Calvin Sandborn, a professor of environmental law, legal director of the University of Victoria Environmental Law Clinic and author of Becoming the Kind Father: A Son’s Journey recently shared a story of forgiveness in a powerful article about his relationship with his father. Here’s an excerpt:

“Dad was an angry, hard-swearing, tattooed man’s man. By the time I was 13, I wished he would die. And then he did. I thought that my wish had killed him, and for the longest time I couldn’t forgive myself. I was scared to death I would damage someone else. But four decades on, I’ve forgiven myself for hating him. More difficult, I’ve somehow forgiven myself for the Dad-like fury I inflicted on my own family.”

Read Calvin Sandborn’s full story of forgiveness posted in our stories section. Does it strike a chord with you? Share your story of forgiveness with us.

Stephanie Ortigue, head of the 4D Brain Electrodynamics Laboratory at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has been using a functional MRI (fMRI) to provide a literal snapshot of how love affects the brain. According to the UCSB Coastlines alumni publication, “Ortigue found that when people were really in love, they were faster to do a task if their love’s name had been subliminally presented.” Most of us would intuitively agree with what Ortigue’s ongoing research is revealing, “that love is good for the brain.”

In this, the final entry in a four part series, Fred Luskin shares the importance of forgiveness in maintaining a loving relationship.

Many of the things that have hurt us in the past can continue to impact our current love relationships. I have worked with many people who are the product of troubled, and/or rejecting parents. In forgiveness classes people share horror stories of lovers who abandoned them, cheated on them, and failed to pay child support. Unfortunately, too many people also struggle with current conflicted and stressful love relationships. As often as I can, I suggest they focus on getting the current relationship right and paying less attention to the past.

I once counseled a man named Danny who was in his mid thirties. Danny came from a dysfunctional home where his parents had a bitter divorce. His mother was only marginally capable of parenting and Danny spent much of his childhood without guidance. His father was absent and did not contribute much to his care. Danny has a number of significant wounds from his parents that he could benefit from forgiving. However, the suggestion I made to Danny was to let his parents’ mistreatment take a back seat to doing his best to make his love relationship with Yolanda work. I told Danny it would make minimal difference in his life how he felt about his parents but would make a huge difference if he could make it right with Yolanda.

As part of his therapy, Danny was asked to forgive situations with Yolanda that were triggered by issues from his childhood. Danny chafed any time he was told what to do as he had mostly raised himself. He also suffered from poor problem solving strategies having received little adult guidance. Inevitably, in the course of conversation, Yolanda would tell Danny what to do or try to correct his lack of planning and follow through. Danny got mad almost every time one of these conversations happened.. I suggested he practice simple stress management practices on a regular basis and use his current goal of creating a loving relationship to motivate him. He found, after practice and struggle, that learning to create a successful relationship did wonders for his self-confidence and practicing forgiveness with someone he loved made it easier to do in more difficult situations. Danny learned how to practice forgiveness in the most important and loving situation in his life.

Danny connected with the precious opportunity for a happy life that a loving partnership presents. When he committed to doing his best with Yolanda, he was forced to confront how much baggage he was carrying from his past. He saw his anger and rebelliousness and had to decide how much of that to impose on Yolanda. He also saw how these habits allowed him to criticize and avoid Yolanda who wanted desperately to connect with him. With forgiveness training he was able to see clearly the loving and imperfect woman he was punishing for other peoples’ offenses and he chose to stop.

In this, the third of a four part series, Fred Luskin shares the importance of forgiveness in maintaining a loving relationship.

Couples forgiveness rule number one: Because of your resentments, don’t gloss over the fact that you made a willing decision to be your partner’s lover. The problem we struggle with is how much did I commit to good behavior after I made my choice of mate? Do I blame them if things turn out different than we planned or do I see risk and challenge at the heart of all love relationships? Forgiveness allows you to continue to be kind and honor your choice even when your partner’s conduct has been poor. It allows us to love them in ways that include their flawed humanness.

I remember when I did couples therapy before becoming a forgiveness teacher. I would see people like Rick and Arlene come into my office and scream at each other. Bitterness dripped from every word Rick uttered and Arlene was full of contempt. Each would hurl insults at the other and repeat story after story of grievance and disappointment. Rick would have a scowl on his face as he would tell me how hard he tried to get Arlene to stop her lying. And Arlene would look pained as he was talking, barely able to listen before she jumped in with her harsh telling of how annoying Rick is and how he is always complaining about her. I remember thinking if this is how Rick and Arlene treat the person they pledged their lives to then the rest of their social world better duck I wondered why they were not embarrassed to be treating the person they chose to love so poorly. But they certainly are not alone.

In my therapy practice and in my forgiveness classes what I see over and over is blame and hostility and then more blame. I see outright hostility, such as when Rick told Arlene that she was a bitch. I see subtle hostility as when Arlene told Rick that she felt sorry for him that he had done such a bad job of being a husband. I see a lack of responsibility from both partners such as when Arlene and Rick blame each other for their unkind and nasty behavior. Finally, I see a sense of entitlement that somehow we are owed great love without having to give it. One of my goals is to help couples like Rick and Arlene to see relationships as a work in progress rather than an entitlement.

In this, the second of a four part series, Fred Luskin shares the importance of forgiveness in maintaining a loving relationship.

Practicing forgiveness is the simple understanding that love is what unfolds when we stop resenting the person we chose to live with. Simply put, as forgiveness replaces resentment, happiness grows in your intimate relationship. The less resentment you hold towards your partner the more love you will experience. Whether you resent them for leaving the toilet seat up or for snoring each evening, the cost in love and peace is the same. Whether you resent them for something they did yesterday or five years ago, the problems it causes you are the same. The cost is always a diminished love in your heart and a greater hurt in theirs. It is a huge cost we pay when we do not know how to forgive.

The attempt to make a strong romantic partnership is an experiment in one unique kind of love. And, the divorce statistics suggest it is difficult to do. Two people with different histories and painful experiences in their past commit to help each other and love each other in a sexually exclusive manner. Each couple is made up of two people from different cultures—whether it’s family culture, ethnic, religious, or geographic. One of the things that makes getting along so difficult is because of our differing backgrounds, our ideas of what makes sense are often wrong.

Too many of us come from homes where our parents did a poor job of getting along. They quarreled often or quarreled badly. They cheated on each other or committed other destructive acts. They might have been defensive or withdrawn with each other. We watched how they acted and when we were young their behavior seemed normal. We watched how they behaved and now a generation later we find ourselves acting in the same way. Too often it did not work for them and now it does not work for us. Or, another problem many of us had was to figure out how to deal with how our parents treated us. We created habits to deal with our parents that as we grow up are either problematic or unnecessary.

In either case, most of us enter into adult relationships with unskillful patterns we got from home and then wonder why we have problems with our lovers. While we are doing that, our partner is wondering the same thing about us. This happens with people who like each other and are relatively intact. It is much worse with people who have been abused or brutalized. Whatever the upbringing, when we become partners an important step is to understand how, even in a good relationship, we each have plenty to forgive in both ourselves and our partner.

In this four part series, Fred Luskin shares the importance of forgiveness in maintaining a loving relationship. As Director of the Stanford University Forgiveness Projects, Luskin has conducted the largest forgiveness research study to date. He has done research to demonstrate that forgiveness can work to heal a wide range of emotional and psychological issues—from severe trauma, such as the murder of a child, to dealing with the loss of money in the stock market. Luskin has taught forgiveness in corporate, academic, and faith-based settings, as well as trained therapists to use forgiveness methods in their practices. His work with thousands of couples and individuals led to his writing, Forgive for Love.

Listening to countless stories of infidelity, alcohol abuse, mistreatment of children, disregard for feelings and other causes of divorce and disagreement, I have seen first hand how difficult it is to make relationships work. In fact the dozen years of teaching and research I have done with forgiveness has convinced me just how hard it is to have loving and lasting unions. But more than that, it has shown me how essential forgiveness is and why it needs to be at the center of our intimate relationships. From a couple’s relative interest in sex, dedication to work, relationship to their parents, and relationships with their children, there are simply too many ways that a relationship can become unbalanced. Considering the complexity of life, it is inevitable we will disagree with our partners. The key is to understand the inevitability of disagreement and the need to forgive and move on with love. In that way forgiveness is an essential balm for hurt feelings.

Committed relationships are hard work, and they ask a lot of us. The triangle theory of romance says it takes passion, friendship, and commitment to sustain a relationship. Relationships falter when they have two elements but lack a third for a long period of time. If you both love and like your partner, but aren’t committed, then your relationship will likely end at some point. If you feel friendship and commitment to your partner you’ll end up with a good friend, not a lover. If you have commitment and passion, without friendship, you end up with a stormy but passionate mess. In order for your relationship to work you need to love your partner, like your partner, and be willing to stick it out through thick and thin. That is hard to do and almost impossible without regular doses of forgiveness for yourself and your partner.

Campaign spokesperson, Dr. Eileen Borris, a licensed clinical psychologist, political psychologist, educator/trainer, and author, shares her experience training Liberians in conflict resolution and forgiveness. For years, Borris has been involved in the healing of emotional wounds on a personal and political level. She is Director of Training and Program Development for the Institute for Multi-Track Diplomacy where she works in the area of international conflict resolution. She is the author of Forgiveness the Ultimate Freedom Finding Forgiveness: A 7 Step Program for Letting Go of Anger and Bitterness.

A few months ago I went to Liberia. Despite dealing with the aftermath of 14 years of civil war, the Liberian people are full of hope about the future. This hope is, in part, due to the new government of president Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf. It’s also because the Liberian culture supports the notion of forgiveness. Pain and violence have impacted the lives of all Liberians and forgiveness is a universal response to their collective trauma. People must heal from this trauma, but collective healing involves much more than healing individuals and relationships. It involves tapping into the depth of their culture which supports healing and resolving conflict on a collective level. For the Liberians this could mean reviving the Palava Huts (town meeting place), using story, song, and dance to help in the healing process of the nation and teaching about forgiveness.

While I was in Liberia, I gave a weeklong training in conflict resolution, trauma healing and forgiveness. I teach a model called the “Trauma Healing/Forgiveness Model” because we have to heal before we can forgive and the things that call for forgiveness can also be traumatic. This work begins with creating a safe environment and sharing one’s “traumatic” narrative with others who will be supportive and listen deeply to what is being said. I talk about how it is part of our human nature to want revenge. As the Liberians talked, they began to realize that revenge will not heal their deep emotional pain. The focus then becomes dealing with their painful emotions, especially anger. The key in this step is in understanding what our anger is trying to tell us. Anger’s message is to look inward and take responsibility for our own behavior. This helps us look at the situation differently. We stop asking “why me,” and start asking “why them.” A shift in our thinking begins to take place by being willing to walk in someone else’s shoes and understand their suffering. This reframing supports growth in understanding and compassion which helps us to heal our own pain and suffering.

As we struggle with our own difficulties in being able to forgive, some experience opening to a creative force—sometimes experienced as grace, which comes from beyond ourselves. This power gives us the ability to forgive even when we feel forgiveness is impossible. When it happens, some feel the power and presence of a higher intervention which transforms relationships through an outpouring of inexplicable love. This is the power of forgiveness.

David McCleery is a poet and editor of A Slow Tempo Press, in Lincoln, Nebraska. We share his poem, “Lament in the Night,” as a prelude to Father’s Day.

Lament in the Night

— for Caitlin

In the dark house,
the uilleann pipe rides in my lap,
a body small and warm in my arms,
the bag of hide tight, fragrant as any flesh I’d wish to hold.

I play a Lament and call the years through me.
Lean into the chanter,
as the thin reeds open like small mouths
to take the milk of the song.

The uilleann pipe opens out into the dark room,
the plaintive cry opens me too,
and I think of my daughter, twenty today,
and how I once held her in a room like this,

singing to her late at night, in darkness,
feeding her milk through a bottle,
her body warm and breathing in my arms,
her thin arms reaching up toward my song.

Reprinted with permission
Copyright © 2003
by David McCleery

“When I was a kid, I used to tell all the other kids you were the smartest man in the world.” –David Heins to his father, John

Listen to David Heins’ touching StoryCorps conversation with his father as he shares his feelings and experience of being both a son and new father. If this story evokes a memory of your father, being a father, or a father figure in your life, we invite you to share it. We also invite you to sample other stories of love and forgiveness on our Web site.

Roselle Kovitz, a writer for the campaign, introduces a small, but powerful team of volunteers.

My friend Maria Miller will be leaving on a humanitarian mission to Thailand soon. She and her fellow volunteers plan to provide beds and toilets for 500 Thai and Burmese children living at the Wat Don Chan orphanage in Chiang Mai, some who were orphaned, some abandoned, and some refugees from Myanmar (Burma).

Maria and a grassroots team of volunteers—part of Toys for Thailand—started their project when Sasha Bilar, who is Thai herself, witnessed the ongoing suffering of children who had lost their parents in the 2004 Tsunami. Once the initial flurry of aid workers and media left, the children remained, with little help and few resources. Many live in schools, Maria told me, where the teachers serve as their parent and educator, living with the children 24 hours a day.

Sasha and her friend, Judy Eberhart made their first delivery of toys and donations in April, 2005. The toys were meant to give the tsunami-zone children some bit of comfort, the donations to help improve their lives.

The work this dedicated team does springs from great compassion and love for the children. From publicity to fundraising, from packing toys to purchasing school supplies, clothing and food, from taking the children on outings, to sharing a meal with them, the group has developed a strong affection for and commitment to these children during their annual treks to Thailand.

Still, as Maria prepared for her fourth trip, she wondered, in a recent e-mail, whether all the resources they needed would come together for this great task. Then, her optimism and faith in their work surfaced and she noted that they would somehow make it happen.

I am so inspired by the work Maria and her fellow volunteers do, without a large organization behind them, that I wanted to share it with you. It is truly a labor of love. And we can watch how it happens. Maria and Sasha will share postcards from Wat Don Chan with us, so we can see the work they will be doing this summer. Check back to see a small miracle in progress.