A PROFESSOR IN THE Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, for 23 years, Robert Enright teaches courses in moral psychology, adolescent development, and forgiveness. His research focuses exclusively on forgiveness.

Professor Enright has written three three books. Exploring Forgiveness offers essays by professionals, as well as personal testimonies to the effectiveness of forgiveness. Helping Clients Forgive is a book he wrote with Richard P.Fitzgibbons. This book is for anyone in a "helping profession," whether a pastoral counselor, teacher, psychologist, priest, or rabbi. [Editor's Note: Two excerpts from this book appear in the Items of Interest section of this issue.]

Forgiveness Is Choice: A Step-By-Step Process for Resolving Anger and Restoring Hope, Enright's latest book on forgiveness, is geared to the general public, particularly people who might want to forgive someone, and need help in doing so. Professor Enright is also president of the International Forgiveness Institute, a not-for-profit organization that he formed in the early 1990s.

In 1978 the University of Wisconsin hired me to study and teach about moral issues and psychology. In 1984 I took a sabbatical, and I spent it studying the history of moral psychology. I found out that in the 1890s much of that work was lively and given to the general public. But during the twentieth century, the field was becoming more and more isolated from the public. The language was becoming esoteric, and the questions were appealing to fewer and fewer people because they had to have specialized training.

I decided, at the end of that sabbatical, to stop doing the research. I didn't have an alternative plan. I just decided that this did not seem to be going as deeply into helping others as I had hoped. Given that I'm in a "publish or perish" university, I quickly had to think about what area of morals I could explore. I realized that questions of mercy had rarely been discussed in the psychological sciences, so I considered many different expressions of mercy—legal pardon is an example—but forgiveness kept coming up.

As I thought about forgiveness, it seemed to fit with my goal to have a discourse with the general public, and perhaps to help the public. I realized that most of us, perhaps everyone in the world, has been hurt by unfair treatment from other people at some time in their lives. And so, everybody who hears the word forgiveness has to make a decision one way or another about whether to go ahead and forgive and make an adjustment when they've been deeply hurt, or to go in another direction. I thought, "This is for me."

Little did I know that in 1985 there was literally no published research on this topic at all in any of the social sciences. Nothing. I was flabbergasted to think that psychology is supposed to be one of the "helping professions," and that forgiveness, which seems to me to be potentially one of the most helpful moral quali ties in the whole world, had never been given much thought at all in any of the social sciences.

Early in 1985 I started talking with graduate students. I asked, "How would you like to make a turn away from traditional moral psychology and into a completely unexplored area of forgiveness?" I thought people might think it was a silly idea. But within a month, we had eight very bright, eager graduate students of varied backgrounds sitting around a table on a Friday morning, wanting to tear into this topic.

We started the seminar in the spring of 1985, and it has been meeting every semester without fail for 17 years. We began asking three questions: What is forgiveness? How do you go about forgiving? What happens when you actually go ahead and forgive? We spent a couple of years on the first question, and we looked at the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Koran. We reviewed the Confucian texts and peeked at Buddhism. And we also examined modern philosophy very carefully.

The ancient texts really do have solid moral qualities in every one of them. And in distilling them, along with the modern philosophical texts, we realized there was a very strong convergence among all of them on two dimensions. There is a definition of forgiveness that cuts across the ancient disciplines, with their moral base, and today's philosophical writing.

This involves two elements. One is that when you forgive, you give up a resentment that you are entitled to. The other is that you give the person who has hurt you a moral gift that might take the stance of beneficence, compassion, a sense of moral love, even though that person might not be deserving of these things because of what he or she did.

So you see, forgiveness has imbedded within it these two paradoxes. First, you have a right to your resentment because of what the person did to you, but you deliberately give that up. And the other person doesn't necessarily have a right to your goodness, but you give that anyway. That's one reason why forgiveness has had a bad rep for a lot of people. They think that the forgiver does all of the giving and the other does all of the getting, and it seems terribly unfair.

But we found that forgiveness actually isn't dealing with justice at all. We're not trying to balance scales here. We're not striving for equality or equity in a justice sense. We're not looking for "an eye for an eye."

A lot of times we define people by what they do, how much money they make, or whether they're in a wheelchair or not. But that's really a misunderstanding of the true essence of a human being. We are all people of worth. The Christian would say that all are children of God and, therefore, redeemable. And forgiveness acknowledges that you should identify the person not with what they've done, but with who they are. It says you should love them not because of what they've done, but in spite of it.

Forgiveness ought to have a beneficial effect for both the person forgiving and the one forgiven because it has a moral quality. Morality, since the time of Aristotle, has been defined as that which is good between and among people. So it's not something that I do only for myself so I can get good things. Nor is it something I do only for others, because then I would become a doormat and they could walk all over me.

We both, through interaction, can be renewed and restored and refreshed, because there is goodness. One hopes a complete forgiveness is given to the one who did the hurting, and who understands and changes. And that they enter back into a relationship again. But not all forgiveness ends in such a complete story. Sometimes the person who forgives offers this gift and it is rejected; or the other doesn't change, and so reconciliation doesn't occur. But ultimately there is always the possibility of coming full circle, of both people really being who they are.

We spent three or four years trying to understand what forgiveness is. And we realized early on that you can't simply define forgiveness in terms of what it is; you also have to be very clear what it is not. There are at least three key factors. One is not condoning or excusing what the person did. To condone or excuse suggests that the person didn't do something wrong, while forgiveness is centered in the moral world of right and wrong. To condone or to excuse is to realize the person might have had a mitigating circumstance.

As an example, you come out of your office building and you're tired and it's 5:00 p.m.—and you realize your car is gone. It looks like someone stole it, and they did wrong. But if you realize that the person took your car to drive a bleeding child somewhere for aid—well, clearly the person had a good excuse for taking the car and intended to return it. Forgiveness probably wouldn't need to occur under such circumstances.

The second factor of our big three is that it's more than just forgetting. To forgive is not to develop moral amnesia. In fact, because forgiveness is centered in the rights and wrongs of life, we tend to remember what happened and to carry that with us. When we forgive, it is not that we turn our back on the wrong so that we will be beaten up again—whether emotionally or verbally or physically.

The third distinction is between forgiving and reconciling. Forgiving can lead to reconciling, but sometimes it does not. Forgiveness is my individual response to the goodness of someone who hurt me. Reconciliation is a negotiation between two people, working it out together in the hopes that the one who has been hurt will help to change the one who has done the hurting, to alter what they did so they can come back together again. So forgiveness is an individual response, while reconciliation is two people working something out.

Rick Fitzgibbons and I found that when a person is deeply angry because of another person's unfairness, and the person keeps that anger a long time, and has a depth of anger that is much more than the average, then psychological symptoms such as low self-esteem, anxiety, depression, and the like can appear. Unfairness knows no boundaries, unfortunately. It can happen in marriage, in a school setting, on a sports team. Whenever there is human interaction, people can and do hurt others unfairly.

Resentment is an appropriate first response when we realize how terrible life can be and how terrible some people can be to us. The problem with resentment occurs when it continues for months or years at a very deep level. That's when it becomes unhealthy. We can't presume that resentment itself is the "bad guy," so to speak, because it really is a good moral response at first, in that it says, "Hey, I am a person of worth, and you've hurt me, and I'm not going to take this!" But eventually we have to decide to do something about that resentment. Some people think in either/or terms—"If I forgive, then I have to give up my quest for justice; or if I seek justice, then forget about forgiveness." But that's not the only answer. The two can go hand in hand.

We have noticed that when we do our studies, we find something a little bit different than what you traditionally find in the psychological literature, which involves long-term effects. For example, people who write about surviving incest say that it is such a terrible, horrible experience that you have to learn to live with psychological compromise. So we did an actual scientific study where we helped incest survivors forgive, and compared them to those in a control group who could seek therapy as they wished.

As we hoped, those who had the forgiveness experience had a much better sense of their emotional improvement—lower depression, lower anxiety, an increase in hope, an increase in self-esteem—compared to those who just sought therapeutic help as they wished. Then, after the program was over, we put those who were just seeking therapy as they wished into a forgiveness program, and they, too, showed the same improvement. This educational program took place over about 14 months.

When we retested people about a year later, they had retained their original improvements. In other words, they didn't go back to the way they were before they came to us. They stayed non-depressed, they stayed with lower anxiety, they stayed with higher self-esteem and a sense of hopefulness for their future.

These were the strongest results anyone has ever come up with to date in trying to help incest survivors in any number of different ways.

We have worked with those who have deep religious faith and conviction, and those who have deep faith in atheism. We find that regardless of faith, people can be helped through our programs. Actually, we haven't found that there is a particular religious basis to forgiveness. I think God's grace works in mysterious ways.

I'm a little surprised that I ended up in this work. I've never thought of myself as a pioneer or someone who is going to forge ahead with something unique. But it actually did happen to me. It's part of the historical record, and it is who I am. We did the first published, empirical, sci entific set of studies on forgiveness.

What's interesting to me is I was not a churchgoer or a member of any formal religion at all when I started this work. But the work seems to have converted me. I am now a deeply committed Christian. I probably would die for the faith, but I sure hope I'm never put to the test.

So here I am, with people calling and wanting to talk about forgiveness, and seeking help; and all I did was, in a very modest way, try to make a turn in moral psychology from that which is esoteric and irrelevant toward the public. But it has really taken off in ways I would never have imagined. And I have changed as a result. As I say, I am now taking my Christianity very seriously. I also think God has a great sense of humor, because no one can accuse me of being a religious zealot as the reason why I started this work, because I wasn't. In fact, I was like a typical professor where a lot of times I was more interested in my science and in scholarship than I was in questions of the eternal.

What if you really need help forgiving another person? First of all, if you're a member of a religious organization, you should immediately contact your religious leader and talk with that individual about person-to-person forgiveness. The religious traditions are the ones that have preserved the meaning of the word forgiveness. And my hope is that the religious leader woukd provide some help relatively quickly.

The second thing you could do is to log on to our Web site. We formed the International Forgiveness Institute in the 1990s, and we have on the Web site some helpful hints as to how to go about forgiving. The address is www.forgivenessinstitute.org. And I think that would be a good place to begin.

Our new book, Forgiveness Is a Choice, has been written for the general public and presents what has been scientifically demonstrated to be an effective program. Those are three ways to go. As a fourth, I would recommend a book by Lewis Smedes called Forgive and Forget. It's a small paperback, and it's an excellent introduction to the topic.

Forgiveness falls within the realm of mercy, and to express mercy is to give generously to people who don't necessarily deserve it. It is to give generously because someone is in need. You are giving to a needy person who perhaps has sinned or gone wrong or been mistaken, and you are, in essence, trying to restore them to who they really are, with their whole sense of worth, recognizing their worth and your worth.

To hear excerpts from the above article and from the boxed item to the right, go to www.sentinelradio.com and click on program # 129.