Researchers are studying how we can let go of our grievances and live a healthier life. Here's how it works
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The Burn Surgeon: How Anger Can Impede Healing
In 1978, Dr. Dabney Ewin, a surgeon specializing in burns, was on duty in a New Orleans emergency room when a man was brought in on a gurney. A worker at the Kaiser Aluminum plant, the patient had slipped and fallen into a vat of 950-degree molten aluminum up to his knees. Ewin did something that most would consider strange at best or the work of a charlatan at worst: He hypnotized the burned man. Without a swinging pocket watch or any other theatrical antics, the surgeon did what’s now known in the field of medical hypnosis as an “induction,” instructing the man to relax, breathe deeply, and close his eyes. He told him to imagine that his legs—scorched to the knees and now packed in ice—did not feel hot or painful but “cool and comfortable.” Ewin had found that doing this—in addition to standard treatments—improved his patients’ outcomes. And that’s what happened with the Kaiser Aluminum worker. While such severe burns would normally require months to heal, multiple skin grafts, and maybe even lead to amputation if excessive swelling cut off the blood supply, the man healed in just eighteen days—without a single skin graft.
As Ewin continued using hypnosis to expedite his burn patients’ recoveries, he added another unorthodox practice to his regimen: He talked to his patients about anger and forgiveness. He noticed that people coming into the ER with burns were often very angry, and not without reason. They were, as he put it, “all burned up,” both literally and figuratively. Hurt and in severe pain due to their own reckless mistake or someone else’s, as they described the accident that left them burned, their words were tinged with angry guilt or blame. He concluded that their anger may have been interfering with their ability to heal by preventing them from relaxing and focusing on getting better. “I was listening to my patients and feeling what they were feeling,” Ewin told me. “It became obvious that this had to be dealt with. Their attitude affected the healing of their burns, and this was particularly true of skin grafts. With someone who’s real angry, we’d put three or four skin grafts on, but his body would reject them.” Whenever a patient seemed angry, Ewin would help them forgive themselves or the person who hurt them, either through a simple conversation or through hypnosis.
Ewin, now eighty-eight and semiretired after practicing surgery and teaching medical hypnosis at the Tulane University School of Medicine for more than thirty years, became interested in hypnosis while he was a young doctor training under the legendary Dr. Champ Lyons, who pioneered the use of penicillin and treated survivors of the famous Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire in Boston in 1942. As Ewin learned to stabilize patients and conduct skin grafts, he wondered about an intriguing practice that he’d learned of from his great uncle. As an independently wealthy “man of leisure” in Nashville, this uncle had dabbled in hypnosis. He even held séances, which had become so popular in the late 1800s that First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln held them in the White House to attempt to reach the spirit of her dead son. (President Abraham Lincoln reportedly attended.) Many of the most popular séance leaders were eventually exposed as frauds exploiting the grief-stricken, but Ewin’s uncle found another forum for hypnosis that was less controversial than hypnotizing an audience into believing that dead friends were speaking to them. He hypnotized the patients of surgeon friends before they went under the knife in order to minimize their pain. (This was before anesthesia was widely used.)
Ewin took a few hypnosis courses to find out more. “I figured it couldn’t hurt,” he told me in his friendly New Orleans drawl when I reached him at home by phone. Once he started trying hypnosis on his burn patients, he noticed a difference immediately. If he could reach them within half an hour of the injury, the hypnotic suggestions of “coolness and calm” seemed to halt the continued burning response of the skin that usually occurs for twelve to twenty-four hours, leading to speedier recoveries. (While there are no empirical studies of hypnosis on burn patients and Ewin’s data is anecdotal, multiple studies do show that hypnosis can alleviate symptoms and improve medical outcomes in various scenarios, from asthma and warts to childbirth and post-traumatic stress disorder.)
Once Ewin began helping his patients forgive, he noticed even more improvement. “What you’re thinking and feeling affects your body,” he would explain to his patients, using the analogy of something embarrassing causing someone to blush. “What you’re feeling will affect the healing of your skin, and we want you to put all your energy into healing.” At this point, he would learn how the victim had unthinkingly opened a blast furnace without turning it off, or how the workmen at a construction site had repeatedly told the boss about a dangerously placed can of gasoline, to no avail.
“I’d do hypnosis with them and help them forgive themselves or the other person,” Ewin said. “I’d say, ‘You can still pursue damages through an attorney. You’re entitled to be angry, but for now I’m asking you to abandon your entitlement and let it go, to direct your energy toward healing, and turn this over to God or nature or whoever you worship. It’s not up to you to get revenge on yourself or someone else. When you know at a feeling level that you’re letting it go, raise your hand.’ Then I’d shut up, they’d raise their hand, and I’d know that skin graft was gonna take.” Ewin taught other burn doctors what he discovered, and has received letters from colleagues in burn units around the world thanking him for helping them achieve faster recovery times for their patients.
The Investor Turned Research Patron: How Forgiveness Hit Mainstream Science
Like Dabney Ewin, John Templeton was a son of the South, a man of letters who came of age during the Depression and combined his success with less mainstream pursuits. Born to a middle-class family in Winchester, Tennessee, in 1912, Templeton managed to put himself through Yale after the 1929 stock market crash and became a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. He launched his career on Wall Street by taking the “buy low, sell high” mantra to the extreme, borrowing money at the onset of World War II to buy one hundred shares each in 104 companies selling at one dollar per share or less, including 34 companies that were in bankruptcy. He reaped a healthy profit on all but four. Templeton entered the mutual funds business in the fifties, eventually selling his Templeton Funds to the Franklin Group in 1992. Money magazine called him “arguably the greatest global stock picker of the century.”
Yet Templeton was equally passionate about spirituality, morality, and science, and how the scientific method could increase our understanding of life’s “Big Questions”—questions about the nature of consciousness and the role that love and creativity, compassion and forgiveness, play in all areas of human life. In 1987, Templeton founded the John Templeton Foundation, dedicated to funding scientific research “on subjects ranging from complexity, evolution, and infinity, to creativity, forgiveness, love, and free will.” With the motto “How little we know, how eager to learn,” Templeton sought research grantees who were “innovative, creative, and open to competition and new ideas.”
Templeton announced the Campaign for Forgiveness Research in 1997, a funding initiative for scientists in multiple disciplines who were interested in taking forgiveness out of the purview of religion and using rigorous scientific protocol to determine its effects on the body and mind. Spearheading the campaign was Dr. Everett Worthington, a psychology professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. One of the first psychologists to create therapeutic tools using forgiveness, he came to the topic through personal tragedy: His elderly mother was bludgeoned to death by an intruder, and, in part because of her death, his brother committed suicide. Struggling with rage and grief, Worthington switched his focus from marriage counseling to forgiveness. He designed a research framework for the Campaign for Forgiveness Research, Archbishop Desmond Tutu became a cochair for the campaign, and the Templeton Foundation provided a $5 million grant.
Between 1998 and 2005, the foundation, along with thirteen partners including the Fetzer Institute, a Michigan-based nonprofit that funds research and educational projects focused on love and forgiveness, dedicated $9.4 million to 43 scientific studies on the health impacts of forgiveness. Whereas before, Worthington and a few other researchers were alone in their pursuits (and most of their research was aimed at affirming their own therapeutic models), the Campaign for Forgiveness Research took a traditionally religious concept and placed it firmly on the scientific landscape. In addition to funding researchers directly, the campaign sparked dialogue and interest in the broader scientific community. While in 1998 there were 58 empirical studies on forgiveness in the research literature, by 2005, when the campaign concluded, there were 950.
Throughout the process, Templeton was highly engaged. Even into his eighties, he was known to walk waist-deep in the surf for an hour near his Bahamas home each morning before sitting down to read grant proposals. When he died at ninety-five, he was lauded by both the business and scientific communities. The Wall Street Journal called him the “maximum optimist,” whose confidence in rising stocks paid off and whose philanthropy left an enduring legacy. The leading scientific journal Nature wrote, “His love of science and his God led him to form his foundation in 1987 on the basis that mutual dialogue might enrich the understanding of both.”
While it’s up for debate whether the research Templeton funded has enriched our understanding of God, it certainly has enriched our understanding of forgiveness, demonstrating that what was traditionally seen as a religious ideal is actually an important skill for anyone, whether atheist, agnostic, or believer, who seeks to live a healthy, happy life.
The Science of Forgiveness
One of the researchers who participated in the Campaign for Forgiveness Research was Dr. Robert Enright, a developmental psychologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Enright began contemplating forgiveness back in the mid-eighties. As a Christian, he’d been raised on Jesus’ teachings about tolerance and forgiveness. He asked himself: Could forgiveness help patients in a clinical setting? In spite of skeptical colleagues who ridiculed him for applying science to something so “mushy” and “religious,” he designed forgiveness interventions for therapy and studied their psychological and physiological impacts.
He began by developing therapies aimed at helping elderly women to forgive those who had wronged them in the past, and to help victims of abuse and incest to understand their tormentors without justifying the abusers’ actions. His initial findings were encouraging. His first study, which compared women undergoing forgiveness therapy with a control group who underwent therapy for emotional wounds without a forgiveness focus, found that the experimental group improved more in emotional and psychological health measures than the control group. It was published in the journal Psychotherapy in 1993. Afterward, Enright honed his therapeutic forgiveness tools, from helping people develop empathy—the ability to understand and share the feelings of another—toward aggressors, to learning to forgive and accept themselves, and tested them on a range of groups. Among battered women and “parental love–deprived college students,” for instance, those subject to forgiveness therapy showed more improvement in emotional and psychological health than control groups who received therapy without a forgiveness focus.
Enright’s forgiveness model has four parts: uncovering your anger, deciding to forgive, working on forgiveness, and discovery and release from emotional prison. All take place through therapist-patient dialogue. Uncovering anger means examining how you’ve both avoided and dealt with it, and exploring how the offense and resulting anger has changed your health, worldview, and life in general. The phase involves learning about what forgiveness is and what it’s not, acknowledging that the ways you’ve dealt with your anger up until now haven’t worked, and setting the intention to forgive. Next, working on forgiveness entails confronting the pain the offense has caused and allowing yourself to experience it fully, then working toward developing some level of understanding and compassion for the offender. The final phase includes acknowledging that others have suffered as you have and that you’re not alone (for some, this means connecting with a support group of people who have endured a similar experience), examining what possible meaning your suffering could have for your life (learning a particular life lesson, perhaps contributing to one’s strength or character, or prompting one to help others), and taking action on whatever you determine to be your life purpose.
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