How I became involved in forgiveness studies

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I'm Robert Enright.

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I'm a professor in the
Department of Educational

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Psychology at the University
of Wisconsin Madison,

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a licensed psychologist and a
founding board member

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of the International
Forgiveness Institute.

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My studies are on the
psychology of forgiveness

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and we have research projects
going in

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many venues across the world.

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In 1978 the University of
Wisconsin hired me to study

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moral development because I'm
in the human development area,

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but almost all of the scholars
were centered on the question

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"How do children and
adolescents become fair

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or just in society?"

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And I like an obedient academic
followed along

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with everybody else.

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After I got ten years of doing
that, I became very bored and

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discouraged with this topic.

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It was not making a difference
in anybody's life

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other than my own.

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And so I threw all of that
research over a cliff

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and I didn't have a new topic
and so I asked myself the question:

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"What might make a difference
in the world

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in people's lives?"

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And I realized not justice
but injustice is a theme

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we all suffer with.

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We all have to confront
in a way to heal from

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injustices against us,
probably is

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the virtue of forgiveness.

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So I was staying in the realm
of moral development

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where I was hired to begin with.

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And that happened in
1985.

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So when I looked around in the
social sciences at the topic of

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forgiving there literally was
nothing out there.

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I actually went to the library
and had a computer search done

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by the librarian, she looked for
any social scientific study

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that existed on person to
person forgiving and after an

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hour she came back defeated
with a blank sheet of paper and

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said: "There is nothing !"

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And that shocked
me because something as

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important to forgiveness,
you think people would have

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been studying this in the
helping professions

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in the social sciences
and yet they did not.

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So I started a seminar,
we call it

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the "Friday forgiveness"
seminar in 1985.

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And we had people from all over
the world joining this

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and we all started to sit around
once a week on Fridays

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to start asking questions
such as these:

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"What do we mean when we
say to forgive?",

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"How did people do it?".

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"How can we research this to
see the extent of improvement

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of emotional well-being when
people forgive?"

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and "how can we then bring this to
others and forgiveness therapy

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and forgiveness education ?"

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It started in 1985, the seminar
has been running for 30 years

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and we've basically had the
honor of building a field of

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forgiveness studies within
the social sciences.

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I think in looking back on it
now the reason why there were

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no studies at all in the social
sciences on the topic of

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forgiveness that's not just
psychology, that would

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include
psychiatry, social work,

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counselling any of
the social sciences.

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I think there are a
couple of reasons.

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One is that almost everyone
with whom I spoke early on

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thought that forgiveness was
linked to religion or faith

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and the thought was: "Well how
could something that is

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religious be brought into
something as exalted and

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as important as the social sciences?
"We can't have that ! "

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Others thought of forgiveness
as a sign of weakness

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that as you forgive you give in
to the other's unfairness.

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You just simply cave in
to the nonsense.

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And that's not
what forgiveness is.

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Forgiveness is giving
goodness to those

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who have not been
good to you.

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It's truly from a position of
strength and struggle

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to achieve a virtue that's very
difficult to achieve.