Welcome to spirituality and mental health. I'm your host Don Mackintosh and today we're going to be talking about forgiveness and shame. Many terrible things can happen, maybe a terrorist bombing, maybe someone that has injured others because they're self medicating and they had drunk driving. And maybe it's the breakup of a relationship and the loss that comes as a result of having that relational breakdown. Or maybe you've lost a job, and you've been fired. Or maybe you tried to qualify yourself in many different ways, but nothing's really panning out and you're upset, you're angry.

Maybe there's anger, there's blame. There's a resentment and bitterness. And if I was to read this statement to you probably could write a book for me. Once upon a time something happened that really upset me. And to this day, I've not let it go. This is how that decision impacted my life.

I bet you could probably finish that story. Maybe you think about these things every day. And they would be called maybe what we would call them our grievance stories. And if you're marinating and these types of things, if you're ruminating or thinking about these things all the time, what you need is the benefit of forgiveness. Now, forgiveness when it was studied across all different religious faiths or five different faiths, it was shown to be the only spiritual trait that was predictive of mental health after personality, personality variables were considered. So perhaps the most important thing you could ever do is forgive some people have said, If you forgive, then you will live.

Now the mental health benefits of forgiveness, lower levels of stress, anxiety, depression, less negative effect and angry thoughts or rumination, leading to better sleep. greater likelihood of experiencing post traumatic growth. In other words getting better after something bad happened to you. They studied incest survivors, and they found that after weekly individual sessions for 14 months, those who survived were able to forgive their abuser. They also showed decreases in anxiety and depression as a result of this in this instruction. They also looked at women who had been emotionally abused by their spouses, and they had an increased ability to forgive.

With considerable improvements in depression, trait anxiety and post traumatic stress symptoms, self esteem, environmental mastery and finding meaning and suffering. All these things improved once they learned how to forgive, and these gains were maintained for eight months after the treatment. There are physical benefits as well that we could go through one of the ones I find most fascinating is that the HDL cholesterol and LDL to HDL cholesterol ratio is improved. HDL cholesterol is that high density lipoprotein that does not cause problems and it's actually healthy. And LDL is the lousy density lipoproteins that kind of fall off the truck and create traffic jams in your in your vessels. But what they found was that forgiveness may be associated with reduced risk of cardiovascular events, because it increases HDL and lowers LDL.

We also discovered that patients who showed anger induced reductions they showed anger induce reductions of blood flow to the heart. In other words, when they got angry, their heart was seizing up or not perfusing as much, you know, blood through the heart vessel, they were giving 10 weekly psychotherapy sessions focusing on forgiveness and guess what happened. The myocardium perfusion or the blood flow to the heart showed marked improvement compared to the control group. That's right. When you forgive your heart actually gets healthier as a result. As a result tibbits another researcher following Luskin from Stanford discovered that people with hypertension at they reduce the anger expression and the increase the forgiveness, they had a reduction in their high blood pressure.

But what about the spiritual side? Studies show that feeling forgiven by God has the strongest forgiveness related health mediating effect and self forgiveness and forgiveness of others also contributes to the positive physical health of religiosity. So, feeling forgiven by God is number one, forgiving yourself and others. So what are the dangers of not forgiving? Well, if you're angry of increase in adrenalin increase in cortisol increase in heart rate Increase in breathing, increase in blood pressure increase in blood glucose, increased fat in the blood. And all that stuff is designed just in case you get attacked.

You can have clotting factors and you're not going to bleed to death but you're not always supposed to be living like a tiger is chasing you. long term effects of anger are also troubling headache, digestive problems, insomnia, increased anxiety, depression, high blood pressure, skin problems, even eczema, heart attack three times more likely and stroke. So how many can see that forgiveness is something we really need to embrace. In fact, you have lack a lack lack of purpose in your life. If you're on forgetting your only purpose is to be unforgiving. So you kind of you kind of lose it.

Well, what then is unforgiveness? Here's the definition, to ruminate or to chew on an old transgression, something that was done aggressively to you someone transported themself across the line transgression to ruminate on old transgression is to practice This unforgiveness and they monitored people, all their vital signs, their sweat gland activity. And they found out that if they were thinking about things that they ruminating on things that they held in their hearts, the grudges that we talked about all of these things caused them to feel angry, sad, anxious, and less than control. And so the Chinese have a sign saying the man who opts for revenge should dig two graves, you might get that person but you also will die. So then what is forgiveness? forgiveness is this is a process that takes time and we're going to talk about that in our second half.

But forgiveness is a process that takes time and involves letting go of a negative response following an offense. And number three, the through forgiveness, a positive response toward the offender can emerge. Is that what she wants to have happened? Do you want to get through forgiveness you realize it will take some time, but you can learn how to be forgiving. Do you want to let go of the negative responses that you've been holding on to? And do you want to have a positive response even towards the people that have offended you?

You might be scratching your head and say, I don't know if that's possible. But let me tell you it is and we're going to cover that in our next segment on forgiveness. Remember this, he who cannot forgive breaks the bridge over which he himself must pass. Has anyone ever forgiven you, as everyone giving you a break? Has anyone extended forgiveness towards something you've done? And would you like to learn how to do the same yourself?

And so we'll come back when we come back. We'll look at how it is that we can forgive