Profile: Everett Worthington on Forgiveness

Forgiveness can be a powerful way to relieve anger and hurt, but is often misunderstood and dismissed as a treatment tool.

We sat down with Everett Worthington, a clinical psychologist and Commonwealth Professor Emeritus at Virginia Commonwealth University, to discuss how he went from U.S. Naval Officer to one of the world’s leading experts on forgiveness, and how the REACH forgiveness method works.

Pivoting to psychology

Everett Worthington first became interested in psychology in the 1970s, while was teaching nuclear physics to U.S. Navy students. It was a hard course, not all the students had a strong academic background. For his pupils, failing their exams meant much more than a dent in their pride or a telling off from their parents – it could mean being shipped off to the Vietnam War. “If they didn’t pass, they dropped four pay grades and were sent to Vietnam, usually, to sail around and get shot at.” explains Worthington. “During four years of active duty as an officer I had the opportunity to help a lot of young men that were highly stressed. It gave me the chance to give some advice (I’m not sure I would call it counselling) to help them get through those times. It turned out I liked that better than I liked the physics, although I think I could have been happy as a physicist or an engineer. That led me to applying back to graduate school in psychology.”

Healing with hope: the hope-focused couple approach

While accumulating his post-doctoral clinical hours with individuals, families and couples, Everett found he liked the work he did with the couples the most, and he developed a prototype of what is now the Hope-Focused Couple Approach. At that time, there were five parts in this approach, although forgiveness and reconciliation are now also included as an additional part:

1. Assessment and feedback. The couple completes questionnaires and an interview about their relationship history, paying attention to the things that attracted them to each other and which still hold them together. At this point, the couple is also told that experience shows there are particular times when they might be tempted to stop therapy prematurely.

2. Conflict resolution. The acronym ‘LOVE’ is used to help clients remember what this entails:

   • L= Listen and repeat: active listening breaks the pattern of rehearsed disagreements.

   • O = Observe your effects. Immediately stop trying to convince your partner if they are giving signs that they are troubled. Instead, ask what is bothersome and deal with it. This is about not continuing to weaken the emotional bond by wanting to “win” an argument.

   • V = Value your partner. This prevents name-calling, for example.

   • E = Evaluate each person’s interests, not their incompatible positions.

3. Communication training. This includes positive active responding, in which a person responds to their partner’s good news by reflecting on what they accomplished. “It’s worth making a big deal of the positive feelings the partner is expressing”, adds Worthington.

4. Intimacy training. This doesn’t just relate to sex. For example, it might also involve how often the couple talk about plans and their future.

5. Forgiveness and reconciliation. This was a subsequent addition to the programme, and is based on the REACH model of forgiveness, which will be elaborated later.

6. Termination sessions.This allows the couple to review and solidify progress.

Focusing on forgiveness: the birth of REACH
When he started seeing couples, Worthington wasn’t using forgiveness in his therapy sessions. “As a Christian I was interested in forgiveness, but that wasn’t really on my clinical radar,” he recalls. In 1983, though, he began supervising a young therapist who told him that despite trying everything, the couple he was seeing just weren’t making any progress. The trainee told him that they had tried “all the conflict resolution and the communication and the intimacy stuff – but they just hate each other; they’ve got all these grudges for years.” That’s when Worthington said: “We’ve got to create an intervention to help them forgive.”

It worked well, and Worthington taught it to the director of the agency where he served as clinical supervisor. That director then taught it to his therapists. “I ended up writing an article about it, published in 1990 [in the journal Psychotherapy] and that really was the start of the research into forgiveness,” says Worthington. The article caught the eye of the then-graduate student Mike McCullough – now a professor at the University of California San Diego – who started digging around in the library for more studies on forgiveness, but there were very few. Others soon took interest, as Worthington recalls: “Mike was followed by Steve Sandage, now a professor at Boston University, then Jen Ripley, now a professor at Regent University, and then Nathaniel Wade, now a professor at Iowa State University.”

Together they created the five-step REACH Forgiveness method. This can be completed using a Do-It-Yourself workbook, which is available for free on Worthington’s website, and is also elaborated below:

• R = Recall the hurts. Clients face the fact they’ve been wounded, and resolve to change their emotions and behavior toward the person who has hurt them (the “offender”), with no pursuit of payback.

• E = Empathizing with the offender. Clients should imagine sitting in a chair opposite the offender, and “pour their heart out” to them. Then they may imagine the offender doing the same, helping the forgiver see why the offender might have done it. The hope is that the forgiver starts feeling compassion, or even love, which helps to heal the hurt.

• A = Altruistic gift. Forgiveness should be given unselfishly.

• C = Commit. Writing a note to themselves can help clients remember that they have forgiven that person, which helps it to last.

• H = Hold onto forgiveness. If clients start to doubt that they really forgave the offender, they can re-read their commitment note and see that they did forgive.

This model has now been tested with positive results (improved forgiveness, reduced anxiety and depression symptoms, and an increased sense of flourishing) in more than 30 randomised controlled trials. In 2014, a meta-analysis of all outcome research on forgiveness (published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology) found similar benefits for the REACH forgiveness model and Enright’s process model of forgiveness. “Both models use the same principles – such as working on a specific offense or hurt, defining forgiveness, explaining how it benefits those who forgive, and replacing the emotions of resentment, bitterness, and hate with more positive emotions and benevolent motivations,” notes Worthington, “but the approaches package the principles differently and research on their use has targeted different groups of people. The process model has been tested often in psychotherapy and classroom settings, whereas the REACH Forgiveness model has been used mostly with adults, allowing them to work on whatever offenses have bothered them.”

Personal tragedy

In 1996, with his research career now in full swing and his first book on forgiveness at the publishers waiting to be printed, Worthington suffered a personal tragedy: his mother was murdered by a burglar who had broken in on New Year’s Eve. He found himself surprised by how quickly he was able to forgive the killer. “It was almost embarrassingly quickly. I always make the point that I’m not an ‘uber-forgiver’ – I had a professor who gave me a B and it took me 10 years to forgive him,” he jokes, “but I forgave that young man quickly. It was really unusual to be able to forgive that murderer quickly. It’s not like me. I think it was just a gift. It just happened."

When his brother, Mike, died by suicide in 2005, Worthington’s forgiveness of what he felt was his own failure to help his brother took a lot longer. Mike had suffered with post-traumatic stress disorder after finding their mother’s body, and Worthington struggled to forgive himself. He felt he had let his brother down by not effectively using his knowledge of therapy. Just before it happened, Worthington had been accepted to work at the University of Cambridge in the UK, and he got the call about his brother’s death on the journey over. “I was reeling from that,” recalls Worthington. “Although I did my research, I spent most of my time at Cambridge thinking about self-forgiveness, because I was wrestling with my own self-condemnation. For me it was a much more difficult experience than forgiving of my mom’s murderer. In many ways, I think self-condemnation can be more difficult than forgiving others because while you can always get away from another person who hurt you, you can never get away from yourself. You’re living with this self-condemnation all the time and you’re also doing something that’s more cognitively complex. You’re trying to be both the offender and the forgiver.”

This inspired Worthington to change the REACH Forgiveness method to help others deal with self-forgiveness. There are six steps involved in the self-forgiveness approach:

1. Reconcile with God/nature/humanity (or whatever feels fitting for you) for the things you’ve done to hurt others.

2. Repair the damage done to others as well as possible. The acronym CONFESS is used for this:

   • C = Confess without excuse.

   • O = Offer an apology.

   • N = Note the partner’s pain (i.e. empathy).

   • F = Forever value the partner (and don’t devalue).

   • E = Equalise or offer restitution.

   • S = Say ‘never again’.

   • S = Seek forgiveness.

3. Repair the psychological damage done to yourself in the wrongdoing or self-condemnation. “Often this involves confronting self-defeating beliefs and thoughts or dealing with moral injury inflicted on yourself by doing something against your own standards,” said Worthington.

4. Apply the REACH model [outlined earlier] to yourself.

5. Make a decision to treat yourself as generously as you would treat someone else who did what you did. Worthington elaborates “People can often forgive themselves for hurting others but cannot accept themselves as being the type of person who would do such a thing.. [It requires] different therapeutic acts depending on what kind of counselling theory or self-help theory one embraces. One thing is certain: accepting ourselves is almost always really hard.”

6. Recommit to not make the same mistakes again,and if possible, to live more virtuously all around.

The impact of forgiveness on health

Aside from making people happier, learning to forgive has massive implications for our physical health. Worthington explains: “If you look at [the stress hormone] cortisol, and if you think of unforgiveness as being stressful – cortisol affects every physical system in your body. It affects your cardiovascular system and puts people at cardiovascular risk. It affects the gastrointestinal system, the sexual-reproductive system, and the immune system. Colitis, chronic pain... there are just so many physical effects that can happen. [Holding on to grudges] can shrink the brain, in particular the hippocampus, up to 25% – and that interferes with the processing of memories. It all comes out of that systemic disruption that happens with chronic stressors.”

The REACH Forgiveness model incorporates elements of “decisional forgiveness” as well as “emotional forgiveness”. Decisional forgiveness means deciding to forgive a personal offence and to treat the offender more humanely; emotional forgiveness consists of replacing negative emotions with positive ones, like compassion and sympathy. Worthington argues that most of the health benefits lie in emotional forgiveness: “Emotional forgiveness changes negative stressful emotions by replacing toxic resentment, bitterness, hate, hostility, anxiety, and depression [with positive emotions]. All of those are highly related to lowering the stress response, so successfully reducing the stress response strongly improves physical and mental health. After gaining a sense of some emotional forgiveness, the person is challenged whether they want to decide to treat the offender kindly. It’s easier to make such a decision after the forgiver has experienced some healing of their emotions.”

However, some research suggests that there can sometimes be benefits in choosing not to forgive. For example, a 2019 study by Kira and colleagues found that Iraqi refugees who held onto unforgiveness reported better health and lower PTSD scores.

International forgiveness

Not only has the REACH forgiveness model been used with couples and individuals battling personal hurts, it’s also been used to heal people damaged by conflict in their homelands. Worthington’s international work started when he travelled to South Africa. He was scheduled to go to South Africa to speak to three Christian counselling conferences. Despite not holding out much hope that anything would come of it, he asked the organiser of the trip to help him meet with the big research universities. Next thing he knew he had received a letter from the South African government asking him to be a visiting scholar working on their behalf, and the assignment was to speak to those very universities. He also met with the Johannesburg Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was set up to deal with what happened under apartheid, and which had just finished its first human rights hearings.

This had all taken place shortly after his mother’s murder. While he had been able to forgive the killer, her death had greatly unsettled him. Worthington recalls: “By the time I had finished [in South Africa], I was coming back on the plane and I thought: ‘I need to revise my life mission’. I wrote my new mission as 'do all I can to promote forgiveness in every willing heart, home, and homeland’. I reshaped my research programme, and that positive outcome really came out from having been under the cloud of my mother’s murder. When I look back at the things that happened around that time, I say it was God’s providence.”

Through the John Templeton Foundation (a philanthropic organisation supporting scientific and religious research) Worthington has received millions of dollars in funding for supporting over 30 investigators doing international research. One of his own studies, funded by the sister organisation Templeton World Charity Foundation and published in January 2024 in the journal BMJ Public Health, became the largest-ever randomized controlled trial of a forgiveness intervention. Following 4,598 people in 5 conflict-affected countries, the study found that 3 hours using a self-directed REACH workbook was successful in promoting forgiveness, as well as reducing anxiety and depression symptoms. It’s one of his favourite pieces of research because of the sheer geographical spread of it: “They’re all high-conflict countries: Hong Kong (this study was done was when they had all the protests), Indonesia, the Ukraine (we had two sites: one near the Russian front, and one in Kyiv); Columbia (following 60 years of civil war); and South Africa. It’s a big intervention study.”

Worthington’s career demonstrates the transformative power of forgiveness, not only in individual lives but also across communities and nations. The REACH Forgiveness model, with its robust research foundation, provides clinicians with practical tools to address deeply entrenched emotional wounds. Mental health professionals can harness these insights to foster healing, resilience, and flourishing in their clients.