I get a team. Welcome to another installment of you project. It's Harps Craig Anthony harp I hope you're bloody terrific. Another installment of us. Today, I'm talking with doctor Frederick Luskin, who's a world renowned I don't know if he likes to call himself authority, expert, guru, he's probably all of that. In the area of forgiveness, and in heading towards two thousand episodes, We've never had a conversation around forgiveness, so
I've been somewhat negligent. But today is that day. Hi Frederick, how are you?
I'm fine? Thank you.
In all of that time, I've never done an episode. It's funny because Melissa, who runs My Life, who would have sent you or your team the inquiry about getting you on the show. She said, oh, you're interviewing I've got three episodes today And she said, oh, you're interviewing someone who's fascinating in the morning. This said this to me yesterday and I said who and she said, oh, this PhD dude who's a guru one forgiveness. And I went like, I've never even thought to do a standalone
episode on that. But anyway, I appreciate you. I'm super glad that you're here. And could you, rather than me read a bio, could you tell my audience a little bit about you please.
Well, I'm a ex hippie who has start at Stanford University for about thirty years, and for most of that time have done my best to continue to at least keep a shred of hippie nature going. So I teach meditation. You had mentioned sports. I am. I'm the mindfulness teacher for a couple of Stamford sports teams. I go into the corporate world and try to teach them about peace, love and grenelle try to be nice people. So I have.
I've tried not to fully give up on that kind of innocent hope for a better future.
Well, you've just given me the title of the show in the first one minute of our conversation, which which is peace, love and granola. So I'm just writing that down right now.
Well that's that was one of the ways of kidding about the sixties.
How yeah, I imagine what when you say you were trying to hold onto your kind of your hippie.
Roots, did you did?
Were you? Were you right caught up in the middle of the hippie movement. Yeah, you're not that old, right, How what do you know?
I missed it by a bit. But so during high school I was a little young, but when there was a pro test against the war in Vietnam, we marched to the local park and we sang songs. And I remember going to school things where we would push for housing for low income people and that black people should be able to live in our community. So I remember
that kind of positive protest energy. I dropped out a graduate school like a million years ago and started a vegetarian restaurant at the beach about an hour and a half south of San Francisco. And we used to get just dozens of people, you know, who would travel around and follow the grateful dead, and you know, we caught catered things for Neil Young's people because Neil Young lived.
And so yes, I missed the heart of it, but my heart was there, and whenever I could bump up against it, I was delighted.
And was there any for you at that time? Was there any kind of underlying spiritual philosophy or was it just about doing good and being good and connecting with others and helping.
I was born Jewish, and while my parents were not religious at all, and there is a cornerstone to the Jewish something which says that you do your religion in the world. It's not otherworldly, it's how you treat your partner. That whole idea of heal the world social act is very resonant with that part of Jewishness. So I got that in Osmosis. You know that in order to be a good Jew, so to speak, you were supposed to
do something of value. A little later in my life I did discover, like so many people of my generation, yoga and meditation, and again people a little older than I was, they went off to India and met gurus and blah blah blah blah. But I'll tell you one interesting story of this kind of link. Yeah, this was in the very late seventies, so this is a long time ago. And we had this restaurant, and I knew that Ramdas was living about ten minutes from where the
restaurant was. So we sent him a letter, the three of us hippies who had started this place, and we said, you know, we love you, we thank you, We already be here. Now come visit us and we'll give you free food. So three days later he pulled up to the front of our place in a little red MG convertible, gets out of the thing, walks into our restaurant and said,
you sent me a lovely letter. Here I am. So he sat with us for three four hours, telling us all of his stories about India and meeting his guru. And you know, he was saying to us, you're doing the right thing, you know, like you want to bring spirituality to action. We didn't fully know what he was talking about. We were young, but it was it was a very powerful meeting of somebody clearly much more at tune than I was to the spirit, who sabled us
literally for hours. He sat in our kitchen and talked with us and you know, kitted around with us and guided us. And that was that helped to me articulate some of the inco wait things that were there inside of me but didn't have words for.
Amazing now now didn't wasn't around us originally? Excuse my ignorance. Was he not originally a psychology professor or something?
Yeah? Yeah, and the really the reason so, yes, he was a psychology prof us or at Harvard, Yes, but he had gotten his PhD at Stanford, right, right, So not ten years about seven years later I was teaching at Stamford. This is like maybe it was, yeah, about ten years later, a little more, I was teaching at Stanford. I wrote him another letter saying that you know, you came into our little hippie place. We thank you. I had bumped into a couple of times before. But I'm
now a PhD student at Stanford. Will you come talk to one of my classes? He said yes, So he came down to Stanford because he hadn't been back on that campus in a decade and he had gotten his PhD there. And so we met again and he spent ninety minutes speaking to the class and then we went to snack together at the union. But part of his discussion with the class was his history of being a doctoral student at Stanford in the fifties, and you know, it was just a wonderful interaction.
Wow. Wow, this is a weird question, but I'm just interested, like, when you are around somebody like him, is there is there a different energy? Like do you feel you know, and I'm not talking about some psychological perception, but do you feel a different energy around somebody who is that deep into the journey.
Yes and no. Right, I'm going to tell you that I'm more taken not by energy but by behavior. Okay, so let me tell you a ramda story and then a John Cabbage Zinn story. Okay.
Yeah.
The Ramdas story is when he came to Stamford to give that talk, I had handed out to everybody in the class a reprint of an article from Yoga Journal to introduce Ramdas. Now, I had given the class part of one of his books to read, but the book was old. But I gave him like a current you know, Yoga Journal. But I didn't read the issue. I just handed it to the class before he showed up. I started to read the issue and I was mortified. Oh wow,
it wasn't it wasn't that flattering. And when Ramdas showed up at Stanford through the School of Education, I go up to him and I literally am going, oh shit. So I go round us. I can't thank you enough for coming, but I have to apologize because I didn't that the article that I gave the students about what you're doing now, and it wasn't that positive. You know, it didn't paint you in the best of lights, and
I'm embarrassed. And he looked at me with a hundred percent sincerity, right in the eye and said, it doesn't matter to me when anybody writes about me. Wow. Wow. And he said it with such conviction and such there was no embellishment. It was just this is his truth. Yes, that he taught me something that all the speeches couldn't have taught me. Yeah, don't be attached to your ego, don't worry about the world, just do your thing. So
that was his teaching about that. He was in front of the class and didn't even blink one hair on his head about that they had seen something not totally flattering about him. Wow. So that's a Ramdas story, a John cabot Zinn story who started the mindfulness stuff. I'm at a group where he and I are participants. There's about twenty five people in a room and we're all there for I don't even remember, like holistic health or something, and somebody in the room objects to what John Caputsn
had just said. He had just made a statement. A woman in the room like said to him, John, that's such a sexist thing to say, Like, why would you say something like that. Yeah, and John Capitsin looked at her and said, no, I would never have thought that be sexist. Explain to me what you mean. So she's told him. He thought about it for a minute and said, you know, it's still not something that would be natural
to me. But I'm really sorry that I didn't have enough awareness before I said what I said, And I thank you for educating me. Wow, And that was That was the entire end of the discussion. The woman was happy, he was happy, everybody was happy. And again I watched what an untached ego sounded like. Is that a good answer for you? Yeah?
I love that. I love that. I love that. It's all about what people are doing, and yeah, it's why do you think? I don't know if this is in your wheelhouse, but I'm sure you have an opinion. Why do you think we are so worried about what people think of us? Why are we so attached to approval and validation and often from people will will never meet.
Well, I can speak from my own insights, Yeah, that there's a piece of me that wants to be liked and approve of because my own self approval is not sufficient, So I'm weak you know, I don't have a deep enough sense of being okay, So I require somebody else to validate me, come in and rescue me. And if they take it away or don't offer it, then then my lack becomes larger and I get anxious. Oh my god, I don't have enough like self love in here. So if they take theirs away, I'm like skating on thin
ice withold hot choose. That's what it. That's what it kind of feels like. So that's one two. I think as human beings, we are social creatures, so we have some built in survival needs to belong, yeah, you know, to to have a group, to be approved of, to have shared values, and to know that if things happened, there are people who will help us. So when we're rejected, that that builds up a legitimate social anxiety to some degree. Then I think there's also the i'm gonna say the
cost that many people have had of poor parents. You know that they didn't get validated, they didn't get mirrored, they didn't get loved as children enough. So there's a deficit. You know, there's a their upbringing was not sufficient, Like they didn't get enough soul, food and so they're always looking for it because it wasn't there developmentally when they need it. So that's three right off the top of my head.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think I agree. And it's interesting how even as a coach or a mentor or you know, sometimes I sit with people that I'm meeting for the first time and they're way more worried about what I think of them than what they think of them. And you know, that's something that we talk about. But anyway, let's talk about your Well, I'm sure you've got many fields of expertise, but so I want to talk about forgiveness, and I want to talk about your books, your research.
There's maybe the dumbest question, but I just want to start with it. So can you define forgiveness? Like what is forgiveness? Like? What is it? What does it mean practically, like emotionally, psychologically?
So do you need validation that that was the dumbest question?
No, I'll just believe it, can you? No, I need validation that it wasn't the dumbest No, Craig, that's not a dumb question. No, you're not a dummy. You're a bit of a dummy. But no, exactly what I did what I did. That's that's why you're the smile one. You're going, Okay, So what is rough? What is? You know? What is what is forgiveness as a process, as a psychological construct, as a as an expression of emotion. I don't know.
Yeah, it's a good question. Forgiveness is the ability to see your life clearly enough, including the suffering. You know, it's not denial, it's not minimizing. It's I may have had really bad parents, or I may have been beaten, or I may have been abandoned. Is to see your life clearly enough, both the bad and the good, so that you don't have to live back there, but can see it, accept it, and open your life enough to what's next. It's like right here, right now, I can
tell you. You know, I've been deeply loved at times, and other times I've been rejected. You know, there's a truth and a presentness. But the forgiveness goes from Okay, when some of those rejections I may have gotten stuck in, I forgive that so I can be in the present with clarity and not leave lots of my energy or thing behind. So I'm just open to my life. The whole thing you know, it's like I don't kept to constantly go over like the person who mistreated me in
two thousand and ten. But I don't ignore it or minimize it. I don't pretend it didn't happen.
Hey, that. Yes, I've spoken a little bit doc lately about I'm listening to a book by an author. Her name is Abigail Schreier. She wrote a book called Bad Therapy and Bad Therapy. She talks about the idea that revisiting, you know, past trauma, and going every Tuesday and sitting down with your psychologist or your psychiatrist and you know, talking about that thing as you alluded to, that happened ten years ago or whatever it was. For some people
it's there are peutic. For some people, it's actually quite destructive and toxic. And all it does is reopend.
To tell you that for most people it's destructive. Yeah that when enough time has passed, Yeah, and you've shared the woe with me story so that some people have heard you. Yeah, generally speaking, redoing it over and over is not a good thing.
Yeah, Yeah, that I've always thought that, but I hadn't heard anyone, you know, kind of say that out loud and yeah, and I think also, you know one of the things about you know, so I told you I come from an exercise science background, so prescribing exercise for people, and you know, talk about nutrition and lifestyle and sleep and all of those things. And I'm doing, you know, my doctorate in europsych at the moment and all of that.
And like my experience is that there's no set formula for everyone, right, and so what will work for what will work for one person won't for another. You know, this exercise prog for you might be perfect for me, it's terrible for you. Eat a certain food and it works for your body, but it doesn't work for my body. I give you some advice that's good advice for you, But someone else with a similar issue, I give them
that advice. It doesn't work or it's terrible. And I think this like in science and psychology sometimes and medicine, like there's almost this prescriptive thing that you know, this is the problem, this is the solution, rather than taking into account individual variability. Like I can eat almonds, I love them. You eat almonds, you have an anaphylactic reaction, you know, So trying to understand the individual needs of the person.
Yes, I mean I'm going to articulate it. Both are true that there are general tendencies and then within those general tendencies, lot of individual variants. But for the exercise world, clearly it's better to move than not, you know, for the diet world, it's clearly better to have a varied plant based diet than not. But that doesn't mean there are absolute prescriptions that fit everybody. That would be my taking. With getting over being wounded or being mistreated, there are
a couple of like global truths. So one of them is you have to grieve that wound, so you have to acknowledge it, you have to honor the suffering that comes from being wounded, you have to have a community of some people to share it, and you have to give it some time, like the brain requires time to integrate hurtful experience. So it would be generally wrong to tell people, you know, if you come home and your partners in bed with someone else, to just get over it,
because generally speaking, on nervous system can't do that. The issue comes with let's say it's six months later and some people have been smart enough to yell, kick, scream, hate the person talk badly about them, draw little deaf things about them, and then they get that through their system, and six months later they're ready to go, Okay, I got it out of my system. I'm ready to move on. Yeah, some people, maybe a year later are are still struggling
with all sorts of things. But maybe two years later, it then becomes okay to tell people, you know, whatever it is, enough time has passed and you need to move on. But nobody can know whether that's appropriated six months or eighteen months for somebody, but you can know that you know this has gone on long enough when it's like excessive. So that's one dimension where how long
and how intensely do you great grieve and argue? Another dimension is like within your suffering, Like some people are more private, and some people don't you know, they don't need to let twelve people know. So you might have somebody who has you know, and I hate hue party for their ex spouse, and somebody else just takes themselves out to dinner. However, the research is clear that you have to tell a couple of people. If you just
stuff it inside, yeah, you're going to suffer more. So again, I hope you see what I'm getting at, there are some general tendencies, and there's a lot of variance within those tendencies.
What's it the opposite end of the style of forgiveness? So what's the antithesis of forgiveness? What word or term would you use?
A grievance, a grudge, you know, a story that cements you as a victim. Those might be opposites to forgiveness.
What's the What are some of the potential physiological consequences of both? Like, what might you know? Real forgiveness to me seems like not only mentally and emotionally a healthy thing, but physiologically a healthy thing. And you know, resentment hate has you know, a physical consequence, So like, apart from the mental and emotional benefits, I guess it's also good for our body. I guess it's also good for our physical health.
Well, just you know, if you're going to sit there right now and imagine that you need to spend the next ten minutes, I'm not asking you to do it talking about the worst people in your life or the people who have harmed you the most. Even just thinking about it makes your whole body feel heavier, yes, and it disrupts your heart rate. You can feel it just by anticipating it. You go, oh shit, and your heart starts getting a little chaotic and your muscles get tired.
That's just thinking about it. If, on the other hand, you think about, well, you know, where was I the most resilient? Where where did I take life shit? And you know, deal with it successfully and move on and not be stuck about there. When you think that, you have an upsurge in energy and a deeper sense of like, wow, I'm good. But it's not just a mental thing. It's a full body thing. Yeah, So if you think of your day as some parts of your day you're just bitching.
You know, nothing's good enough, you hate everybody, like the traffic sucks, Everything sucks. It's a full body experience, you know. All you know absoil yourselves everything. They get that, And then you think of other parts of your day when you say you're forgiving, like you know, if you live with somebody, they make a mistake and you go, honey, that's okay. You're you're basically a wonderful person. Why would I hold this? You can feel in your body the
freedom of that. When you hold a grudge time after time, after time you stress your body, yes, yes, and over time that kind of stress can wear out the weakest aspects in your body. Yeah.
Well, thoughts and feelings have a physiological consequence, and I always talk about this with groups about your body. Can't distinguish between what is real and what you think is real?
You know what you're focusing on? What about doc? What about people who are listening to this and they're thinking this all makes sense, except he doesn't understand my partner or my ex partner, who's a complete prick, who doesn't deserve forgiveness, who never said sorry, who is a fucking idiot, like, who's just a self centered narcissist, who's a fucking sociopath? Like fuck that guy? Right, Well, that somebody's listening going, yeah, that makes sense, But you haven't met this person in
my life. What do you have to say to them? And I'm not questioning per se. I'm just curious around that.
When I said to you, what is forgiveness? And I implied that it was a pleasant, centered acceptance of the truth of your live, you can say that I dated or married very poorly. I made a big mistake. I didn't recognize the signs I enabled terrible behavior and the guy was a girl, was much worse than I thought possible. That's all true, but that doesn't keep you stuck five years ago. It's just true right when you're in that he's an idiotic sociopath who should rotten. Hell, you're still
in argument with your own life. Yeah, And the only person who can suffer from arguing with your own life is you. So if you like, I'm just going to give you a funny example. Because a very good friend of mine that I taught with at the university for twenty years, she retired. You know, she's ahead of me a little bit, and she was talking about this past week.
She went with somebody close to her to the doctor because it was an anxiety producing thing, and she went to support this person and that was wonderful, but she brought up a time in her past when her partner then had not supported her. And this was, believe it or not, in the eighties, and she still referred to him as an idiot. So at that moment, at that very second, she's still blaming them for something that was forty years ago.
Yeah.
Yeah, So she hasn't fully forgiven because in the present moment, she can't say, you know, I had a very trying experience when I was vulnerable and the person I depended on simply failed me. That's a truthful statement, but that's in the present and is not blaming somebody for ruining anything,
And so I can simply live my life. You know, Yes, this person let me down, but of course I've forgiven it because this moment and tomorrow I want to be able to love as best I can and not be burdened by all the crap that I've gone through.
So the forgiveness, the act of forgiving, is not for the other person.
It's for us, of course, because the act of ruining your life is for you. Yes.
Yes, So when somebody says, when someone says he or she doesn't deserve my forgiveness, they're actually getting it wrong.
They might be right, but that's not a reason to suffer.
Yes, yes, yeah, I think some people get confused on that because it's like, I feel like the idea of saying, oh it's okay that you hit me, that you mistreated me, that it's not fucking okay. But I feel like when they say I forgive you, then that's what they think they're saying, and so there's a reluctance there, but it's not really that at all. It's really I'm liberating myself from that bullshit. Well who decides, yeah, like, who decides
if they deserve my forgiveness? So you' judge of the universe.
That do you know?
Well, I am thanks for asking.
So at least that's being truthful. Yes, Like, this person behaves so badly that I decided that I'm never letting it go. Well, that's fine, But to say they don't deserve it, you, first of all, have no idea whether they deserve it. They might have such a hard life and maybe their unkindness to you was tripped in them
something become a better person? Who knows? Yes, But your judgment of them is never accurate enough because let's say, you know, let's even take something awful like a hitting r U driver kills your kid, and you know, you don't even know who they are, but you could ten years later they don't deserve my forgiveness. What they did was unforgivable and you don't even know who they are. How do you know? Yes, they might have made a mistake,
and who knows. I'm not excusing bad behavior, But you asked me what it is, and it's an ability to tell the truth. It's different than your throwing around your judgments and your opinions and your hostile ideas forever.
Did you have a moment in your hippie dyes, in your vegetarian restaurant dies when you stepped away from academia, you know, because obviously you stepped back into academia at some stys. Did you have a moment an epiphany which was the genesis for this curiosity around forgiveness?
I had two of them.
Yeah.
I was very badly hurt decades ago by an abandonment and it literally ripped to my life for about three years, Like I didn't trust after that. I had a bitterness to my tone, like you know, if this person can do this, then all bets are off and life is scary. And it's true, you know some of it. I hadn't made peace with the truth. But for like three years, I was a bitch and I subjected my wife to like nastiness that she didn't deserve because I had lost faith.
And then one day we had a child. This is a long time, it's thirty years ago, and she's at home with the baby, and I get home and she says, I need you to go shopping, and I'm in a grouchy, paint in the s mood. I don't want to go shopping. She hands me a shopping list, she says, you got to go here, you got to get these items. And now so I go out, giving myself a full pity party about I'm working all day and I have this battle axe wife who's like, I mean, I'm.
Just ha ha ha, I'm.
In oh ruin my life mode. I get to the store and they don't have what she wanted, Like she said, you got to go to this store because they have this I had a park like two miles away. Anyway, I get to that spot, they don't have what she wants, and my mind literally blows or fuse, like nobody loves me. Life isn't fair, you know, all sorts of self pitying nonsense.
And then something inside of me snaps and I noticed that I'm in a supermarket in San Jose, California, and all I am is sitting in a supermarket and they don't have a couple of items, and everything else in my life is abundant. Everything I have a partner, I have a child, I have a job. The only problem was me, and that moment of looking at all the food and this big supermarket in a shopping center change me wow, Like, wow, boy, do you complain a lot? Fred?
And you have this lovely person waiting for you at home? What the hell is wrong with you? But I had used that wound, that pretty bitter betrayal. It made me act as if that was like an eclipse and the sun no longer was out. I had put this wound up between me and the sun, and I said, well, son's gone. I hate the world. My life isn't right. The minute I took this wound away, the Sun's there and it had always been there, but I hadn't seen it.
Wow.
And that's what came to me. Oh okay, Fred, So you, by your terrible handling of this very painful thing, you ruined a couple of years of your life. Not them, they did terrible things, and then you ruined your life. That was the epiphany that I had.
That's the spice between life situation and life experience. And like, sometimes our situation is great, but in the middle of that situational circumstance, our self created experience is anything back.
Right, yep. And so the other definition that we have of forgiveness, the simpler definition is making peace with the word no. Yeah, that's our simpler definition. Like you're going to get a lot of ways that life doesn't give you what you want? Do you think you need? And instead of holding grudge about it, you forgive it. You forgive the fact that you get no. So the no in that situation is I didn't get loyalty and connection.
But we I mean, you know, I've been doing this for a long time, and I get bored if I say the same thing, so I over time, I vow different things. But there's so much pain you would ask me a half hour ago, And we're so attached to getting what we want that we have a hard time forgiving the world when it doesn't give it to us.
I've got a question, maybe my last question. What is the question that you would want people to ask you around this that they tend not to like. I feel like you probably get asked a lot of the same stuff. What is a great question that you wish somebody would ask that might be more enlightening and more helpful.
Why in this short life when I'm not here for that long on planet Earth. I spend so much of this precious time that I have arguing and fighting about what I didn't get, rather than spending more time saying thank you for what I did get. That would be the most pressing question to ask people.
That's a great question. I could talk to you for hours, Doc, So let me just give a quick plug for your book. So Forgive for Good, a proven prescription for health and happiness, Forgive for Love, the missing ingredients for a healthy and lasting relationship, stress free for good, ten scientifically proven skills for health and happiness? Is there another one? Or is that the three?
I'm just about to publish early next year a book called Forgive for Recovering. We've been teaching people in recovery from addiction a lot about self forgiveness so they will have fewer triggers. That's that's the latest research I'm doing, So that would be it. The general book that sold a lot of copies and help people all over the world is Forgive for Good. That is as accessible a
result of research that exists in this field. And if people want to look up any more about me, my website is fred Luskin dot com and you know, there's like YouTube videos all over the place. I'm a public it's not hard to find me. And you know, forgiveness is good for you.
It is forgive for good is on audible? I suppose it's not.
They never made a really a companion for it. Yeah, I don't know why forgive for love is but for good. Probably it was too long ago.
Yeah cool, Hei, Well say goodbye, but Fred, thank you so much for chatting with me. You're a gem. I appreciate you, and you didn't need to do this, but you graciously did. So thank you very much.
Thank you. And I have to tell you part of my appreciation over these thirty years for the fact that so many people in this world who have sought out the Stanford Forgiveness Project. I mean, yeah, we didn't. We didn't start it with any illusions. I'm thankful enough that we got some influence that I generally say yes to people who are like nice and normal as a way of paying something forward for all the publicity we got when we started. So that's partly my answer back to you.
Thank you for asking absolute pleasure