Helping Clients Heal: Does Forgiveness Make a Difference?

Abstract

Broken trust, broken hearts, and broken spirits: these are all potential issues facing clients who have been hurt by others. Some have claimed that helping clients explicitly forgive those who have hurt them is a legitimate therapeutic intervention. However, do clients need explicit forgiveness interventions? Do clients want them? After they are received, are these interventions helpful? For the majority of 59 clients from 3 university counseling centers the answers were mostly affirmative. They had experienced a hurt that they wanted to forgive and wanted to talk about in therapy. Those who talked explicitly about forgiveness reported more overall improvement in their presenting symptoms. Implications for using explicit forgiveness interventions with clients are discussed.

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