Ariana Eunjung Cha
Steve Koch never thought of himself as a grudge-holder. Still, certain moments endured: his mother’s harsh words his final year of high school, the neighbour who publicly slighted him, the Ford Explorer that ran the red light.
They left him anxious, low.
“These incidents coloured my view on a lot of things,” says Koch, who is 74 and lives in the US.
Psychologists have long been interested in why some slights refuse to fade, and how those lingering injuries can settle in – reshaping a person’s thoughts, mood and sense of self over time.
Now, the research is beginning to offer clearer answers. A new analysis spanning more than 200,000 people across 23 countries and published in NPJ Mental Health Research, a Nature publication, found that forgiveness may be more than a moral ideal. It appears to function as a psychological ideal as well, across cultures.
Led by Richard Cowden, a social-personality psychologist at Harvard, researchers found that individuals more inclined to forgive – not just in response to a single event, but as a consistent pattern over time – reported higher levels of well-being across a number of categories.
“Going through the process of forgiveness in a habitual sense can be beneficial to different aspects of our lives,” Cowden says.
Scientists call this dispositional forgiveness, and the idea marks a growing shift in the field that researchers believe has the potential to reshape not only our family and romantic relationships, but also our workplaces – and even geopolitical dynamics.
“Forgiveness comes after grieving. You have to do some grieving before you can let it go.”
Early research on forgiveness focused on specific, often extreme harms – women who endured incest, parents of children who were murdered, communities targeted by genocide. The question was whether forgiveness was possible at all under such conditions.
Now, researchers are asking a different question: not whether people can forgive in extraordinary circumstances, but what happens when forgiveness becomes an ordinary, practiced way of moving through the world.
The problem with ‘unforgiveness’
Forgiveness is not about excusing harm or forgetting it.
It is a deliberate decision to release anger and resentment, even when that does not seem fully earned. The point is not that the offender deserves absolution. It’s that anger, when held too long, begins to radiate outward, shaping more than the original injury ever did.
“Unforgiveness” is not only a mental state. It can become a physical one, associated with anxiety, depression and sustained stress responses, including elevated cortisol, higher blood pressure and muscle tension, according to researchers. As Cowden and his co-authors wrote, a sense of injustice can harden into “a complex cognitive-emotional response characterised by bitterness, resentment, hostility, hate, anger, fear, and vengeful or avoidant motives.”
Fred Luskin, director of the Stanford University Forgiveness Projects and who has written three books on the subject, puts it more plainly. “Forgiveness,” he says, “is making peace with the word no.”
“It speaks to that – at the heart of every grudge, of every wound or grievance – something you really want to have happened in a certain way did not happen in that way,” says Luskin, who was not involved in the research. This applies to both small transgressions, as well as major ones.
The most forgiving countries
The data for the new paper comes from the Global Flourishing Study, a large international research project backed by a consortium of philanthropic foundations that tracks how people’s well-being changes over time across different cultures and countries.
To capture “forgiveness,” the study asked the straightforward question, “How often have you forgiven those who have hurt you?” with response options ranging from “never” to “always”.
Using statistical methods to compare people with different levels of “forgivingness,” the researchers examined 56 different outcomes covering many parts of life – mental health, physical health, relationships, sense of purpose, character traits and financial stability.
What they found is that people who were more inclined to forgive tended to report better outcomes across many areas of life a year later – especially in psychological well-being (things like happiness, depression and sense of meaning). The effects weren’t huge, but they were consistent across very different countries. The links were weaker for things like physical health, suggesting forgiveness matters more for how people feel and relate to others than for the condition of their bodies.
The study only shows correlation, not causation. But it builds on decades of previous research, including clinical trials, that suggests that people who are more able to let go of grudges tend to be doing a bit better emotionally and socially over time.
Everett Worthington Jr., a professor emeritus of psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University and a co-author of the NPJ Mental Health Research study, says he was intrigued by the cross-country differences in the data.
In Nigeria, Egypt and Indonesia, the culture of forgiveness was high while the United Kingdom was low, he says. The US was somewhere in the middle. The team is just starting to assess cultural, socio-economic, political and other factors that may be influencing the differences, but Worthington says the biggest surprise in the data to him was that a number of the countries on the high end have endured profound collective strain.
He says he wouldn’t have expected factors like low trust, instability and discrimination to be associated with a greater willingness to forgive.
Worthington, a pioneer in forgiveness research, was drawn to the field after a personal tragedy: the killing of his mother in 1996. Not long after, he travelled to South Africa, newly emerged from apartheid, at the invitation of the government. He was moved by how the people in Johannesburg were coming back from that dark period.
“That really changed my outlook on things,” he says. “I wrote my life mission statement then that I would do all I can to promote forgiveness in every willing heart and homeland.”
He says his own journey toward forgiveness has come in “waves”. Forgiveness is a process, he says – you don’t always get it right the first time, and you keep working at it.
Forgiveness therapy
Luskin, from Stanford, has focused on whether that mental shift can be taught. Structured forgiveness interventions, he says, have been shown to reduce depression and increase hope. Some of the treatments are designed for individual or group therapy, and there are also a few workbooks (this is one well-known version and here’s another) that people can download and work through themselves.
Though approaches vary, the steps toward forgiveness tend to follow a similar arc:
- At some point, people grow tired of their own reactivity – of noticing that “every time I hear this person’s name my blood pressure goes to 200,” as Luskin put it.
- From there comes a kind of cognitive reappraisal: an acknowledgment that bad things happen.
- Then there’s a recognition that the world contains both harm and good – and a decision to focus on the good.
- Over time, the narrative begins to change. The event is still there, but you see it in a different light.
Koch, based in California, first learned about forgiveness therapy through a friend at church and attended a workshop last year. By then, he says, he had been “sitting with bitterness” toward his late mother for decades, ever since she told him how disappointed she was that he hadn’t gotten into her – rather than his – dream college.
As part of the workshop, he tried what’s known as the empty-chair technique. He spoke to his mother as if she were there, describing how deeply he’d been hurt, then switched roles, answering as her – trying to account for what she had said.
“The things she said back to me were very illuminating,” Koch says. “It was as if she came alive and told me about the shame she felt as a young mother who had to quit school, trying to validate her life through her children’s achievements.”
The exercise shifted something. He began to feel, as he put it, “a great empathy”. The anger eased. The memories that surfaced were more about love.
“She was doing the best she could,” he says. “And it’s to my benefit – and hers, and her memory – that I wish the best for her.”
A public health intervention
Increasingly, researchers are asking whether forgiveness can be taught at scale – where interventions might function not just as therapy but as a public health strategy that could improve the emotional lives of communities or even populations.
In a separate preprint paper that is still under peer review, Cowden and his co-authors created a model of what well-being would look like in New Zealand if everyone were a little more forgiving. Teaching forgiveness society-wide could take the form of media campaigns – such as posters and online ads – or school-based curriculums.
Luskin sees potential: “If it’s given to every family in the country, it might make for more harmonious homes. … That’s not trivial. I like that idea.”
Robert Enright, a professor of human development at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has spent much of his career studying forgiveness. More recently, he has turned his attention to how it might work in groups instead of individuals.
His work has taken him from Milwaukee – still among the most segregated cities in the United States – where he has tried to bridge divides between Black and White residents. He has also travelled to Belfast, where he has spent years working with children from Irish Catholic and British Protestant communities. In Ireland, he found many carried levels of anger approaching clinical concern. When they were introduced to the idea of forgiveness, that anger began to subside.
More recently, Enright has been in Israel, laying the groundwork for what he hopes could become a therapeutic response to the trauma of the October 7, 2023, attacks, when Hamas militants carried out a large-scale assault that killed roughly 1,200 people and took about 250 hostages. He would also like to work with Palestinian residents of Gaza and the West Bank in the wake of ongoing Israeli military operations, which have killed tens of thousands.
Forgiveness between groups, he says, is harder to grasp than forgiveness between individuals. “It’s more abstract. You’re not face to face,” Enright says. “But you begin to see them as human beings who had very flawed ideas.”
And forgiveness, researchers note, is not only about others. It also includes the ability to extend the same release inward – to reckon with one’s own mistakes without letting them harden into something more damaging.
Washington Post
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