HOLDING GRUDGES

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HOLDING GRUDGES

Science is beginning to verify that nursing grudges will hurt you worse than it hurts your offenders.

New work shows it can contribute to emotional problems and even heart disease.

Mark Moran, MPH, at MSN Web MD writes that research suggests that forgiveness can lead to better health."People have grown tired of simply pointing fingers and attributing blame," says McCullough, PhD, professor of psychology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. "Culturally, people have begun to wonder whether there is something more positive we can do."

One recent study, for instance, found that holding a grudge could be bad for your heart and your health.

"Our research shows that simply thinking about one's offender in a begrudging way can have immediate physical ramifications," says author Charlotte Witvliet, PhD, associate professor of psychology at Hope College, in Michigan.

"Short, fleeting thoughts are unlikely to have long-term health impact, but we know hostility is a potent risk factor for heart disease. When we have deep wounds, and hostility becomes an ingrained personality trait, then it can be health eroding."A fundamental problem confronting researchers is how to define forgiveness.

Is it an emotional response, a mental process, or a complex combination?

Perhaps it can be defined by comparing it to its opposite — unforgiveness.

"I look at forgiveness as an emotional replacement of unforgiving feelings with positive emotions, such as love, empathy, or compassion," says Everett Worthington, Department of Psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Some personality types appear to be related to the capacity to forgive or not.

Anger and rumination may predispose individuals to being unforgiving, while the converse of those traits — agreeableness, generosity, and empathy — are likely to predispose one to let go of grudges.There have been some steps toward understanding the brain and body chemistry of forgiveness, drawing on the work of neuropsychologists who look at the way feelings become embodied through the chemical activity of the brain.

In theory, it works like this: The body produces muscle reactions and other bodily sensations in response to any experience — for instance, a slight, an insult, or a violation.

Those sensations are fed into the brain, which labels the experience with a specific chemical response.

Later, when any similar slight or insult is experienced, the old embodied emotion will be reproduced.So forgiveness may be a process — sudden and profound, or time- consuming and incremental — by which old embodied feelings of anger and resentment are replaced with new chemical reactions in the body.

Such a complete replacement of unforgiving feelings can be difficult and painful to come by — as anyone who has suffered a profound grievance can testify.

But even if true forgiveness is impossible, Worthington says, there are many ways to reduce unforgiveness.Dr. Witvliet emphasizes that forgiveness isn't about letting offenders off easy, but about liberating the offended from the ill effects of vengefulness.

"It's about letting go of the bitterness eating at us. By giving an unwarranted gift to someone who doesn't deserve it, we find paradoxically that it is we, ourselves, who are freed from that bondage."Chelle ("Shay") , Editor