Welcome to Nobody Told Me. I'm Laura Owens and I'm Jan Black. On this episode, we're focusing on forgiveness. Do you find it difficult to forgive? Do you wish others would find it

easier to forgive you? Joining us is Dr. Fred Luskin, who's the director of the Stanford

forgiveness projects, an ongoing series of workshops and research projects that investigate

the effectiveness of his forgiveness methods on a variety of populations.

Dr. Luska is one of the world's leading researchers on forgiveness.

He's the author of the bestselling books,

Forgive for Good, A Proven Prescription for Health and Happiness,

and Forgive for Love, the missing ingredient for a healthy and lasting relationship.

Doctor, thank you so much for joining us.

Hey, you're welcome.

How do you define forgiveness?

Wow.

You know, unfortunately, there's many definitions.

What we do is try to make it as practical as possible.

So basically, it stopped throwing a hissy fit when life

didn't go the way you want. It's not about the past at all, that it's, it's about the current,

like, arguing with your own life. What is Stanford's Forgiveness Project? It's such an amazing idea for something. And we were also wondering how you became interested in the topic yourself. Yeah. But the forgiveness project was or is a, just an attempt to like figure out how to help people forgive.

I mean, just a simple practical desire to teach this stuff to understand what works and what doesn't.

And at its core, a desire to help people suffer less.

I got into the forgiveness project because I had been very badly hurt, betrayed many years ago,

and had no skills and no clue how to handle it and went flailing around for a number of years

with anger and disappointment and bitterness and

...