195: How to Forgive Someone When You Feel You Can't, with Dr. Fred Luskin

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“The process of making peace is forgiveness. It’s perfectly ok to be angry, and it’s perfectly helpful to become bitter, protective, and even depressed for a bit, because we’re overwhelmed and we can’t take in this information.” - Dr. Fred Luskin

Forgiving others is not easy to do, and forgiveness is often misunderstood as letting those who have wronged us off the hook without any consequences. But on today’s Finding Brave show, our guest explains why we need to forgive others, and how we can learn to do it, in order to free ourselves from the fear, shame and lack of confidence that so many of us continue to experience when we cannot forgive. It’s all about healing and empowering ourselves to release our experience as “victim” and finally becoming freer to create life as we truly want it, rather than staying stuck in a prison of long-held grudges and desperately-wanted retribution.

A top expert on forgiveness, Dr. Fred Luskin is the director of the Stanford University Forgiveness Projects, a senior consultant in wellness and health promotion at Stanford University, and a professor at the Institute for Transpersonal Psychology, as well as an affiliate faculty member of the Greater Good Science Center.

He serves as department chair of the PsyD program at Sofia University and is the author of the bestselling titles Forgive for Good, and Forgive for Love. His research interests are in stress management, emotional intelligence, positive psychology, forgiveness and wellness.e, career and relationships, both at work and at home.

In this episode, Fred looks at the most common things that hold us back from the act and process of forgiving, as well as provides powerful strategies and tips to help us forgive what we may have previously found “unforgivable.” As he shares, when you learn to forgive for good, it changes you for good (and for the better).

To learn more about today's guest, visit: https://learningtoforgive.com/ 

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