bookshop.org and will receive 10% of the purchase price when you click through and make a purchase. This supports our production and hosting costs. Bookshop.org doesn’t earn money off bookstore sales, all profits go to independent bookstores. We encourage our listeners to purchase books through Bookshop.org for this reason.

Transcript

This is The Dignity Lab, a podcast that seeks to define dignity, its violations, and its reclamation. No matter who you are, no matter what you’ve done, no matter what’s happened to you, you can reclaim your dignity.

Hosted by physician, narrative medicine practitioner, and leadership coach, Dr. Jennifer Griggs.

This season focuses on healing from past hurts through forgiveness and its alternatives.

Today’s episode is a dose of dignity, a solo, bite-sized episode that focuses on living and leading with dignity.

Hello and welcome to The Dignity Lab. In this episode, I'll be talking about what happens to our body, our minds, and our organizations when–and if–we choose to forgive. I’ll also describe the neural changes that have been shown to happen when we forgive.

If you haven't already listened to the previous episodes from this season, we'd encourage you to do so before you listen to this one. 

Please note that forgiveness is not a requirement for healing or, frankly, to be a good or loving person. 

Let’s start with the benefits of forgiveness on our emotional and psychological wellbeing. 

Forgiveness is strongly associated with reduced anger, depression, self-esteem, and hopefulness. A systematic review and meta-analysis from 2021 found that forgiveness interventions reduce depression, stress, and distress and promote positive emotions. The REACH forgiveness psychoeducational group intervention, developed and recently reviewed by Everett Worthington, shows consistent positive effects on forgiveness and psychological well-being across 24 studies with effect sizes related to the duration of the intervention. That is, the longer the intervention, the greater the positive effect. 

Intervention studies in diverse populations confirm that forgiveness training increases positive affect and self-esteem, which may be related to a sense of dignity and worth. What's really interesting here is that it's forgiveness training. So learning the skills, learning how to replace anger and resentment with gratitude, joy, curiosity, and love, is a process.

As a scientist, I feel compelled to point out some of the limitations of the research I’ve discussed. Small sample sizes, lack of an active control group, or short follow-up periods limit our ability to conclude with confidence that there is a cause-and-effect relationship between the intervention and the outcomes. In addition, not all forgiveness interventions are equally effective, and the process can be emotionally taxing. That emotional tax is more pronounced if forgiveness is a prescription, not an invitation, as I talked about in the first episode of this season.

What are the benefits of forgiveness on the body? Well, meta-analytic and intervention studies suggest that forgiveness is linked to better heart health, cholesterol, sleep quality, and less physical pain. It appears that the key mechanism is through reduction in anger. Longitudinal research by Toussaint et al., published in 2013, found that increases in forgiveness predicted decreases in stress and, indirectly, better mental health over five weeks but did not show a direct effect on physical health symptoms. Of course, this was just a five week study, and that may not have been long enough to see meaningful physiological effects.

Among cardiac patients, a study by Friedberg and her colleagues found that higher self-reported forgiveness correlated with lower anxiety, depression, stress, and healthier cholesterol ratios, suggesting that forgiveness may reduce cardiovascular risk, that is, conditions such as high blood pressure, and cardiac events like angina or a heart attack. 

Dr. Suzanne Lee and her colleagues demonstrated that forgiveness interventions in women with fibromyalgia led to improvements in pain, anger, and overall health. The reduction in pain is particularly exciting given the lack of effective pain relief for people with many pain syndromes. 

Many of these studies are correlational or use self-reported health and may inflate associations. Longitudinal and intervention studies have often found stronger effects on mental than physical health. Some large population studies report little to no effect on forgiveness on physical health over time. Mechanisms such as anger reduction are supported by the studies I just told you about, but more research is needed to establish a cause and effect relationship and to rule out confounding factors such as things like social support and other attitudinal and dispositional factors. 

As promised in the opening to this episode, I'm next going to cover what we have learned about the impact of forgiveness on our nervous system, sharing some hypothesis generating findings. 

When people are prompted to engage in forgiveness exercises while being scanned with a functional fMRI scan, several areas of the brain light up. 

For example, the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex show activity. These areas of the brain support cognitive reappraisal. This allows people to reframe transgressions to, for example, to see that the actions of the person who hurt them reflects their own pain and not our own worth. These areas also help convert resentment into what’s referred to as “managed emotion,” reducing rumination. One study showed that there was 3% gray matter thickening in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex after only six weeks of forgiveness practice. The brain responds to the work by growing areas that allow for healing.

Forgiveness increases activity in the temporoparietal junction, which helps with perspective taking. Moreover, granting forgiveness through a thought exercise during an fMRI activates the right angular gyrus and inferior parietal lobe, regions that are critical for taking the perspective of another person, creating empathy and releasing blame. 

At the same time, forgiveness reduces activity in the amygdala, which is where fear and anger reside. Lowered amygdala activity decreases cortisol production, which improves physical health markers like blood pressure and sleep quality. And this can calm the body's stress response by reducing heart rate and muscle tension.

Two other interesting findings–forgiveness activates the ventral striatum associated with relief and positive emotions. This creates a sense of what's called psychological liberation.

All of this work is so promising. I do, however, want to bring some caution to the information I just shared. Functional MRI studies are often done on small numbers of people. We're talking samples of 10 or maybe 20 people, sometimes 40 people. But functional MRI imaging is not that reliable with such small numbers. The reproducibility of that data is actually quite low between participants and even between one time that they're in the functional MRI machine and the next time. So that's why I call these findings hypothesis generating. We need studies with 100 or 200 people to help us really bank on this kind of data. 

But I do find it promising to understand what might be going on in the brain when we engage in the work of forgiveness. 

I’m going to close this episode with a description of the benefits of forgiveness within organizations. Theoretical models argue that a forgiveness climate in which organizations foster pro-social responses to conflict enhances trust and supports collective effectiveness and organizational resilience. 

Some of the early research on organizational forgiveness, conducted by Kim Cameron, one of our guests in an earlier season, demonstrated that a culture of forgiveness especially, after trauma or downsizing (its own form of trauma), can boost morale, productivity, and organizational resilience.

Cao and colleagues published in 2021 a study showing that forgiveness at work predicts higher job satisfaction, better work outcomes, and lower intentions to quit. The causal link, the relationship between forgiveness and these outcomes, was supported over multiple time points with forgiveness leading to improved work outcomes within weeks.

As with the other research, there are a couple of caveats. Organizational research is an emerging field and is often, although not always, based on cross-sectional or theoretical models with few large-scale intervention studies.

It's also really important to say that there's a dark side of forgiveness. Too much emphasis on forgiveness in an organization without accountability can enable repeat offenses, toxic environments, and ongoing harm. And it's also important to recognize that cultural and contextual factors may moderate, that is, make greater or smaller, the effectiveness and appropriateness of forgiveness interventions on organizations. Across all these areas, additional rigorous, long-term, and culturally sensitive research is needed to clarify mechanisms and potential risks of forgiveness interventions. 

From my own experience, I can attest to the changes that happened to me when I was able to forgive and reclaim my dignity. I found that the rumination that kept me up for nights on end resolved. While I still have occasional nightmares, they are fewer and further between. And I am able to recover more quickly. I have been able to manage the shame that trauma often evokes. I am free from the impotent rage that was eating away at me, rage that I did not know how to handle, that led to my having a diminished life. I have a broader, gentler perspective on the behaviors of others without compromising my boundaries or my expectations of others.

If this episode has been helpful, please consider sharing it with someone you love or someone in the organization in which you work. Please also take a minute to rate our podcast and write a review. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.

This has been The Dignity Lab with Dr. Jennifer Griggs.

If you have experienced a dignity violation or have a dignity dilemma and want to be a guest on our show, contact us through our website, www.thedignitylab.com. Guests may remain anonymous. 

And If you’re a leader wanting to up level your leadership with a small community of like-minded people, visit our website thedignitylab.com to learn more about the Dignity Lab (yes, the same name), our group program for leaders.

Our website and the show notes have downloadable resources that you can access from anywhere.

More information about any of our guests can be found in show notes for that episode. 

This season of The Dignity Lab is produced by me, Vanessa Aron. Pete Carty is our audio engineer and sound designer. Chase Miller composed our theme music.

This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional advice, diagnosis, or treatment. The content discussed is intended to explore and raise awareness about dignity. Sensitive topics may be discussed that could evoke strong emotions; discretion is advised, and listeners are encouraged to engage with the material with empathy."

Remember, “...be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the Universe, no less than the trees and the stars.”