Forgiveness Education and Coaching

Due to a massive loss and betrayal in my life, which led to an extended period of suffering and bitterness, I had to learn to forgive. At the point that I rescued myself from my self-pity, anger, and victimhood, I had to choose a topic for my Ph.D dissertation at Stanford University. I chose to do a randomized clinical trial in forgiveness to see if what had worked for me would work for others. My project was successful, and the results were compelling and convincing. Forgiveness training reduces anger, stress, and depression, and more significantly, it leads to greater hope and inner peace.

 

I was only the third researcher in the world to demonstrate that forgiveness was good for physical and mental wellbeing. Forgiveness had been ignored as an intervention and there was almost no science attesting to its effectiveness. My dissertation enabled me to get funding from the only major grant competition ever awarded for forgiveness research. That grant catapulted the Stanford Forgiveness Project and led to the largest randomized trial on the effectiveness of forgiveness psychoeducation.

Since then, I have given hundreds of presentations, workshops, and seminars on forgiveness, and educated tens of thousands of aggrieved people all over the world. I have worked with, and counseled families who have lost loved ones to violence, including families from Northern Ireland, and many individuals who lost loved ones in the attacks on the World Trade Center. My research shows that forgiveness reduces depression and anger even with the catastrophic loss of a child or other loved one to political violence. I’ve shared my learnings and methodology to trainers all over the globe from a war-torn Sierra Leone to Honolulu, where I’ve worked closely with educators and coaches for the last 15 years in an initiative sponsored by the Hawaii state government. I have spoken at the United Nations, and traveled to Colombia to help its citizens heal from their civil war. Among other things, I helped create a museum exhibit on forgiveness, in Bogota, trained peer educators in forgiveness, gave multiple public talks to both welcoming and skeptical audiences, in addition to creating a Spanish curriculum of Forgive for Good.

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