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Frederic Luskin, Ph.D. - Guest
Frederic Luskin, Ph.D. is a psychologist in Counseling and Health Psychology from Stanford University where he has been teaching for the past 30 years. Currently, he is on the faculty for the Stanford School of Business Executive Education program where he teaches mindfulness, emotional intelligence, psychological safety, and positive psychology to executives from all over the world. He serves as Director of the Stanford University Forgiveness Projects, researching the positive effects of forgiveness for a healthy and happy life. Fred is one of the world’s recognized authorities on forgiveness of self and others. He’s been interviewed and featured in such media outlets as The New York Times, O Magazine, Today Show, LA Times, Time Magazine, Huffington Post, and CBS Morning News. In addition, he’s published 3 books and dozens of articles on forgiveness. His book Forgive for Good is the best-selling secular self-help book published on the topic of forgiveness. |
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W. Keith Sutton, Psy.D. - Host
Dr. Sutton has always had an interest in learning from multiple theoretical perspectives, and keeping up to date on innovations and integrations. He is interested in the development of ideas, and using research to show effectiveness in treatment and refine treatments. In 2009 he started the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy, providing a one-way mirror training in family therapy with James Keim, LCSW. Next, he added a trainer and one-way mirror training in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and an additional trainer and mirror in Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy. The participants enjoyed analyzing cases, keeping each other up to date on research, and discussing what they were learning. This focus on integrating and evolving their approaches to helping children, adolescents, families, couples, and individuals lead to the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy's training program for therapists, and its group practice of like-minded clinicians who were dedicated to learning, innovating, and advancing the field of psychotherapy. Our podcast, Therapy on the Cutting Edge, is an extension of this wish to learn, integrate, stay up to date, and share this passion for the advancement of the field with other practitioners. |
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (00:24):
Welcome to Therapy on the Cutting Edge, a podcast for therapists who want to be up to date on the latest advances in the field of psychotherapy. I'm your host, Dr. Keith Sutton, a psychologist in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the Director of the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy. At the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy, we provide training in evidence-based models, including Family Systems, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, Motivational Interviewing, and other approaches through live in-person and online trainings, on demand trainings, consultation groups, and one-way mirror trainings. We also have therapists throughout the Bay Area and California providing treatment through our six specialty centers, each grounded in an evidence-based approach, with our Lifespan Centers, Center for Children and Center for Adolescents, where all the therapists are working systemically; our Center for Couples, where all the therapists are using Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy; and our specialty issue centers, our Center for Anxiety, where all the therapists are using CBT and EMDR for trauma; and our center for ADHD and Oppositional & Conduct Disorder clinic, where we're integrating those four approaches.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (01:32):
In the institute, we have our licensed, experienced therapists, and for those in financial need, we have an associated nonprofit, Bay Area Community Counseling, where clients can work with associates, psych assistants, and licensed clinicians who are developing their abilities and expertise. Additionally, as part of our nonprofit, we also have the Family Institute of Berkeley, where we provide treatment, training, and one-way mirror trainings in family systems. To learn more about trainings, treatment, and employment opportunities, please go to sfiap.com and to support our nonprofit, you can go to sf-bacc.org to donate today to support access to therapy for those in financial need, as well as training in evidence-based treatment. BACC is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, so all donations are tax deductible.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (02:20):
Today I'll be speaking with Fred Luskin, who is a psychologist in counseling and health psychology from Stanford University, where he has been teaching for the past 30 years. Currently, he is on the faculty for the Stanford School of Business Executive Education Program, where he teaches mindfulness, emotional intelligence, psychological safety, and positive psychology to executives from all around the world. He serves as director of the Stanford University Forgiveness Projects, researching the positive effects of forgiveness or a healthy and happy life. Brett is one of the world's recognized authorities on forgiveness of self and others. He's been interviewed and featured in such media outlets as the New York Times, O Magazine Today show, LA Times, Time Magazine, Huffington Post, and CBS Morning News. In addition, he's published three books and dozens of articles on forgiveness. His book Forgive For Good is the bestselling secular Self-help book published on the topic of forgiveness. Let's listen to the interview.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (03:19):
Well, hi Fred. Welcome.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (03:21):
Thank you.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (03:24):
Great. Thanks for joining us today. I really appreciate it. I was just telling you earlier that actually the first networking event I ever went to when I was a student was the Marin County Psychological Associations event that they had where you were speaking about your book, Forgive For Good and I really enjoyed the book. I had gotten it, read it, and actually found it life changing with some of my clients that I used it with. Recently I saw that you're going to be talking for the Northern California CBT network here, and I was just interested in reaching out to you again and learn more about your work and hearing more as well as what you've been up to lately. But before we get into all that, I always like to find out from folks their evolution of their thinking, how they got to thinking about and doing what they're doing. Can you tell me a little bit about that?
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (04:20):
A long time ago in college, I got very interested in spiritual questions. I'm not going to say I dropped out, but I went sideways for a while to read books and to learn how to meditate and to think a lot about deeper meanings. And I started a vegetarian restaurant in Santa Cruz because I didn't want to become part of corporate America and wanted to explore whatever it was that was outside the norm. I had a baby, had to grow up, went back to graduate school, and then spent a good decade or so trying to figure out how to create something in my life that was meaningful and aligned with things like that. When I got to Stanford as a Ph.D. student, my mentor was an accomplished psychologist, but he had gotten really interested in spirituality and meditation. We started teaching classes together on campus on mind, body, and spirit and managing stress, and we ran a master's degree program on holistic health. My dissertation came around and I had to think of something, and I had been dramatically unable to forgive.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (06:19):
Hmm.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (06:20):
I was just a mess at it, and it ruined my life and I was lost and I was an idiot. Like, you can be lost and not necessarily an idiot. I was an idiot and I was lost. It's a great combination.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (06:38):
Yeah. Both
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (06:39):
If you want to ruin your life and the life of people around you. Anyway, that dissertation allowed me to create an interface between science and where I was at that stage in my life and my long interest in spiritual questions. My dissertation was a secular way of looking at forgiveness to see if I could reproduce what had helped me forgive. The dissertation was successful. We got a massive amount of publicity on it, and the world invited the Stanford Forgiveness project. I got interviewed by the New York Times and the Chronicle and all the local media. That integration and my desire to do something different was the genesis for my work.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (07:48):
Oh, that's wonderful. Tell me about the forgiveness. I'd love to hear also that transition of spiritual to the secular and how you conceptualize forgiveness?
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (08:04):
Well, you'll find it interesting. My mentor was somebody who was probably more religious than I was and we were uncertain whether we were going to do research on a secular approach or religious approach. We found that the problem with the religious approach was too much tribalism. We'd give a talk and we'd talk about forgiveness, and if we were among Christians, they would expect it to be just about Jesus. If we were among Buddhists, they expected it to be just about Buddha. We didn't find much, I'm going to say just in quotes, "Christian charity" among people, so we dropped the religious part. The secular part was a way to define forgiveness without having to refer to anything other worldly or outside of normal experience and allow me to use normal accepted psychological methods in a different way.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (09:24):
Very interesting. So you basically were more focused on the subject, the topic itself, and kind of leaving out maybe the religious references, but kind of distilling down the forgiveness aspects.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (09:38):
I mean, I saw them as different portals of entry.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (09:41):
Got it.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (09:43):
So you can come to something because your religion tells you to, or your connection to spirit tells you to, or you can come to something because you want to protect your heart health. I don't think it makes that much difference. Plus I had this very basic belief that whatever God is or spirit is has no concern which belief system we follow at all. It was more about our behavior and how we followed the commandments of whatever religion we belonged to. And forgiveness seemed pretty trans religious. Wisdom tradition had something, so we tried to make simple techniques, like even back then it was unusual for people to be talking about using mindfulness practices, or CBT in a kind of a Buddhist way. That basic idea, the world doesn't turn out exactly the way you want. Well, Officer Aelius said that thousands of years ago. You could look at Buddhism as all desire leads you to misery so you have to moderate it. We just wanted to make something broad and acceptable. Once we decided on the secular approach, it was clear that that was the better approach. I got invited to do keynotes in law places and medical places and it allowed our work in particular to popularize forgiveness.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (11:38):
Yeah well forgiveness, I think, is such a hard concept. I do a lot of trauma work, and I also use EMDR, and particularly sometimes when we get down to that point of the forgiveness aspect or where the person might be stuck or where some of the discernments might be, sometimes I talk about your book particularly, and I might be getting this wrong or mixing it up but I talk about the way I think about forgiveness is in the book that forgiveness is for the person who has been wronged rather than for the other. So I explain to my clients sometimes, I say, I can't do it justice. You have to get the book and read it. It'll make sense.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (12:25):
But that oftentimes can be life changing. And I had one client that I had done some trauma work with. She had been to numerous other therapists before. We did some EMDR and then she still had about a 3 out of 10 disturbance. I recommended the book, and she came back the next week. This was back when I was still a graduate student. So I was still reading the book and not quite through it yet. She finished it in a week and she said, my gosh, I can't believe it. I've been talking about this my whole life with everybody. It's been such my sole focus, and I realize I need to be able to move to forgiveness and create that space because my kids need me, my husband needs me. She had just realized how much she was consumed with this difficulty forgiveness piece, and how it was just taking over her whole life and she got her life back.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (13:18):
I would suggest to you that that simple truth be offered to every client. You heal for you and you have the mechanism in the present to make some changes. That would seem to be therapy one, you know? Like that basic orientation.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (13:43:
Yeah.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (13:44):
So I'll give you an example of where what you're talking about still keeps me interested. Before saying that, I got trained in EMDR decades ago when I was doing my internship in a VA hospital, they offered me free training. That seems like one of the valuable basics that everybody should be trained in, I mean, maybe that's too strong. But you know what I'm getting at. It's so simple, so clean, so non-denominational, and it helps a lot of people. Nobody that I know, including myself, we don't get an x-ray into somebody's mind or nervous system. So we're all making suppositions about what people can or cannot do. You use the word trauma and from my work in forgiveness, trauma is one of those words that can both help and hurt when people describe it to themselves. It helps if it allows them to gain empathy for their own predicament. Like, "wow, I didn't just face X, that was trauma." I've seen it hurt a lot of people when they take normal life and turn it into trauma. So I know people whose therapists have told them that their parents' divorce was a trauma. It would have to be a really bad divorce in my mind, to be a trauma. But once you identify it as a trauma it becomes much harder to forgive because the word itself catalyzes your nervous system and usually gives you someone to blame. So my antidote to some of that is that wonderful, "you don't have to argue for your limitations, they're already yours." So forgiveness is a deliberate attempt to not blame anyone past grief so that in the present moment you are no longer limiting yourself by throwing blame, exaggerating the past and minimizing your capacity to cope with life right now. That's where the Buddhist stuff is. It's right now.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (17:02):
Yeah that acceptance and presence.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (17:07):
Yeah. Right today we're co-creating our experience. Part of it is past habits, but part of it is choice, and part of it is mindful awareness of what we're doing. Forgiveness, from my point of view, accentuates that mindful awareness part. Do I need to refer to myself as a victim of anything right now? But it's designed for freedom now. We've all had very painful things happen. You live longer, you get to a certain age, your parents have died, you know what I'm saying?
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (18:03):
Yeah. Well, I was going to say it sounds like the opposite of forgiveness is kind of that being ever present with you and maybe affecting each present moment or so on because of the narrative of "I'm the victim of this" and not necessarily being able to be with whatever is happening or in the situation, but instead always bringing in this other piece that's almost taking away the experience of now.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (18:37):
Yeah. And there's that Dr. Phil question, how's that working for you? So we used to ask people all over the place, and this is in no way arguing with anybody's past. I can't tell anybody that that's not what happened or that the implications they're wrong at, but I can ask them how holding it that way is doing to them today?
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (19:16):
Sure. Well, I imagine that's also kind of stuck in that process of grief and whether it be they're stuck in the anger or stuck in the depression or the bargaining. Like, if this didn't happen, my life would've been different as opposed to completing that process of mourning and getting to a place of acceptance and moving forward.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (19:40):
And even acknowledging. Part of the flip side of forgiveness, acknowledging the vulnerability that never goes away.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (19:55):
Part of the reason that our parents have such a capacity to harm us is how vulnerable we are when we're young. And then part of the reason that love is so challenging. And you know, by far in a way, the biggest catchment for forgiveness is intimate relationship. I've been doing this forever and like 70% of it is my partner was a bum, my husband was a bum, wife was a bum. Their ex was a bum. But it's because when we're open like that, we're so vulnerable. So much of forgiveness is being able to accept that vulnerability and not have to blame whatever it is that reminds us of how vulnerable we are.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (20:55):
Yeah so in kind of embracing that vulnerability.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (21:01):
Yeah. Because that's what the nub is. How do we react in the present to an experience or a period of time where we could not protect ourselves? Many of our solutions make our life worse, like bitterness, victimhood --that's that Dr. Phil's, "how’s that working for you?"
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (21:31):
Sure.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (21:33):
All I'm saying is our methods 30 years ago were very different than most therapeutic methods now.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (21:43):
Yeah. Focus on the present rather than going into the past and looking at the parent's effect on more of a psychoanalytic or dynamic kind of piece and how that plays into the difficulties the person's having in the present.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (21:59):
Well my mentor John Cab and I hosted a talk at our class in 1994 after his book had just been released. He was just starting to become a somebody. But I remember listening and talking to the class about the power of mindfulness. I didn't know that much about mindfulness then. It was all about how as you increase awareness, you increase choice. And obviously that resonated with me.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (22:49):
I was actually an eastern philosophy minor in undergraduate and was lucky to have a wonderful philosophy teacher that really brought in a lot of eastern philosophy and philosophy related psychology. This idea of being able to be present and make those choices to move from being reactive to more responsive and also where we want to put our energy and attention rather than just like a Plato's cave where you are reacting to the shadows and going along with things. Instead actually looking around and seeing that there's more than that and not necessarily having to just react to what's happening.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (23:34):
Where'd you go to college?
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (23:36):
I went to the University of Denver. I had a great philosophy department that had a lot of stuff and also brought in some stuff from Naropa Institute in Boulder and some of the somatic psychotherapy, and Taoism, and Buddhism, which was really fortunate for me.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (23:55):
When I was a senior in college, I took a class that literally changed my life in the same dimensions that you are referring to. I was in upstate New York then, which was pretty much the hinterlands. There was a visiting scholar from India who was writing a series of books on the interface between Hindu philosophy, yoga, and psychology. I took a class from him over a quarter, and it opened my mind to things that I had never anticipated. That changed the direction of my life, but the thing that I got from that, more than anything, was the idea of practice.The yogis and the Buddhists are all about current practice. We're creating our future.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (25:13):
Yes, by putting that time and that energy into it, we're putting intention rather than just being reactive.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (25:22):
Yeah. And working at it.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (25:25):
There was somebody I interviewed a couple podcasts ago who was very interesting talking about aspects of forgiveness. She was doing some work with folks that experienced trauma in the United States, particularly who had lost a loved one to a serial killer, and just going into that spiritual aspect. Her name is Karen Sprinkle Ancelet. She was talking about feeling like CBT was not effective enough for these types of situations and there is a more spiritual aspect to it. She went to Asia to live and work and she did some work in Tibet with trauma survivors. I really liked how she talked about how in Tibet, the idea of suffering is that things happen, unfortunately, bad things happen to good people and there's an acceptance of it. Versus in a more western culture, the question is "why me?" Oftentimes people getting very stuck on, "why did this happen to me?" Maybe it's more avid, Judeo Christian if you do the right things then you get good things versus an acceptance that bad things happen that we don't understand or for no reason, but how do we accept that and move forward with our life, given what's happened?
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (26:49):
Well, the Tibetan Buddhist approach, besides the fact that bad things happen to everyone, both good people and bad people, is that the essence of Buddhism is our attachment to outcomes. And our attachment to getting what we want that causes most-- a good percentage of the suffering, not just the experience itself.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (27:21):
That more secondary suffering, that attachment to how it should be, or should have been.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (27:27):
Yeah, and I do agree with you that my experience has been that CBT is not sufficient by itself for a good number of things and even more chilling for a good percentage of the population who don't just want to think linearly or thinking, being their predominant exploration.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (27:58):
Yeah, and I know that you've done so much with your forgiveness project and beyond individuals, I know you've also done some international work. Can you talk a little bit about some of that?
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (28:14):
You know, right now, we're at the very nascent stages of trying to work with an NGO who are hoping to create a forgiveness base something to experiment on people somewhere in the relationship of Gaza, not directly impacted now, but starting peripherally to see if we can teach forgiveness to Palestinians and Israelis --very beginning. Because for my own survival and the value of my own thinking, I need to let some of my bitterness and blame go. The first series of projects we did was in Northern Ireland, where we took people whose family members were murdered, and we taught them to forgive. We brought them to Stanford. First was mothers who had their sons killed, and second was anyone who had someone killed in their family. We've done work in Sierra Leon, I've done work in Columbia, and we've done forgiveness work after the attacks on 9/11. It's a turbocharged version of normal life.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (30:03):
Yeah.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (30:04):
But the, the most challenging part of this is when you're in a conflict among people who don't like each other. Your side can become an obstacle to your own healing. So if we worked with somebody from side A and they had had a family member killed or something happened and they wanted to forgive side B, their side A would label them a traitor. I think you even see things like that now in the United States with red states and blue states. You're either all with me or you're against me. And if you don't share the same woundedness, then you're not trustworthy.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (31:06):
Sure
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (31:07):
I mean, it's the side that I'm on doing it, that was the most difficult and dispiriting part of doing work with really hostile groups.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (31:22):
Well I'd imagine too when there's not the safety, maybe you're talking about an adult parent or something like that, right. Maybe that's now 20, 30 years later after the childhood. So there's maybe an adult who's separate from the parent, or a couple where a partner hurt somebody, but now they're not together. But in this situation, with Israel and Palestine, I imagine it must be extremely hard to forgive knowing that something could happen very soon again because there's so much of that animosity that's going on. How do you do that? How do you forgive while knowing that the perpetrator of the harm is still in their position?
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (32:18):
I understand that that's the same question we all face. So if you had a crappy marriage partner - I mean, you know, you're a therapist. So you hear blood curdling things about how horrible partners have been. They get drunk, they hurt the kids, they don't pay a dime in child support, they scare, you know, all sorts of stuff. And that has just a devastating effect on one's sense of trust and safety. At that same moment, there's always the question of what actually makes us safe in this world. And unfortunately, the long-term solution of armoring up, becoming bitter, or trusting less does not lead us to feel safe. It may make us protected, it may make us more guarded, but it also limits our capacity to love and enjoy.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (33:35):
Now, in this example that you're giving, that makes me think of if the person was no longer in the home, right. Or if the person maybe got treatment and came back, but if the person's still in the home still hurting the children, that's what I imagine. Again, something like an ongoing conflict like Israel and Palestine or even in times of peace, it doesn't mean that things have changed and there's a high likelihood it's not going to happen again. So that's where I would be curious about it. Because oftentimes the forgiveness is like once there's been a change, or once the person's away from the situation versus actually still having to live with that situation. Especially if there's also oppression or injustice.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (34:26):
I have three answers, and I'm sorry I'm interrupting, but I'm holding all three. So the first one is the difference between forgiveness and reconciliation. Forgiveness is inner -my own appealing and release- reconciliation is the relationship. So you can forgive and still show somebody the door. That's an important distinction. I remember I gave a talk at Santa Clara University decades ago, and some young woman raised her hand at the end of the session and said, "forgiveness stuff is interesting and I like the idea, but I still don't want to go home on Thanksgiving because dad's crazy." And that was crystallizing the difference between forgiveness and reconciling and the ever present need to keep yourself safe. So we used to say to people when we were more snarky that forgiveness is not the same as getting a lobotomy. You still have to think. And you don't, you know, if dad's a creator and I mean these terms generally-
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (35:55):
Sure, sure, sure.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (35:57):
If Dad's crazy, don't go home. But when you're not home, you don't need to hate him. The third piece that is missing from your question is the mindful piece, which is right this very moment, I'm usually safe. That if I can bring my attention to now, like that ramdas be here now, so if I can ask myself, where am I? Well, I'm right here. And when am I here right now? Am I safe right here? And now for this moment? Most of the time the answer's yes. Not always, but it's a corrective to the overreach of our threat response.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (37:05):
Got it.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (37:06):
Like the stress response is not an intelligent agent. It overreaches all over the place. That's its job. You want to do practices that help combat that overreach.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (37:22):
I think of it sometimes as closing the fight or flight loop. For example, the zebra gets chased by the lions, they go into fight or flight, and then they realize the lions are gone, and then they close that loop back to safety so they can go and eat and drink water or whatever it might be. So that's a nice way of mindfulness to kind of get yourself back to that safety that is present -if it is present- rather than continuing to think about the lion and feeling in that fight or flight place at most moments.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (37:58):
Wasn't that Robert Polsky's basic understanding of why zebras don't get ulcers?
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (38:06):
Yeah. Yeah. I love that work.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (38:09):
So that's exactly right. But most of us, because adrenaline is such a powerful threat generator, rarely examine at the present moment if it's true. Then when you add narrative in which cements threat often, it becomes almost impossible to get through that defensiveness, to even have people look around and see how much abundance and safety they actually have. That lack of vision of their abundance and safety keeps them stuck in ways that they don't understand. So you take Marin County, which is wealthy and educated, you don't see enough happy people who live with most of their basic needs met. They don't think about their day objectively, which is, "Hey, I got food in the refrigerator. My kids go to mostly safe schools. I have education, transportation. I live in a beautiful place. I have indoor plumbing, and I have money in the bank, therefore I'm in the 95th percentile of the food chain." Because they don't, and we don't see reality are threat things operate in exaggerated fashions. So all that can be examined.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (40:02):
Yeah. Kind of what our mind is doing and what it's looking at and where it's focusing on and paying attention to. I like this idea of the forgiveness aspect, the reconciliation aspect, and the mindfulness aspect. With that forgiveness and reconciliation, it sounds like forgiveness and acceptance are kind of synonymous, or is that different?
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (40:30):
I mean, I don't know how to answer. I can give you pokings at it, but one of the things that strikes me as interesting about that question is there's a little bit of mental dysfunction in not accepting. Like what does it mean to not accept what is? It's a form of mental problem. If you don't accept that your kid ran away or your husband's ex or grandma was abusive, that's just make believe in your own mind. So a lack of acceptance is in and of itself a mental health problem. So acceptance at some level is the baseline quality to do therapeutic work. You have to accept that it happened, you have to own the fact that this is real. Yes, that's true, that's a cornerstone of forgiveness, but what forgiveness adds to is that there's all sorts of things that happen in this world that we don't like. What happens with some of them is our reactions become overwhelming and chronic and lead to grievance, but nothing changes in the world. I mean, it's just the unfolding and forgiveness is unwinding our reactivity, pulling it back so that we're simply left with reality of what's always been there. And then we can start to answer the important questions, which is "if I did have an abusive parent, what's the best way to live my life to minimize the harmful effects of that?" That's the important question, not the condemning or the blaming or anything. Or, since I spent 20 years unable to make peace with my life, how do I make sure that that doesn't happen again if somebody else disappoints me? So forgiveness is the cleanup of the projected stuff around so that we can then work on what really matters. How do I live an optimal life and how do I, within the limitations of this world, stay safe?
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (43:37):
Well, and I think it goes back to what I have taken away from your work, which is that forgiveness is for you, not necessarily for the other person. And that oftentimes I think when people do think of forgiveness, they think of forgiving the other person, resolving them of their difficulties. But instead, it's more resolving yourself and letting go of that bitterness or that anger or that focus on this piece and putting down the protest sign and moving forward with life.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (44:09):
So two responses: one is we learned early on, we were humbled that we thought we'd go in and teach all this miracle forgiveness stuff. Half the time people had no idea what we were talking about, maybe more than half the time. And we realized that what you just said, what is forgiveness and what is it not that turned out to be half of our work. Educating people about what it is and what it isn't and it's for you. The second thing is when we were sitting around, we would ask ourselves, "if you have to forgive an abusive parent and they're dead, can you forgive them?"Now if it's about them, you can't, what are you going to do? Dig up the mom and shake her bones? But if you realize it's for you, then whether they're dead or not doesn't matter, it's for you. That became the defining thought experiment that allowed us to move forward in the way that you've now articulated twice. It's for me, not them.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (45:31):
Yeah. I think that sits better with people, understanding that piece. And I know that you've created a workbook that you had mentioned. Tell me a little bit about that.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (45:43):
Well for me, this is probably the capstone of our forgiveness career, so to speak. And it's why I agreed to do the thing you talked about with the CBT. After decades, I hardly do any full day talks on forgiveness anymore. I do two hour talks, but my partner and I turned Forgive For Good into a step-by-step workbook with prompts and meditations, because in the 20 years since I wrote Forgive for Good, that book was a bit aspirational. Nobody really knew what we were doing. We had some really good ideas, but now 20 plus years later, we fleshed it out and I think we understand a little more. So we turned it into what I hope is an extremely user friendly step-by-step guidance for how to actually do this.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (47:06):
Great. That's wonderful.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (47:08):
And I'm hoping that is my legacy or whatever.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (47:14):
Sure, yeah you're passing on that tool to help people go through it and actually have some concrete steps on how to process to get that forgiveness, rather than just taking the ideas and not being sure what to do with it from the book alone.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (47:28):
And we've heard that.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (47:31):
Well, that's great. That's wonderful. And how have you been finding people reacting to it?
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (47:38):
It takes work to do a workbook and in 21st century America, there are fewer people than you might think that want to dig in and do work.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (47:56):
Sure. Sure.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (47:58):
And second, forgiveness is in the therapeutic endeavor, not a basic program. It's a more advanced, difficult program. So that's another obstacle. The people who have used the workbook are thankful, but I can't tell you how many people have said, "this looks great, and if I have a spare two months, I'll get to it."
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (48:36):
Well I imagine there's that correlation between the discomfort or the struggle the person is in and the amount of time and energy they might put in to work on it. It's nice that it's there to help guide them through as well as for therapists to be able to use with their clients because it can be life changing to achieve that forgiveness and to shift. It sounds like for yourself you started this whole journey for your own forgiveness so it really can be significant. I forget if it was in your book, you talk about all that space it takes up in your mind and allowing that to be able to be pushed to the side or really to move past it. Not that it's gone, but that there's more space enabled to be mindful and to be making conscious choices about what we're doing and how we're spending our focus in our present.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (49:43):
Well, yes and you know also that our attention spans are far weaker than they used to be. Fewer people read any books now during a year --it's a different landscape. For me, the interesting pieces are going back out there and teaching workshops. It's causing me to have to build up my stamina. I mean, I've been doing so many podcasts over these past six months that I know I'm still good for an hour, but six hours is a different animal. The one thing that I will say, there's a very famous line about forgiveness called, it's giving up all hope for a better past.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (50:54):
Hmm.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (50:55):
And that's the best thing that I've ever heard about it.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (50:59):
That's wonderful. Well, Fred, thank you so much for taking the time today and I really appreciate the work that you're doing and
you've just had such a wonderful influence. It's such an important topic and subject where so many people struggle. I'm glad that there's a workbook for even more nuanced help to work through. So really appreciate your time. Thank you so much.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (51:24):
It was sweet of you to say that you saw me 20 years ago at an event that I remember.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (51:36):
Oh, you do? Oh, great. Wonderful.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (51:39):
I was friends at that time with a couple of people on the Marin Psych Association board of directors so I do remember that.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (51:53):
Yeah, how things come around. It's great the universe brought us back together again.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (52:00):
I believe that. So, I thank you as I'm doing these things to try to promote that workbook.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (52:08):
Great. Well, take care. Bye-bye.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (52:11):
Thank you for joining us today. If you'd like to receive continuing education credits for the podcast you just listened to, please go to therapyonthecuttingedge.com and click on the link for CE. Our podcast is brought to you by the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy, where we provide trainings for therapists in evidence-based models through live and online workshops, on-demand workshops, consultation groups, and online one-way mirror trainings. To learn more about our trainings and treatment for children, adolescents, families, couples, and individual adults, with our licensed experienced therapists in-person in the Bay Area, or throughout California online, and our employment opportunities, go to sfiap.com. To learn more about our associateships and psych assistantships and low fee treatment through our nonprofit Bay Area Community Counseling and Family Institute of Berkeley, go to sf-bacc.org and familyinstituteofberkeley.com. If you'd like to support therapy for those in financial need and training and evidence-based treatments, you can donate by going to BACC’s website at sfbacc.org. BACC is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit so all donations are tax deductible. Also, we really appreciate your feedback. If you have something you're interested in, something that's on the cutting edge of the field of psychotherapy, and you think therapists out there should know about it, send us an email. We're always looking for advancements in the field of psychotherapy to create lasting change for our clients.
Welcome to Therapy on the Cutting Edge, a podcast for therapists who want to be up to date on the latest advances in the field of psychotherapy. I'm your host, Dr. Keith Sutton, a psychologist in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the Director of the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy. At the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy, we provide training in evidence-based models, including Family Systems, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, Motivational Interviewing, and other approaches through live in-person and online trainings, on demand trainings, consultation groups, and one-way mirror trainings. We also have therapists throughout the Bay Area and California providing treatment through our six specialty centers, each grounded in an evidence-based approach, with our Lifespan Centers, Center for Children and Center for Adolescents, where all the therapists are working systemically; our Center for Couples, where all the therapists are using Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy; and our specialty issue centers, our Center for Anxiety, where all the therapists are using CBT and EMDR for trauma; and our center for ADHD and Oppositional & Conduct Disorder clinic, where we're integrating those four approaches.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (01:32):
In the institute, we have our licensed, experienced therapists, and for those in financial need, we have an associated nonprofit, Bay Area Community Counseling, where clients can work with associates, psych assistants, and licensed clinicians who are developing their abilities and expertise. Additionally, as part of our nonprofit, we also have the Family Institute of Berkeley, where we provide treatment, training, and one-way mirror trainings in family systems. To learn more about trainings, treatment, and employment opportunities, please go to sfiap.com and to support our nonprofit, you can go to sf-bacc.org to donate today to support access to therapy for those in financial need, as well as training in evidence-based treatment. BACC is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, so all donations are tax deductible.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (02:20):
Today I'll be speaking with Fred Luskin, who is a psychologist in counseling and health psychology from Stanford University, where he has been teaching for the past 30 years. Currently, he is on the faculty for the Stanford School of Business Executive Education Program, where he teaches mindfulness, emotional intelligence, psychological safety, and positive psychology to executives from all around the world. He serves as director of the Stanford University Forgiveness Projects, researching the positive effects of forgiveness or a healthy and happy life. Brett is one of the world's recognized authorities on forgiveness of self and others. He's been interviewed and featured in such media outlets as the New York Times, O Magazine Today show, LA Times, Time Magazine, Huffington Post, and CBS Morning News. In addition, he's published three books and dozens of articles on forgiveness. His book Forgive For Good is the bestselling secular Self-help book published on the topic of forgiveness. Let's listen to the interview.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (03:19):
Well, hi Fred. Welcome.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (03:21):
Thank you.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (03:24):
Great. Thanks for joining us today. I really appreciate it. I was just telling you earlier that actually the first networking event I ever went to when I was a student was the Marin County Psychological Associations event that they had where you were speaking about your book, Forgive For Good and I really enjoyed the book. I had gotten it, read it, and actually found it life changing with some of my clients that I used it with. Recently I saw that you're going to be talking for the Northern California CBT network here, and I was just interested in reaching out to you again and learn more about your work and hearing more as well as what you've been up to lately. But before we get into all that, I always like to find out from folks their evolution of their thinking, how they got to thinking about and doing what they're doing. Can you tell me a little bit about that?
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (04:20):
A long time ago in college, I got very interested in spiritual questions. I'm not going to say I dropped out, but I went sideways for a while to read books and to learn how to meditate and to think a lot about deeper meanings. And I started a vegetarian restaurant in Santa Cruz because I didn't want to become part of corporate America and wanted to explore whatever it was that was outside the norm. I had a baby, had to grow up, went back to graduate school, and then spent a good decade or so trying to figure out how to create something in my life that was meaningful and aligned with things like that. When I got to Stanford as a Ph.D. student, my mentor was an accomplished psychologist, but he had gotten really interested in spirituality and meditation. We started teaching classes together on campus on mind, body, and spirit and managing stress, and we ran a master's degree program on holistic health. My dissertation came around and I had to think of something, and I had been dramatically unable to forgive.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (06:19):
Hmm.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (06:20):
I was just a mess at it, and it ruined my life and I was lost and I was an idiot. Like, you can be lost and not necessarily an idiot. I was an idiot and I was lost. It's a great combination.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (06:38):
Yeah. Both
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (06:39):
If you want to ruin your life and the life of people around you. Anyway, that dissertation allowed me to create an interface between science and where I was at that stage in my life and my long interest in spiritual questions. My dissertation was a secular way of looking at forgiveness to see if I could reproduce what had helped me forgive. The dissertation was successful. We got a massive amount of publicity on it, and the world invited the Stanford Forgiveness project. I got interviewed by the New York Times and the Chronicle and all the local media. That integration and my desire to do something different was the genesis for my work.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (07:48):
Oh, that's wonderful. Tell me about the forgiveness. I'd love to hear also that transition of spiritual to the secular and how you conceptualize forgiveness?
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (08:04):
Well, you'll find it interesting. My mentor was somebody who was probably more religious than I was and we were uncertain whether we were going to do research on a secular approach or religious approach. We found that the problem with the religious approach was too much tribalism. We'd give a talk and we'd talk about forgiveness, and if we were among Christians, they would expect it to be just about Jesus. If we were among Buddhists, they expected it to be just about Buddha. We didn't find much, I'm going to say just in quotes, "Christian charity" among people, so we dropped the religious part. The secular part was a way to define forgiveness without having to refer to anything other worldly or outside of normal experience and allow me to use normal accepted psychological methods in a different way.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (09:24):
Very interesting. So you basically were more focused on the subject, the topic itself, and kind of leaving out maybe the religious references, but kind of distilling down the forgiveness aspects.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (09:38):
I mean, I saw them as different portals of entry.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (09:41):
Got it.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (09:43):
So you can come to something because your religion tells you to, or your connection to spirit tells you to, or you can come to something because you want to protect your heart health. I don't think it makes that much difference. Plus I had this very basic belief that whatever God is or spirit is has no concern which belief system we follow at all. It was more about our behavior and how we followed the commandments of whatever religion we belonged to. And forgiveness seemed pretty trans religious. Wisdom tradition had something, so we tried to make simple techniques, like even back then it was unusual for people to be talking about using mindfulness practices, or CBT in a kind of a Buddhist way. That basic idea, the world doesn't turn out exactly the way you want. Well, Officer Aelius said that thousands of years ago. You could look at Buddhism as all desire leads you to misery so you have to moderate it. We just wanted to make something broad and acceptable. Once we decided on the secular approach, it was clear that that was the better approach. I got invited to do keynotes in law places and medical places and it allowed our work in particular to popularize forgiveness.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (11:38):
Yeah well forgiveness, I think, is such a hard concept. I do a lot of trauma work, and I also use EMDR, and particularly sometimes when we get down to that point of the forgiveness aspect or where the person might be stuck or where some of the discernments might be, sometimes I talk about your book particularly, and I might be getting this wrong or mixing it up but I talk about the way I think about forgiveness is in the book that forgiveness is for the person who has been wronged rather than for the other. So I explain to my clients sometimes, I say, I can't do it justice. You have to get the book and read it. It'll make sense.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (12:25):
But that oftentimes can be life changing. And I had one client that I had done some trauma work with. She had been to numerous other therapists before. We did some EMDR and then she still had about a 3 out of 10 disturbance. I recommended the book, and she came back the next week. This was back when I was still a graduate student. So I was still reading the book and not quite through it yet. She finished it in a week and she said, my gosh, I can't believe it. I've been talking about this my whole life with everybody. It's been such my sole focus, and I realize I need to be able to move to forgiveness and create that space because my kids need me, my husband needs me. She had just realized how much she was consumed with this difficulty forgiveness piece, and how it was just taking over her whole life and she got her life back.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (13:18):
I would suggest to you that that simple truth be offered to every client. You heal for you and you have the mechanism in the present to make some changes. That would seem to be therapy one, you know? Like that basic orientation.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (13:43:
Yeah.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (13:44):
So I'll give you an example of where what you're talking about still keeps me interested. Before saying that, I got trained in EMDR decades ago when I was doing my internship in a VA hospital, they offered me free training. That seems like one of the valuable basics that everybody should be trained in, I mean, maybe that's too strong. But you know what I'm getting at. It's so simple, so clean, so non-denominational, and it helps a lot of people. Nobody that I know, including myself, we don't get an x-ray into somebody's mind or nervous system. So we're all making suppositions about what people can or cannot do. You use the word trauma and from my work in forgiveness, trauma is one of those words that can both help and hurt when people describe it to themselves. It helps if it allows them to gain empathy for their own predicament. Like, "wow, I didn't just face X, that was trauma." I've seen it hurt a lot of people when they take normal life and turn it into trauma. So I know people whose therapists have told them that their parents' divorce was a trauma. It would have to be a really bad divorce in my mind, to be a trauma. But once you identify it as a trauma it becomes much harder to forgive because the word itself catalyzes your nervous system and usually gives you someone to blame. So my antidote to some of that is that wonderful, "you don't have to argue for your limitations, they're already yours." So forgiveness is a deliberate attempt to not blame anyone past grief so that in the present moment you are no longer limiting yourself by throwing blame, exaggerating the past and minimizing your capacity to cope with life right now. That's where the Buddhist stuff is. It's right now.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (17:02):
Yeah that acceptance and presence.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (17:07):
Yeah. Right today we're co-creating our experience. Part of it is past habits, but part of it is choice, and part of it is mindful awareness of what we're doing. Forgiveness, from my point of view, accentuates that mindful awareness part. Do I need to refer to myself as a victim of anything right now? But it's designed for freedom now. We've all had very painful things happen. You live longer, you get to a certain age, your parents have died, you know what I'm saying?
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (18:03):
Yeah. Well, I was going to say it sounds like the opposite of forgiveness is kind of that being ever present with you and maybe affecting each present moment or so on because of the narrative of "I'm the victim of this" and not necessarily being able to be with whatever is happening or in the situation, but instead always bringing in this other piece that's almost taking away the experience of now.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (18:37):
Yeah. And there's that Dr. Phil question, how's that working for you? So we used to ask people all over the place, and this is in no way arguing with anybody's past. I can't tell anybody that that's not what happened or that the implications they're wrong at, but I can ask them how holding it that way is doing to them today?
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (19:16):
Sure. Well, I imagine that's also kind of stuck in that process of grief and whether it be they're stuck in the anger or stuck in the depression or the bargaining. Like, if this didn't happen, my life would've been different as opposed to completing that process of mourning and getting to a place of acceptance and moving forward.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (19:40):
And even acknowledging. Part of the flip side of forgiveness, acknowledging the vulnerability that never goes away.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (19:55):
Part of the reason that our parents have such a capacity to harm us is how vulnerable we are when we're young. And then part of the reason that love is so challenging. And you know, by far in a way, the biggest catchment for forgiveness is intimate relationship. I've been doing this forever and like 70% of it is my partner was a bum, my husband was a bum, wife was a bum. Their ex was a bum. But it's because when we're open like that, we're so vulnerable. So much of forgiveness is being able to accept that vulnerability and not have to blame whatever it is that reminds us of how vulnerable we are.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (20:55):
Yeah so in kind of embracing that vulnerability.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (21:01):
Yeah. Because that's what the nub is. How do we react in the present to an experience or a period of time where we could not protect ourselves? Many of our solutions make our life worse, like bitterness, victimhood --that's that Dr. Phil's, "how’s that working for you?"
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (21:31):
Sure.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (21:33):
All I'm saying is our methods 30 years ago were very different than most therapeutic methods now.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (21:43):
Yeah. Focus on the present rather than going into the past and looking at the parent's effect on more of a psychoanalytic or dynamic kind of piece and how that plays into the difficulties the person's having in the present.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (21:59):
Well my mentor John Cab and I hosted a talk at our class in 1994 after his book had just been released. He was just starting to become a somebody. But I remember listening and talking to the class about the power of mindfulness. I didn't know that much about mindfulness then. It was all about how as you increase awareness, you increase choice. And obviously that resonated with me.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (22:49):
I was actually an eastern philosophy minor in undergraduate and was lucky to have a wonderful philosophy teacher that really brought in a lot of eastern philosophy and philosophy related psychology. This idea of being able to be present and make those choices to move from being reactive to more responsive and also where we want to put our energy and attention rather than just like a Plato's cave where you are reacting to the shadows and going along with things. Instead actually looking around and seeing that there's more than that and not necessarily having to just react to what's happening.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (23:34):
Where'd you go to college?
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (23:36):
I went to the University of Denver. I had a great philosophy department that had a lot of stuff and also brought in some stuff from Naropa Institute in Boulder and some of the somatic psychotherapy, and Taoism, and Buddhism, which was really fortunate for me.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (23:55):
When I was a senior in college, I took a class that literally changed my life in the same dimensions that you are referring to. I was in upstate New York then, which was pretty much the hinterlands. There was a visiting scholar from India who was writing a series of books on the interface between Hindu philosophy, yoga, and psychology. I took a class from him over a quarter, and it opened my mind to things that I had never anticipated. That changed the direction of my life, but the thing that I got from that, more than anything, was the idea of practice.The yogis and the Buddhists are all about current practice. We're creating our future.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (25:13):
Yes, by putting that time and that energy into it, we're putting intention rather than just being reactive.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (25:22):
Yeah. And working at it.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (25:25):
There was somebody I interviewed a couple podcasts ago who was very interesting talking about aspects of forgiveness. She was doing some work with folks that experienced trauma in the United States, particularly who had lost a loved one to a serial killer, and just going into that spiritual aspect. Her name is Karen Sprinkle Ancelet. She was talking about feeling like CBT was not effective enough for these types of situations and there is a more spiritual aspect to it. She went to Asia to live and work and she did some work in Tibet with trauma survivors. I really liked how she talked about how in Tibet, the idea of suffering is that things happen, unfortunately, bad things happen to good people and there's an acceptance of it. Versus in a more western culture, the question is "why me?" Oftentimes people getting very stuck on, "why did this happen to me?" Maybe it's more avid, Judeo Christian if you do the right things then you get good things versus an acceptance that bad things happen that we don't understand or for no reason, but how do we accept that and move forward with our life, given what's happened?
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (26:49):
Well, the Tibetan Buddhist approach, besides the fact that bad things happen to everyone, both good people and bad people, is that the essence of Buddhism is our attachment to outcomes. And our attachment to getting what we want that causes most-- a good percentage of the suffering, not just the experience itself.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (27:21):
That more secondary suffering, that attachment to how it should be, or should have been.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (27:27):
Yeah, and I do agree with you that my experience has been that CBT is not sufficient by itself for a good number of things and even more chilling for a good percentage of the population who don't just want to think linearly or thinking, being their predominant exploration.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (27:58):
Yeah, and I know that you've done so much with your forgiveness project and beyond individuals, I know you've also done some international work. Can you talk a little bit about some of that?
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (28:14):
You know, right now, we're at the very nascent stages of trying to work with an NGO who are hoping to create a forgiveness base something to experiment on people somewhere in the relationship of Gaza, not directly impacted now, but starting peripherally to see if we can teach forgiveness to Palestinians and Israelis --very beginning. Because for my own survival and the value of my own thinking, I need to let some of my bitterness and blame go. The first series of projects we did was in Northern Ireland, where we took people whose family members were murdered, and we taught them to forgive. We brought them to Stanford. First was mothers who had their sons killed, and second was anyone who had someone killed in their family. We've done work in Sierra Leon, I've done work in Columbia, and we've done forgiveness work after the attacks on 9/11. It's a turbocharged version of normal life.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (30:03):
Yeah.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (30:04):
But the, the most challenging part of this is when you're in a conflict among people who don't like each other. Your side can become an obstacle to your own healing. So if we worked with somebody from side A and they had had a family member killed or something happened and they wanted to forgive side B, their side A would label them a traitor. I think you even see things like that now in the United States with red states and blue states. You're either all with me or you're against me. And if you don't share the same woundedness, then you're not trustworthy.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (31:06):
Sure
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (31:07):
I mean, it's the side that I'm on doing it, that was the most difficult and dispiriting part of doing work with really hostile groups.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (31:22):
Well I'd imagine too when there's not the safety, maybe you're talking about an adult parent or something like that, right. Maybe that's now 20, 30 years later after the childhood. So there's maybe an adult who's separate from the parent, or a couple where a partner hurt somebody, but now they're not together. But in this situation, with Israel and Palestine, I imagine it must be extremely hard to forgive knowing that something could happen very soon again because there's so much of that animosity that's going on. How do you do that? How do you forgive while knowing that the perpetrator of the harm is still in their position?
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (32:18):
I understand that that's the same question we all face. So if you had a crappy marriage partner - I mean, you know, you're a therapist. So you hear blood curdling things about how horrible partners have been. They get drunk, they hurt the kids, they don't pay a dime in child support, they scare, you know, all sorts of stuff. And that has just a devastating effect on one's sense of trust and safety. At that same moment, there's always the question of what actually makes us safe in this world. And unfortunately, the long-term solution of armoring up, becoming bitter, or trusting less does not lead us to feel safe. It may make us protected, it may make us more guarded, but it also limits our capacity to love and enjoy.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (33:35):
Now, in this example that you're giving, that makes me think of if the person was no longer in the home, right. Or if the person maybe got treatment and came back, but if the person's still in the home still hurting the children, that's what I imagine. Again, something like an ongoing conflict like Israel and Palestine or even in times of peace, it doesn't mean that things have changed and there's a high likelihood it's not going to happen again. So that's where I would be curious about it. Because oftentimes the forgiveness is like once there's been a change, or once the person's away from the situation versus actually still having to live with that situation. Especially if there's also oppression or injustice.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (34:26):
I have three answers, and I'm sorry I'm interrupting, but I'm holding all three. So the first one is the difference between forgiveness and reconciliation. Forgiveness is inner -my own appealing and release- reconciliation is the relationship. So you can forgive and still show somebody the door. That's an important distinction. I remember I gave a talk at Santa Clara University decades ago, and some young woman raised her hand at the end of the session and said, "forgiveness stuff is interesting and I like the idea, but I still don't want to go home on Thanksgiving because dad's crazy." And that was crystallizing the difference between forgiveness and reconciling and the ever present need to keep yourself safe. So we used to say to people when we were more snarky that forgiveness is not the same as getting a lobotomy. You still have to think. And you don't, you know, if dad's a creator and I mean these terms generally-
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (35:55):
Sure, sure, sure.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (35:57):
If Dad's crazy, don't go home. But when you're not home, you don't need to hate him. The third piece that is missing from your question is the mindful piece, which is right this very moment, I'm usually safe. That if I can bring my attention to now, like that ramdas be here now, so if I can ask myself, where am I? Well, I'm right here. And when am I here right now? Am I safe right here? And now for this moment? Most of the time the answer's yes. Not always, but it's a corrective to the overreach of our threat response.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (37:05):
Got it.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (37:06):
Like the stress response is not an intelligent agent. It overreaches all over the place. That's its job. You want to do practices that help combat that overreach.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (37:22):
I think of it sometimes as closing the fight or flight loop. For example, the zebra gets chased by the lions, they go into fight or flight, and then they realize the lions are gone, and then they close that loop back to safety so they can go and eat and drink water or whatever it might be. So that's a nice way of mindfulness to kind of get yourself back to that safety that is present -if it is present- rather than continuing to think about the lion and feeling in that fight or flight place at most moments.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (37:58):
Wasn't that Robert Polsky's basic understanding of why zebras don't get ulcers?
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (38:06):
Yeah. Yeah. I love that work.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (38:09):
So that's exactly right. But most of us, because adrenaline is such a powerful threat generator, rarely examine at the present moment if it's true. Then when you add narrative in which cements threat often, it becomes almost impossible to get through that defensiveness, to even have people look around and see how much abundance and safety they actually have. That lack of vision of their abundance and safety keeps them stuck in ways that they don't understand. So you take Marin County, which is wealthy and educated, you don't see enough happy people who live with most of their basic needs met. They don't think about their day objectively, which is, "Hey, I got food in the refrigerator. My kids go to mostly safe schools. I have education, transportation. I live in a beautiful place. I have indoor plumbing, and I have money in the bank, therefore I'm in the 95th percentile of the food chain." Because they don't, and we don't see reality are threat things operate in exaggerated fashions. So all that can be examined.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (40:02):
Yeah. Kind of what our mind is doing and what it's looking at and where it's focusing on and paying attention to. I like this idea of the forgiveness aspect, the reconciliation aspect, and the mindfulness aspect. With that forgiveness and reconciliation, it sounds like forgiveness and acceptance are kind of synonymous, or is that different?
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (40:30):
I mean, I don't know how to answer. I can give you pokings at it, but one of the things that strikes me as interesting about that question is there's a little bit of mental dysfunction in not accepting. Like what does it mean to not accept what is? It's a form of mental problem. If you don't accept that your kid ran away or your husband's ex or grandma was abusive, that's just make believe in your own mind. So a lack of acceptance is in and of itself a mental health problem. So acceptance at some level is the baseline quality to do therapeutic work. You have to accept that it happened, you have to own the fact that this is real. Yes, that's true, that's a cornerstone of forgiveness, but what forgiveness adds to is that there's all sorts of things that happen in this world that we don't like. What happens with some of them is our reactions become overwhelming and chronic and lead to grievance, but nothing changes in the world. I mean, it's just the unfolding and forgiveness is unwinding our reactivity, pulling it back so that we're simply left with reality of what's always been there. And then we can start to answer the important questions, which is "if I did have an abusive parent, what's the best way to live my life to minimize the harmful effects of that?" That's the important question, not the condemning or the blaming or anything. Or, since I spent 20 years unable to make peace with my life, how do I make sure that that doesn't happen again if somebody else disappoints me? So forgiveness is the cleanup of the projected stuff around so that we can then work on what really matters. How do I live an optimal life and how do I, within the limitations of this world, stay safe?
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (43:37):
Well, and I think it goes back to what I have taken away from your work, which is that forgiveness is for you, not necessarily for the other person. And that oftentimes I think when people do think of forgiveness, they think of forgiving the other person, resolving them of their difficulties. But instead, it's more resolving yourself and letting go of that bitterness or that anger or that focus on this piece and putting down the protest sign and moving forward with life.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (44:09):
So two responses: one is we learned early on, we were humbled that we thought we'd go in and teach all this miracle forgiveness stuff. Half the time people had no idea what we were talking about, maybe more than half the time. And we realized that what you just said, what is forgiveness and what is it not that turned out to be half of our work. Educating people about what it is and what it isn't and it's for you. The second thing is when we were sitting around, we would ask ourselves, "if you have to forgive an abusive parent and they're dead, can you forgive them?"Now if it's about them, you can't, what are you going to do? Dig up the mom and shake her bones? But if you realize it's for you, then whether they're dead or not doesn't matter, it's for you. That became the defining thought experiment that allowed us to move forward in the way that you've now articulated twice. It's for me, not them.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (45:31):
Yeah. I think that sits better with people, understanding that piece. And I know that you've created a workbook that you had mentioned. Tell me a little bit about that.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (45:43):
Well for me, this is probably the capstone of our forgiveness career, so to speak. And it's why I agreed to do the thing you talked about with the CBT. After decades, I hardly do any full day talks on forgiveness anymore. I do two hour talks, but my partner and I turned Forgive For Good into a step-by-step workbook with prompts and meditations, because in the 20 years since I wrote Forgive for Good, that book was a bit aspirational. Nobody really knew what we were doing. We had some really good ideas, but now 20 plus years later, we fleshed it out and I think we understand a little more. So we turned it into what I hope is an extremely user friendly step-by-step guidance for how to actually do this.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (47:06):
Great. That's wonderful.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (47:08):
And I'm hoping that is my legacy or whatever.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (47:14):
Sure, yeah you're passing on that tool to help people go through it and actually have some concrete steps on how to process to get that forgiveness, rather than just taking the ideas and not being sure what to do with it from the book alone.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (47:28):
And we've heard that.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (47:31):
Well, that's great. That's wonderful. And how have you been finding people reacting to it?
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (47:38):
It takes work to do a workbook and in 21st century America, there are fewer people than you might think that want to dig in and do work.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (47:56):
Sure. Sure.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (47:58):
And second, forgiveness is in the therapeutic endeavor, not a basic program. It's a more advanced, difficult program. So that's another obstacle. The people who have used the workbook are thankful, but I can't tell you how many people have said, "this looks great, and if I have a spare two months, I'll get to it."
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (48:36):
Well I imagine there's that correlation between the discomfort or the struggle the person is in and the amount of time and energy they might put in to work on it. It's nice that it's there to help guide them through as well as for therapists to be able to use with their clients because it can be life changing to achieve that forgiveness and to shift. It sounds like for yourself you started this whole journey for your own forgiveness so it really can be significant. I forget if it was in your book, you talk about all that space it takes up in your mind and allowing that to be able to be pushed to the side or really to move past it. Not that it's gone, but that there's more space enabled to be mindful and to be making conscious choices about what we're doing and how we're spending our focus in our present.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (49:43):
Well, yes and you know also that our attention spans are far weaker than they used to be. Fewer people read any books now during a year --it's a different landscape. For me, the interesting pieces are going back out there and teaching workshops. It's causing me to have to build up my stamina. I mean, I've been doing so many podcasts over these past six months that I know I'm still good for an hour, but six hours is a different animal. The one thing that I will say, there's a very famous line about forgiveness called, it's giving up all hope for a better past.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (50:54):
Hmm.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (50:55):
And that's the best thing that I've ever heard about it.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (50:59):
That's wonderful. Well, Fred, thank you so much for taking the time today and I really appreciate the work that you're doing and
you've just had such a wonderful influence. It's such an important topic and subject where so many people struggle. I'm glad that there's a workbook for even more nuanced help to work through. So really appreciate your time. Thank you so much.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (51:24):
It was sweet of you to say that you saw me 20 years ago at an event that I remember.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (51:36):
Oh, you do? Oh, great. Wonderful.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (51:39):
I was friends at that time with a couple of people on the Marin Psych Association board of directors so I do remember that.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (51:53):
Yeah, how things come around. It's great the universe brought us back together again.
Fred Luskin, Ph.D. (52:00):
I believe that. So, I thank you as I'm doing these things to try to promote that workbook.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (52:08):
Great. Well, take care. Bye-bye.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (52:11):
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