“One of my favorite party games is to ask a group of people this simple question: What is your oldest or most cherished grudge? Without fail, every person unloads with shockingly specific, intimate detail about their grudge.” T. Herrera, The New York Times

ESL Voices Lesson Plan for this post with Answer Key

Excerpt: Let Go of Your Grudges. They’re Doing You No Good.By Tim Herrera, The NYT

“Career slights (intentional or not), offhand-yet-cutting remarks, bitter friendship dissolutions; nothing is too small or petty when it comes to grudges.

One of my favorite answers I’ve gotten to this question came from a friend whose grudge stretched back to second grade. A classmate — he still remembered her full name and could describe her in detail — was unkind about a new pair of Coke-bottle glasses he had started wearing. Her insult wasn’t particularly vicious, but he’d been quietly seething ever since. Childhood!

But what does holding onto grudges really get us, aside from amusing anecdotes at parties… And what could we gain from giving them up?

I posed this question on Twitter last week, asking if people had ever given up on a grudge and, if so, how that made them feel. The responses were delightfully all over the place.

Yeah pretty much most of them since entering my 30s,’ one respondent said. ‘It feels cleansing to free up the brain space.’‘Literally not once,’ another said. ‘I felt neutral!!’ one more wrote. ‘Like I just couldn’t be bothered anymore but also I didn’t feel relieved or anything. Just indifferent.’

A 2006 study, published in the Journal of Clinical Psychology as part of the Stanford Forgiveness Project, suggested that ‘skills-based forgiveness training may prove effective in reducing anger as a coping style, reducing perceived stress and physical health symptoms, and thereby may help reduce’ the stress we put on our immune and cardiovascular systems.

‘Holding onto a grudge really is an ineffective strategy for dealing with a life situation that you haven’t been able to master. That’s the reality of it,’ said Dr. Frederic Luskin, founder of the Stanford Forgiveness Project.

‘Whenever you can’t grieve and assimilate what has happened, you hold it in a certain way,’ he said. ‘If it’s bitterness, you hold it with anger. If it’s hopeless, you hold it with despair. But both of those are psycho-physiological responses to an inability to cope, and they both do mental and physical damage.’

At the same time, he said, the converse is true: Full forgiveness can more or less reverse these negative repercussions of holding onto anger and grudges.

O.K., so getting over grudges is good. But how do we do it?

1. Forgiveness is for you, not the offender. 2. It’s best to do it now. 3. It’s about freeing yourself …Perhaps most crucially, Dr. Luskin stressed, forgiveness is a learnable skill. It just takes a little practice.”