No Hard Feelings

Holding a grudge can feel like a form of justice, a way of punishing those who have wronged us. But psychologist Fred Luskin says that more often than not, grudges don't hurt the targets of our anger. Instead, they only hurt us. This week, we explore the lingering effects of long-standing animosities, and how to let them go.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. It was a cold day in Appalachia on January 7, 1865. A Union soldier named Asa McCoy was on his way home, wounded from fighting in the Civil War.

• 0:15Shankar Vedantam?

  As he neared his cabin in Kentucky, Asa was given a message: "Don't return home, or you will be killed."

• 0:25Shankar Vedantam?

  A local group of Confederate militia, known as the Logan Wildcats, planned to kill Asa. The Wildcats were led by a member of the Hatfields, a family living in West Virginia who had strong ties to the Confederate Army.

• 0:39Shankar Vedantam?

  Asa hid out in a cave near Peter Creek, Kentucky. But it was no use. He was eventually tracked down and shot dead.

• 0:50Shankar Vedantam?

  The incident is said to have sparked a famous feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys. It lasted decades. In 1873, a McCoy family member, perhaps still seething from Asa's death, accused Floyd Hatfield of stealing his pig. A trial followed, and Floyd Hatfield was acquitted. A few years later, one of the trial witnesses was killed by two McCoys.

• 1:17Shankar Vedantam?

  In 1882, on Election Day in Kentucky, some McCoy brothers drunkenly fought and killed Ellison Hatfield, stabbing him multiple times in the back. In retaliation, the Hatfields killed all three McCoy brothers.

• 1:32Shankar Vedantam?

  The feud continued into a cycle of violence that reached its peak in 1888, during what came to be known as the New Year's Night Massacre. Several members of the Hatfield gang set fire to a McCoy cabin and killed two children.

• 1:50Shankar Vedantam?

  History is full of incidents that have sparked longstanding grudges, sometimes with consequences that last decades. But there also are smaller, more personal grievances that we all harbor.

• 2:02Shankar Vedantam?

  Perhaps you still remember some slight you experienced years ago at the hands of a friend or family member?

• 2:11Shankar Vedantam?

  Today, we explore the psychology of grudges, how longstanding animosities affect our lives, and what to do about them. This week, on Hidden Brain.

• 2:41Shankar Vedantam?

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• 3:05Shankar Vedantam?

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• 3:37Shankar Vedantam?

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• 4:13Shankar Vedantam?

  Don't let people live rent-free in your head. That's a way of saying you shouldn't allow people who have wronged you to take up too much of your attention. Sounds nice, but is it realistic? We are social creatures, after all, and our interactions and relationships with others matter. When someone is kind to us, it has the power to alter our day, maybe even change the course of our lives. When someone wrongs us, it can also have large effects. At Stanford University, Fred Luskin has spent a quarter century studying what happens when we hold on to grudges. Fred Luskin, welcome to Hidden Brain.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  Hey, thank you so much.

• 4:52Shankar Vedantam?

  Fred, some years ago, you met a woman named Debbie. She was having issues with her husband. And when I say issues, this was not merely conflicts about who takes out the garbage.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  No. I mean, issues, that's a nice way of putting it. Her husband was a serial adulterer. She had found him cheating numerous times. He said, "I'm sorry." She said, "Okay, I'll take you back." He did it again.

• 5:27Shankar Vedantam?

  The cycle repeated itself over and over. One day, Debbie came home early from work. She discovered her husband on the couch with another woman. It was the last straw.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  Something snapped in her. She said, "No more. You'll never treat me like this again." She threw him out. She filed for divorce. But when we met her, this guy owned her brain. And her conversation was just so dominated by him, him, him, him, him.

• 6:04Shankar Vedantam?

  So many people have been in similar situations where they have been betrayed by a romantic partner and people really struggle with it. How was Debbie's account of what happened to her affecting her life, Fred?

• 6:15Speaker 01

  There's a sadness or a poignancy sometimes when you see people who are hurt like that. Her conversation is about my ex and the lost marriage and what a bad person he was, but it's shrouded in failure. It's, uh, this didn't work. I couldn't make it happen. I did my best. There were obstacles too big for me. And that has implications for her entire life.

• 6:50Shankar Vedantam?

  I understand that it was important for her to let everyone else know what a louse her husband was and how much pain he had caused her.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  That, that is true for her. It's like, let me tell you. Now let me tell you. Now let me tell you again. Now let me call up grandma and tell her. The real suffering is when that failure and that loss become part of their identity. And so for somebody like Debbie, when we had encountered her, it was, hi, I'm Debbie, a woman with a lousy ex-husband and a failed marriage. So that had meant that it was now integrated into her self-concept.

• 7:47Shankar Vedantam?

  In the course of your work and research, you came by another person named Jill and she confided in you about her troubled relationship with her mother. But unlike in the case of Debbie's ex, Jill's mother was dead?

• 8:05Speaker 01

  So she was, my mom didn't love me. I never got the kind of affection that I would hope for. I felt rejected and unwanted and I grew up with this sense of not being good enough and, you know, not having enough value in this world. And no matter what I said to mom, I couldn't get through to her. You know, like, "Mom, notice me. Mom, I'm around. Notice, I matter." Mom was impenetrable.

• 8:40Speaker 01

  And so Jill brought that sense of frustration and invisibleness to the way she talked about what it was that had occurred, you know, 20 years ago when her mother had died. You could, you could just feel the angst.

• 9:01Shankar Vedantam?

  You know, what is striking about both these stories you've just told me, Fred, is that in both Debbie's case and in Jill's case, the source of their pain is in their past, but it's almost as if this person, this other person, is standing with them, walking with them, living with them, inside their heads all the time.

• 9:21Speaker 01

  Precisely. And what you articulated is one of the unanticipated consequences of keeping a grievance alive. And they don't realize how integrated that wound or problem has become in their self-identity. And that, that link, that integration makes it seem really hard to imagine, "What would I be without this?"

• 10:01Shankar Vedantam?

  So you're a scholar, you're a teacher, you're a therapist, but you're also a human being and you yourself are not invulnerable to holding on to a grievance. I want you to tell me the story of your friend Sam and what happened to you and Sam. And maybe start with how close you were to Sam for many years of your life.

• 10:20Speaker 01

  Sam was my closest friend for probably a decade.

• 10:27Speaker 01

  Somebody I considered almost a brother and a very, very dear friend of my wife and I. I assumed that Sam would always hold that place in my life. So what happened or what transpired was he met someone who was, for whatever reason, uncomfortable with the relationship that Sam had with me and my wife.

• 11:00Shankar Vedantam?

  This is a romantic partner?

• 11:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, and he just disappeared.

• 11:06Speaker 01

  We're best friends and now, poof.

• 11:10Speaker 01

  And I couldn't connect with him and the word ghosted did not exist then, but I was ghosted.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  And inside of me, I fell apart. I became bitter as my trust was shattered and I developed a bit of like an agitated depression.

• 11:42Shankar Vedantam?

  I understand that at one point, Fred, you heard that Sam was to be married and you did not hear about this from Sam, but from someone else.

• 11:52Speaker 01

  When a mutual friend came to my house and said, oh, by the way, you know, he's getting married. I had absolutely no ability to integrate that information. It hit me like bricks in my face and I just, I crumbled.

• 12:13Shankar Vedantam?

  So you were not invited to the wedding. This is someone whom you consider to be, as you said, your best friend, nearly your brother. How did that change your outlook and behavior? I understand that the people around you started to notice that you were different.

• 12:27Speaker 01

  My, my wife turned to me one day and said, Fred, I still love you. I just don't like you as much.

• 12:37Shankar Vedantam?

  Wow.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  So I was, to put it kindly, crabby.

• 12:44Shankar Vedantam?

  I understand that at one point during the saga, Fred, you found yourself in a very unusual place to have an epiphany, the supermarket. Tell me what happened at the supermarket that day.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  So my wife told me to go to the supermarket. And I told her I wanted to go to supermarket A, because it was closer. She said, go to supermarket B, Safeway. It has what I want. I walked out of the door muttering, poor me. I get to Safeway muttering all the time, you know, people don't understand me and all the, really like bitter. I walked to the place with the item that my wife is gonna send me to Safeway for, and it's not there.

• 13:34Speaker 01

  And, and my self pity is like overwhelming, like, like I could have gone to Albertson's and, you know, why am I here? And nobody loves me and nobody understands me. And my self pity went to a kind of overdrive. But there was a moment where it broke, just one moment. I turned away from the shelf where the item was supposed to be, and I noticed for the first time, I'm in Safeway, big supermarket.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  But I literally said to myself, holy [bleep] Fred, look what you're missing. You're missing abundance. This store has everything. You're missing apples and oranges and diapers and, and that you have the money to pay for this. So I had a voice almost in me that said, pay attention, Fred, pay attention. I walked out of that supermarket and I was, I was different.

• 14:56Shankar Vedantam?

  For better and worse, people we are close to can affect us in profound ways. Sometimes, these effects are fleeting, and sometimes, they last for years. When we come back, the physiological and psychological effects of holding a grudge. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 15:33Shankar Vedantam?

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• 16:05Shankar Vedantam?

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• 16:49Shankar Vedantam?

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• 17:06Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. When someone wrongs us, holding a grudge against them almost feels like a form of justice. But psychologist Fred Luskin says that more often than not, grudges don't hurt the targets of our anger, they hurt us.

• 17:26Shankar Vedantam?

  Fred, we've discussed a few ways in which people can hurt us, but sometimes it's a process that hurts us. One person you worked with was upset she did not get a job promotion. Can you tell me Dana's story and what went through her mind?

• 17:41Speaker 01

  Dana is one of the people that even after a decade or more, I still remember. Her issue was that she was a great worker for a local Silicon Valley company who worked above and beyond what anybody could expect from an employee. She came in early. She also was ambitious. And so she had an expectation that that best effort would lead to a promotion.

• 18:20Speaker 01

  So after a number of years of getting promoted appropriately, there was a bigger job right ahead of her, that she just knew she was the right person for the job and had earned it. And when she found out that she didn't get that job, she became furious. I mean, hell hath no fury, I mean, because she had checked all the boxes.

• 18:59Shankar Vedantam?

  So if I understand correctly, Fred, Dana's reaction to not being promoted was the sense that she had wasted 10 years of her life, that all this time and effort she had spent at the company going above and beyond, all of it was wasted effort.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  Wasted effort and that she was an idiot for putting in all that effort. It was a multi-pronged attack towards both her employer and towards herself.

• 19:30Shankar Vedantam?

  Let's look at one aspect of the story you just told me. So this was an employee who did not get a promotion. Another way of looking at this is to say, the company has a number of different priorities. Maybe I don't fully understand all the priorities of the company. They've picked somebody else, but it's actually not about me. It's just about what the company needed to do at this time.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 19:51Speaker 01

  The not getting the promotion. Dana heard that, that it's about Dana. She took it personally. It's my company, my job. I did all this work. I made all this effort. She took the no, the rejection as a personal affront.

• 20:18Shankar Vedantam?

  Now, in some ways, it's worth pointing out, of course, that not getting that promotion did indeed have personal effects on Dana. It might have affected her life, her finances, maybe even her retirement plan. So it had consequences in her personal life, Fred.

• 20:31Speaker 01

  Absolutely. So there's no denying that Dana's body and mind were affected by not getting the job. What there is room to negotiate is how much of that effect had to do with Dana's expectations, not just the not getting the job.

• 20:54Shankar Vedantam?

  I want to talk about another component of grudges, Fred. You worked with a man named Alan, whose wife cheated on him. Can you tell me his story and the thoughts that constantly circled around in his mind?

• 21:06Speaker 01

  So Alan had a wife who cheated on him. And she didn't try to hide it. You know, it was like, we're married, but you don't satisfy me. So, you know, I have an affair. And she shut him down if he started to complain or articulate his needs. So Alan just had one of those doozies of a story. It's all her fault. The blame is the second piece of a three-part sequence.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  It starts with taking it too personally, which you covered. When we take things too personally, our mind and body react in a very harsh, physically disruptive, and emotionally suffering way. And then we have to talk to ourselves about what happened. So all three of those end up as this quality of blame. You did it to me. I'm not responsible for how bad I feel. And I'm going to talk to myself.

• 22:30Speaker 01

  That solidifies this as a blaming story.

• 22:38Shankar Vedantam?

  I can see in some ways how, at least on a short-term basis, this can make you feel better. If you're feeling very upset, if you're feeling very hurt, it does make you feel better to say, I know what the cause of my hurt is. It's this other person. This other person did this terrible thing, and that's why I'm feeling terrible. It's her fault.

• 22:57Speaker 01

  You're spot on with that. Because when people are devastated, it's appropriate to be disrupted, dysregulated, confused, angry, lost, scared. And, short-term, it's really helpful to have somebody to blame besides you.

• 23:27Shankar Vedantam?

  So we've talked about the role that taking things personally and the blame game plays in the development of a grudge. These often lead to what you call the final stage in the grievance process, the construction of a grievance story. What do you mean by this, Fred?

• 23:41Speaker 01

  When, when something happens, we have a choice of how we talk about it. And so we can talk about it as a normal life event, a catastrophe, something to cope with, you know, something I'm here to learn from, or a sign that the world is an unfair, unsafe place. What we lose when we get too deep into a grievance story is, one, we have a choice. So that story of, hey, I got a really crappy deal with this wife, and she messed up my

• 24:26Speaker 01

  life for six months, that's a healthy story for a month or so, you know? It's like, that's how your brain rebalances and reorganizes itself from the disruption, and it can go directly to, oh, let's think about this. I didn't make a good choice in marriage, she gave me lots of clues, I didn't do X. You can't reorganize, you know, coherently right away, so she's a terrible human being is a wonderful way to reorganize.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  The grievance story is a practice for how it is we're going to explain to ourselves what happened and what's an appropriate response for us to deal with it. The practice of it is very useful short term and destructive long term.

• 25:37Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm curious why some wrongdoings become grudges and others don't. You talk about a very powerful concept, the violation of unenforceable rules. What does this mean, Fred?

• 25:50Speaker 01

  When Dana wanted a promotion, she turned what she wanted into an expectation. I want to be promoted. She turned it into, I have to be promoted. When somebody gets married, they have a hope, you know, I want my partner to be faithful. But they change it into they have to be faithful.

• 26:24Speaker 01

  That is a rule for somebody else's behavior that you actually don't have power to enforce. If you wake up in the morning and you say, hey, I got a big day today. It has to be sunny and it's pouring. Most normal people recognize they don't control the weather. But when an adult person does something that you don't want, we bypass that. Well, a normal adult person doesn't have to do what I want.

• 27:05Speaker 01

  But when we create unenforceable rules, we start thinking, an adult separate from me has to do what I want. They have to give me a promotion. They have to stay my friend. They have to be faithful or also they have to talk to me. Those unenforceable rules are rigid like substrates in our thinking that when they're broken, cause us to have all sorts of exaggerated distress.

• 27:45Shankar Vedantam?

  I want to talk about one unenforceable rule that you had in your life, Fred. When your mother-in-law was alive, you and your family would often go and visit her in Connecticut. I understand that she wasn't very nice to you.

• 27:59Speaker 01

  You could say that.

• 28:03Speaker 01

  Let's just say it was a relationship challenge. But yes, there was one situation where she demanded that I do something in her home, and it was absolutely trivial. It was something along the lines of, "Don't put this back here. You have to put it back here." And she was yelling at me because I had put it back in the wrong place.

• 28:41Speaker 01

  So she had an unenforceable, like, "Son's-in-law can't put things back where I don't want them put back." And then I had an unenforceable, "Mom's-in-law can't talk to me like this." I heard myself saying it. In my mind, "You can't talk to me like this." And I ran out the front door. I literally ran out the front door, ran away from my wife and her family, literally took a run because my unenforceable role was shouting at me. "She can't do this. How dare she do this?

• 29:25Speaker 01

  Who is she to do this?"

• 29:32Speaker 01

  I was gone for like an hour. My wife thought I was crazy enough to have gone back to California. She wondered, but, and I'm not blaming one shred of this on my mother-in-law. I'm saying my role, she broke my rules so strongly that I could only react that way because of the rule, not the reality of what she did.

• 30:03Shankar Vedantam?

  So after this fight, I understand that you called a friend to complain about your mother-in-law. You wanted to tell someone else your grievance story. What did you say? And what did your friend tell you?

• 30:13Speaker 01

  So either during that run or later, I went to a payphone. I didn't want to do it in the house. And I called up really close friends, and I started to complain about my mother-in-law. And I got about 10 seconds in, and the friend said, Fred, every time you go there, you call me to complain. And I looked, I looked at myself, and I looked at him and said, but this one's serious. And he said, I'm sure it's serious, but every single time you go there, you call us to complain about her, and you want us to agree

• 30:56Speaker 01

  with you. So complain, and we'll agree with you. But understand, you do this every time. A light bulb went off. Wow. This woman owns me. She owns my nervous system. She owns my mind. She owns my feet. They take me to the phone. She owns me.

• 31:28Shankar Vedantam?

  We've talked about the anatomy of grudges and how they form. Let's spend a moment talking about some of the consequences of holding on to our past grievances. Many studies have examined the relationship between resentment and mental health issues. One study, for example, found that holding a grudge could lead to lower self-esteem.

• 31:45Speaker 01

  I mean, there's lots of information about how hostile thoughts, resentment, and blame are all negatives for long-term physical well-being. One of the studies that I liked when I was doing a lot of this was there was a linear relationship between blame and all-cause, like physical well-being.

• 32:17Speaker 01

  There is a good degree of evidence that hostile people have greater heart disease.

• 32:25Shankar Vedantam?

  I feel like I can remember times in my own life, Fred, when I've been up at 3:45 in the morning, upset about what someone said to me or what someone did to me, and I'm lying in bed tossing and turning, I can't sleep, I'm angry, and of course, it seems like the effects on sleep must be one of the effects of resentment and grievance.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, and there was a recent study that linked the what you're calling perseveration and anger, both were linked to sleep quality.

• 33:00Shankar Vedantam?

  Why is it that grievance and grudges cause these physiological effects? What is happening physiologically to us that cause an effect on sleep, that cause an effect on the heart, that cause an effect on high blood pressure?

• 33:14Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, the clearest and simplest link is with the stress response.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  So when you're angry, or when you're pissed off, or when you're blaming, you have an internalized sense of threat. Someone out there has hurt you, or disappointed you, or left you, and you're not okay.

• 33:40Speaker 01

  So that sense of not okay, you know, leads the brain and it signals to the adrenals and all sorts of changes to prepare you to, you know, run away, and run away doesn't have to be physically run away, it could be, I'll never talk to them again. That's a form of flight, or fight them, be hostile.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  But the more you're angry, and the more you're blaming, the more you arouse that system.

• 34:16Speaker 01

  The more you trigger an adrenalized response, the more you train your body to accommodate cortisol, the more your brain gets used to that pathway of reaction, it develops practice effects. It becomes easier to do because the templates become laid down more succinctly. The immediacy of arousal of anything that's a threat to us is the reason why long-term grievances are so dangerous.

• 35:04Shankar Vedantam?

  So the irony here, Fred, is that grudges can make us feel better in the short term. They make us feel like we're getting back at the people who've hurt us, but the people they hurt the most might be us.

• 35:16Speaker 01

  There's a distinction made between constructive and destructive anger. So when our arousal and our physiology and our threats say, "We need to protect ourselves," anger can be a really good response. So if somebody is hurting your kid, get angry. It's really helpful. If you see an injustice, get angry. Notice it and recognize you want this to change. The destructive anger is when anger does not lead to useful action. When it just becomes perseverative and in a grievance,

• 36:01Speaker 01

  it actually becomes a substitute for action. In a chronic anger situation, there's a little bit of dopamine that you get, that pleasure chemical, "Ah, I'm doing something about it," when actually you're doing nothing constructive about it. The dopamine is a response to an anticipated value. But in anger, you never get that anticipated value unless you actually do something and change.

• 36:37Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, strategies for letting go of the past. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 36:58Shankar Vedantam?

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• 37:43Shankar Vedantam?

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• 38:08Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In the late 1960s, tensions were exploding in Northern Ireland. Riots were breaking out in cities like Belfast and Derry. People were sharply divided on whether to remain part of the United Kingdom or to join the Republic of Ireland. Catholic nationalists wanted unity with Ireland, and Protestant unionists wanted the country to stay within the United Kingdom. Decades of hostility and turmoil led to what became known as the Troubles, a violent conflict that involved bombings, shootings, and the killing of many people. More than 3,500 people were killed in the conflict, the majority of them civilians.

• 38:53Shankar Vedantam?

  Many people were left grieving over horrific losses.

• 39:00Shankar Vedantam?

  In another part of the world at the time, Fred Luskin was at Stanford University in California, studying the role of forgiveness in people's lives. A man named Byron Bland reached out to Fred after reading newspaper articles about his work at Stanford. Byron asked, was Fred willing to try his forgiveness training with mothers who had lost their children to the troubles? Their stories were unimaginably painful. One woman's son had been kidnapped on the way to work, then ushered into a shallow grave where he was shot, his body hidden for 21 years.

• 39:36Shankar Vedantam?

  Another woman's son had been working at a restaurant when a gunman walked up to the takeout window and shot him seven times. He died on the spot.

• 39:45Shankar Vedantam?

  A third woman said her Protestant son was hanging out with his Catholic friend at a pub when a loyalist rushed in and shot both men dead. The stories went on.

• 39:57Shankar Vedantam?

  When the women were flown to California to share their stories, Fred found himself overwhelmed with horror. But he listened, and he began the training. It started with intake. He asked them to fill out questionnaires about their mental state. Then, slowly and carefully, he took them through the steps he had developed. One was along the lines of his own epiphany at Safeway. When you are deeply upset about something, take a moment to notice things you are not upset about.

• 40:27Speaker 01

  So one time, we brought them to the window of the fifth floor of the building. On Stanford's campus, we opened the blinds and said, literally, let the sun in. That this murder is a horror, but it's in your past, and you want to make sure that this murder doesn't serve as like a full solar eclipse. And it doesn't mean that this didn't happen, but you can open back up to goodness. And we gave them some practice in changing the story that they tell, the grievance story,

• 41:10Speaker 01

  not just to talk about how terrible it was, but what are some possibilities for moving forward?

• 41:19Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm wondering whether you heard from these women, or you hear from other people you work with, Fred, a sense of anger directed toward you. Because these are people who are saying, you know, I've been through something terrible, and the person who did this terrible thing to me, you know, really, it's unforgivable. And here's Fred Luskin coming in and telling me to forgive and forget. I mean, do you get people angry with you? Because in some ways, it can feel, even though that's not what you're doing, but it can feel like you're taking the side of the transgressor?

• 41:51Speaker 01

  I never tell people to forgive and forget. I tell them to forgive and remember differently. That is entirely different. I explain to them that forgiveness is not condoning. It's saving your life. I remind them that forgiveness has nothing to do with seeking justice. Forgiveness is inner healing and making peace with the life you had, not endlessly arguing with what you didn't get.

• 42:34Speaker 01

  The other thing is, the whole orientation is a profound empathy for how much someone has suffered, and a plea for them to not continue parts of this suffering that are under your control by fighting hard against what actually happened. So there's an empathic plea. They stole so much from you. Don't let them steal more.

• 43:12Shankar Vedantam?

  What was the effect of these ideas on the women who went through the program, Fred?

• 43:16Speaker 01

  It was mixed. They themselves, on the whole, reported improvement in mood and a dimming of the symptoms of stress. When they went back to Northern Ireland, it became much more dicey because their communities didn't want to hear about forgiveness. They themselves didn't give me grief, but their communities were not interested in going to fancy California and learning to do this. So that was one obstacle that we learned about.

• 44:00Speaker 01

  The most satisfying moment of this, in a very difficult experience, was the second time we brought these women back, plus family members, not all of them, and one of the women's daughters, a middle-aged woman, came to us and said, "Thank you for giving us our mother back." She was just grief-stricken. And, you know, we couldn't get through to her. And you reminded her, you can be grief-stricken and still, in the present, try to love and

• 44:45Speaker 01

  hold what's still good in your life.

• 44:48Shankar Vedantam?

  It's interesting. The word forgiveness itself, I think, points our mind toward the person who has done us harm, the person who has done us wrong. When I think, "I forgive you," I'm thinking that my forgiveness is directed toward you. But everything that I'm hearing from you, Fred, is that really forgiveness, in fact, is not about the other person at all. It's about ourselves.

• 45:15Speaker 01

  It can be for the other person in an important intimate relationship. So if your partner cheats, you can forgive both to free you and them.

• 45:34Speaker 01

  But it's an unenforceable rule thinking that if I forgive them, like they're going to change, or they forgive me. We don't have control over the other. Part of the problem of unforgiveness is our lack of control of what happened. Makes us feel so vulnerable and threatened. That if we don't come up with a strategy that puts some of the control back in our hands, we can feel lost and scared for a long time. The simplest example is an intimate partnership.

• 46:18Speaker 01

  If your partner is a schnook and cheats on you, and you don't let that go, then you sometimes bring that to the next relationship. You're going to cheat on me. I can't trust you. If you forgive it, it's not necessarily to help the past partner. But you open back up to a kind of trust. So the next partner doesn't have to deal with your woundedness.

• 46:51Shankar Vedantam?

  We talked earlier about your mother-in-law and how she would often make rude and critical comments about you. And some of this might have been because she was, you know, you could say an exceptionally tidy person, or you could say an obsessively tidy person, depending on your point of view. But at one point, you asked yourself a question with her that also made a very big difference in the way you responded to her. What was this question, Fred?

• 47:15Speaker 01

  When I got off the phone with those friends, and I had already started the Forgiveness Project, but it wasn't finished.

• 47:25Speaker 01

  I realized I need a new story. I can't keep on telling everybody how terrible my mother-in-law is and how helpless I am. I came up with a new story, which is, I asked myself, Fred, why are you here? Why are you visiting her? And I said, because I want to support my partner, my wife, and I want my kids to know their grandma. So I said, why don't you act like it?

• 47:54Speaker 01

  You show up and you're a bear. You're not helping your wife, you're not helping your kids. If you can't do it, don't go. I wasn't there to get along with my mother-in-law. I was there to really support my wife. It changed my behavior 180 degrees, changed me inside, and it transformed the Forgiveness Project into something really useful.

• 48:22Speaker 01

  Positive intention. What do you want? Why are you there? What positive thing can you move forward on? So that the grievance is in the rearview mirror and not out your front windshield.

• 48:41Shankar Vedantam?

  I understand that at one point toward the end of her life, your mother-in-law had a chat with you about the way she may have treated you. Tell me about that story and what happened, Fred.

• 48:52Speaker 01

  That was one of the most poignant experiences of my life.

• 48:58Speaker 01

  When my wife died, which is now about 13 years ago, I continued to visit her parents. And I showed up at their home, and I knocked at the door, and she comes out. I mean, we had, we had made a peace together, but we hadn't healed. And this was a woman who was suffering from some dementia. And she comes out and she looks at me and says, I don't think I was that nice to you sometimes, was I? And this was a woman who was suffering from some dementia. And I said, no, at times you really weren't. And she said, I'm sorry.

• 49:42Speaker 01

  And I said, of course, fully accepted. The piece that completely ends this is, I went back home, thought about that. And here I am, a big shot forgiveness teacher, and an older woman makes the first step. That doesn't look good. And the next time I went and visited them, I knocked on her door. And I said, remember when you told me that you were sorry for treating me a certain way? I said, well, I'm here to apologize to you. I'm sorry for all the ways that I may not have been a good son-in-law and just made your life harder.

• 50:26Speaker 01

  I'm deeply sorry for that. And I think we both hurt your daughter. So please accept my apology. She smiled a little. She was, you know, not fully there. Forgiveness wrapped it up in a boat. We're both clean. And it's as if it never happened.

• 50:53Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, Fred offers more techniques to get us moving when we find ourselves stuck on a grudge. Plus, we take a look at some of the physiological benefits of forgiveness. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 51:31Shankar Vedantam?

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• 53:08Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 53:12Shankar Vedantam?

  Many of us want to be rid of our grudges, but we find that the grievance keeps rearing its head. Pay attention to me, it tells us. Forgiveness is for suckers. We find ourselves drawn irresistibly to rehashing the events that caused us pain. We may go back to complaining to others about how we have been wronged.

• 53:36Shankar Vedantam?

  Fred Luskin sometimes tells the people he is trying to help about a psychological experiment.

• 53:41Speaker 01

  It was a piece of research where they experimented with giving people scenarios and asking them to assume the role of different people in scenarios. So one of the scenarios that I remember was a bicycle accident where a car was driving, and it hit a bicycle. It was not a terrible accident. Nobody was killed. But they asked people to assume the role of a car driver. So in their stories, the bike driver is weaving all over the place, and they're honking their horn

• 54:24Speaker 01

  and slowing down and skillfully trying to get around them. When they're in the role of bicyclists, it's this lunatic speeding driver came up behind me without any warning and scared the crap out of me. Yeah. I know from the show you do that you know about the negativity bias, you know, the profound effect of our brain of finding things wrong and looking for problems. And I know because of the work you do that you know about the confirmation bias, you know, our meaning-making apparatus

• 55:09Speaker 01

  are so biased, but they are biased mostly in the direction of threat.

• 55:18Speaker 01

  Since threat, that negativity bias is there to protect us, so many of the responses that we consider innate are actually off-kilter because of our need and desperate biological necessity to deal with danger and threat. So in an accident, you're gonna distort this to keep your ego intact to deal with the threat.

• 55:52Shankar Vedantam?

  Fred and other researchers have also found that once we are down the path of constructing a grievance story, our minds reach for more and more evidence that our state of mind is justified.

• 56:04Speaker 01

  Our memories are state-dependent.

• 56:08Speaker 01

  So that when you're unhappy, that gives greater access in your brain to other times when you were unhappy. When you're angry, you have greater access to stories and times when you were angry. That is to allow us to draw upon the past as to how to solve the issue that we're dealing with now. So it would do no good if you're angry now and your memory is access to lying on the beach in Hawaii. You're not gonna get much information. So when we have a habit...

• 56:54Speaker 01

  Of creating grievance stories around life. Not only are we reacting to the current experience, but we get access to a pattern of creating grievance stories that makes the current story seem more real and the response to it seem more usual.

• 57:18Shankar Vedantam?

  You know, I'm thinking back to the moment you went to the grocery store, you know, against your wishes to get something your wife wanted. And of course, you're thinking about your friend Sam and you're thinking about the way in which he had hurt your feelings and the way in which, you know, it was unfair that he treated you the way he treated you. And then you show up at the grocery store and now the thing that you wanted is not in the grocery store. Now, that's yet another piece of evidence that the universe, in fact, is unfair against you, Fred. And you can see how these different stories now are circling around one another and forming a braid.

• 57:52Speaker 01

  And it allowed me to tell my wife that she was unfair sending me to the supermarket that I didn't want to go to.

• 58:07Shankar Vedantam?

  One technique that you teach is to ask people to be mindful about the interventions they have tried in the past and the effectiveness of those interventions. You worked with a woman named Alice who did not get along with her in-laws. Tell me how she tried to fix the problem and how you helped her.

• 58:24Speaker 01

  I mean, Alice, like everybody, tries usually what the fight-or-flight brain gives it. So if you don't like your in-laws, you go, "Well, I'm not going to talk to them." Or, "I am gonna, you know, tell them how I feel." Or, "I'm gonna stew." Or, "I'm gonna tell my husband to stop." Or, sometimes, you say, "Well, none of that worked, so I won't talk to them." Or, "I'll make the conversation short." Or, "When they visit, I won't be here." And the really handy thing is, instead of continuing strategies that don't help

• 59:06Speaker 01

  you, take 15 minutes and write them down. So we asked Alice, what do you do when your in-laws are not what you want them to be? She wrote down six things. We said, did they work? She said, no. We said, don't do them again. And so we saved Alice a lot of grief, because if, like, being snarky to your in-laws is not helpful. At least, don't be snarky. Say to yourself, I know what doesn't work. Let me see if I can experiment to find out what does work.

• 59:49Shankar Vedantam?

  And of course, the point that you're making here is that very often, when we're carrying grievances around, we try the same thing over and over and over and over again. We come back to the same strategy over and over again. It doesn't work, but we say, okay, next time, I'm really going to tell this person off, and next time, they're going to come to their senses and realize how much they've wronged me.

• 1:00:10Speaker 01

  But that's the direct result of anger on the brain. Anger reduces blood flow to the prefrontal cortex. Your thinking capacities and your creativity are dimmed. If you can soothe that anger in the moment, then you get your blood flow and your brain back, and you get a chance to think of some different strategies. And that is the simplest description of how forgiveness is helpful.

• 1:00:43Shankar Vedantam?

  Fred walked me through a mental practice he calls Positive Emotion Refocusing Technique, or PERT for short.

• 1:00:54Speaker 01

  Just take two slow, deep breaths into and out of your belly. Slow and deep. Just take two slow, deep breaths into and out of your belly. And when your belly inhales, allow it to expand.

• 1:01:22Speaker 01

  And now, bring to your mind's eye a picture of someone you love.

• 1:01:30Speaker 01

  Just bring to your mind's eye a picture of someone you really, really, really love.

• 1:01:39Speaker 01

  And try to feel that love in your body.

• 1:01:46Speaker 01

  Try to almost feel it in your heart.

• 1:01:54Speaker 01

  And then, you can open your eyes.

• 1:02:09Speaker 01

  What we taught Alice and all the women from Northern Ireland is, when you get a picture or a thought about your mother-in-law or the murder, practice this.

• 1:02:23Speaker 01

  Don't allow your nervous system to be hijacked by stress. Practice this immediately. We told the women in Northern Ireland, you may have to practice this 50 times before it has an impact, but then you're starting to counter condition your stress response. With Alice, it wasn't quite that tough, you know.

• 1:02:49Speaker 01

  So, maybe after eight practices, we'd say, "Okay, you got your mind back. Now, what can you do?

• 1:02:59Speaker 01

  What might be a strategy to use with either your husband or your in-laws that doesn't bring back stress for you?"

• 1:03:11Speaker 01

  And that becomes the inner guidepost. So she said, "Well, I guess I could just take a deep breath when they upset me." And I'd say, "Beautiful, try that." Or, instead of giving your husband grief, ask for his help.

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  You can't come up with any of those solutions as long as fight or flight is active. So pert is just a simple practice to shut that down.

• 1:03:45Shankar Vedantam?

  Fred says there is lots of evidence that reducing hostility is good for our mental and physical health. The old saying is true, anger does the most harm to the vessel that stores it. One analysis found that far from soothing our pain, grudges have a way of increasing our experience of chronic suffering, as seen in conditions like fibromyalgia.

• 1:04:06Speaker 01

  It's a study that reviewed all the research and suggested pathways for how forgiveness could reduce the rumination and anger that are so constant companions to fibromyalgia. And they now know that the mental component of anger and rumination blends in with the pain pathways of the physical parts and amplifies it. So when you reduce your anger and rumination, you reduce the experience of pain.

• 1:04:49Speaker 01

  When anger becomes chronic, that appears to amplify those pain pathways. When anger is soothed, that piece of it can go away from the pain pathway.

• 1:05:01Shankar Vedantam?

  You also conducted a study that looked at the effects of forgiveness on workplace productivity and well-being. Tell me about that, Fred.

• 1:05:09Speaker 01

  Well, we taught people about positive emotional intelligence centered on forgiveness. We took about 100 people in different work sites and we led them through this process of a little bit of coaching and a workshop and stuff like that. And then we evaluated at the end of like six months and it led people to be less stressed, less angry, you know, fewer symptoms of stress, but it also helped be more productive at work. That was the piece.

• 1:05:53Speaker 01

  Now, this is an uncontrolled study. We really didn't have a great control group and it's one group, but it's the kind of study that suggests there might be more here than we acknowledge.

• 1:06:08Shankar Vedantam?

  We talked earlier about unenforceable rules, the rules we want others to follow, but we cannot make them follow. Let's return to the story of you and your best friend Sam. So you emailed him at the height of your grudge and told him how you felt. What did you say and how did he respond, Fred?

• 1:06:25Speaker 01

  I wrote a blame letter, how about that? Here's all the things you did to ruin my life, so to speak.

• 1:06:35Speaker 01

  And it didn't give me what I want, but he wrote me back something that, in retrospect, wasn't as bad as I received it as. But because I had practiced arousal so much, I'm reading his letter and my blood pressure is like 200 over 120 and my mind's going ballistic. And I have all these thoughts of anger and revenge. And this was the third learning point for me. I said to myself, nobody will ever get this control over my nervous system again, long term. So I took a deep breath and I stepped away.

• 1:07:20Speaker 01

  I pushed the letter away. I took a deep breath and I pushed myself away and I said, calm down. Calm down. Then I started reading a bit and came up with pert. But his letter triggered every response that I had practiced for the last six months or a year. He fit right in with a stream going full. I had an unenforceable rule. He has to respond the way I want. I had an unenforceable rule. He has to be my friend as long as I want him to be my friend. I have an unenforceable rule.

• 1:08:05Speaker 01

  He can't take time off from the relationship. I then started to untangle those unenforceable rules.

• 1:08:15Shankar Vedantam?

  How did that change your relationship with Sam?

• 1:08:18Speaker 01

  Well, after that blame letter,

• 1:08:22Speaker 01

  we didn't have contact. But I worked on myself.

• 1:08:28Speaker 01

  This is how I developed the Forgiveness Project. I started trying out my new story with my wife. I created a story that looked forward, not backward. And I got hope again.

• 1:08:44Speaker 01

  And then, I don't remember who contacted who, but we met for dinner. And I showed up in front of him. And I sat down. And I realized that I had forgiven him. But I also realized that all the work I had done for myself, I recognized that I was half the problem. That had I known how to handle this, it never would have escalated the way it did. So inside of myself, I said, I forgive you. I didn't say anything to him. Within about a half an hour, we were the best of friends again. And nothing, there's not even been a blip in decades.

• 1:09:33Shankar Vedantam?

  Fred Luskin is a psychologist and director of the Stanford University Forgiveness Project. He's the author of Forgive for Good: A Proven Prescription for Health and Happiness and Forgive for Love: The Missing Ingredient for a Healthy and Lasting Relationship. Fred Luskin, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

• 1:09:51Speaker 01

  Hey, this was a delight. Again, thank you for helping me publicize forgiveness.

• 1:10:03Shankar Vedantam?

  Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristin Wong, Laura Kwerel, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor.

• 1:10:22Shankar Vedantam?

  Do you have follow-up questions about grudges and forgiveness for Fred Luskin? If you'd be comfortable sharing your question with a Hidden Brain audience, please record a voice memo on your phone and email it to us at [email protected]. Use the subject line "Grudge." That email address again is [email protected].

• 1:10:47Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

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  All right, back to your podcast playlist or whatever's keeping you going today.

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