Writing Wrongs: Expressive Writing to Facilitate Forgiveness

1. Writing Wrongs:Expressive Writing to Facilitate Forgiveness Catherine R. Barber, Ph.D. School of Education barbercr@stthom.edu

2. Overview • What forgiveness is (and isn’t) • Benefits of forgiveness • Obstacles to forgiveness • Rumination • Facilitating forgiveness • Empathy • Expressive writing • A “how to” primer

3. Then Peter approaching asked him, “Lord, if my brother sins against me, how often must I forgive him? As many as seven times?” Jesus answered, “I say to you, not seven times but seventy-seven times….” Matthew 18:21-22 New American Bible

4. How Do Psychologists Define Forgiveness? • Lack of consensus! • Focus typically more on the intrapersonal than the interpersonal • Change in thoughts, feelings, and behaviors • “Positive vs. Negative” Controversy • Unconditional vs. conditional

5. What Forgiveness Is Not • Denying • Excusing • Forgetting • Reconciliation?

6. To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover the prisoner was you. -- Attributed to various sources.

7. Benefits • Psychological • Anxiety • Depression • Relationship Satisfaction • Physical • Mediator of the religiousness – health link • Cardiovascular

8. Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much. -- Oscar Wilde

9. Obstacles to Forgiveness • Intent/Blameworthiness • Ongoing anger • Rumination

10. Facilitating Forgiveness • Apology (sometimes!) • Relationship factors • Empathy

11. What Is Expressive Writing? • Pennebaker paradigm • “Deepest thoughts and feelings about an event” • Can be tailored to a specific situation • Small but robust effect sizes • Cognitive restructuring

12. Forgiveness-Based Expressive Writing • Published studies • Romero (2008): empathy and benefit-finding • McCullough et al. (2006): benefit-finding • Stratton et al. (2008): general essay

13. Forgiveness-Based Expressive Writing • Recent projects • Baylor Psychiatry Clinic data • Veterans project

14. How to Start • Start with a single offense and a single offender. • Examine the pros and cons of forgiving vs. not forgiving this person. • Think about times when you have needed forgiveness. • Make the choice to forgive.

15. How to Start • Start with a written description of what happened, who did what to whom, etc. • Describe your thoughts and feelings about the person and the event. • Try to empathize with the one who hurt you. See the offender as a person. • Note that this does not mean excusing the offender or suggesting that what happened wasn’t wrong.

16. How to Start • Keep practicing until you notice an increase in empathy and a decrease in hurt/anger. • Continue to commit to your choice to forgive. • Forgiveness is rarely a one-time event in the case of more severe offenses. • Decide whether positive behaviors toward the other person might be helpful.

17. Participant Quotes • “I never realized how soothing writing could be. I have started writing in a journal almost every other day. It really organizes my thoughts.” • “I wrote what I felt and [it] helped me to talk [with another person about the incident], because then I didn’t keep [my feelings] bottled up inside, which would in the end cause more pain.”

18. Participant Quotes • “At first I saw [writing] as just doing this to get the [course] credits. After the two weeks when I had finished my journaling, I felt better about the person who hurt me….It seems weird to say that some psychology graduate student research helped me work through a major problem in my life, but it did. I now see how valuable journaling is.”

19. “Thank you for helping me bring closure to my past.” -- Anonymous Participant

20. Conclusions • Forgiveness is a choice to reduce negative thoughts, feelings, and behaviors and (perhaps) replace them with positive ones. • Forgiveness has numerous psychological benefits, and increasing evidence points to physical benefits. • Expressive writing appears to be helpful for facilitating forgiveness.

21. References • Braithwaite, S. R., Selby, E. A., & Fincham, F. D. (2011). Forgiveness and relationship satisfaction: Mediating mechanisms. Journal of Family Psychology, 25, 551-559. • Fehr, R., Gelfand, M. J., & Nag, M. (2010). The road to forgiveness: A meta-analytic synthesis of its situational and dispositional correlates. Psychological Bulletin, 136, 894-914. • Freedman, S., & Chang, W. R. (2010). An Analysis of a Sample of the General Population’s Understanding of Forgiveness: Implications for Mental Health Counselors. Journal of Mental Health Counseling, 32, 5-34. • Frisina, P. G., Borod, J. C., & Lepore, S. J. (2004). A Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Written Emotional Disclosure on the Health Outcomes of Clinical Populations. Journal of Nervous & Mental Disease, 192, 629-634. • Harris, A. H. S. (2006). Does Expressive Writing Reduce Health Care Utilization? A Meta-Analysis of Randomized Trials. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 74, 243-252. • Lawler-Row, K. A. (2010). Forgiveness as a mediator of the religiosity – health relationship. Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 2, 1-16. • Lawler-Row, K. A., Karremans, J. C., Scott, C., Edlis-Matityahou, M., & Edwards, L. (2008). Forgiveness, physiological reactivity and health: the role of anger. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 68, 51-58. 

22. References • Luchies, L. B., Finkel, E. J., McNulty, J. K., & Kumashiro, M. (2010). The doormat effect: When forgiving erodes self-respect and self-concept clarity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98, 734-749. • McCullough, M. E., Root, L. M., & Cohen, A. D. (2006). Writing about the benefits of an interpersonal transgression facilitates forgiveness. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 74, 887-897. • Pronk, T. M., Karremans, J. C., Overbeek, G., Vermulst, A. A., & Wigboldus, D., A., G. (2010). What it takes to forgive: When and why executive functioning facilitates forgiveness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98, 119-131. • Romero, C. (2008). Writing wrongs: An intervention to promote forgiveness. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 25, 625-642. • Stratton, S. P., Dean, J. B., Nonneman, A. J., Bode, R. A., & Worthington, E. L. Jr. (2008). Forgiveness interventions as spiritual development strategies: Comparing forgiveness workshop training, expressive writing about forgiveness, and retested controls. Journal of Psychology and Christianity, 27, 347-357. • Witvliet, C.V. O., Ludwig, T. E. & Vander Laan, K. L. (2001). Granting forgiveness or harboring grudges: Implications for emotion, physiology, and health. Psychological Science, 121, 117-123. • Zechmeister, J. S., Garcia, F., Romero, C., & Vas, S. N. (2004).  Don’t apologize unless you mean it: An empirical investigation of determinants of forgiveness.  Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 23, 532-564.

23. Thank you! For a copy of the slides, please email me at barbercr@stthom.edu.