Theology and Spirituality in Counseling Intervention Studies on Forgiveness

The article Intervention studies on forgiveness: A meta-analysis, addresses the idea of forgiveness from a counseling perspective. Three different types of categories were considered by the authors. These were decision-based interventions, along with two types of process-based interventions. One of those was individual and the other was with groups. There were nine published studies used to gather the data for the article, which equated to 330 participants' information being collected and analyzed. Theories of forgiveness were also reviewed, in an effort to examine why people choose to forgive or not forgive, and how that forgiveness may or may not play into their faith and other types of beliefs. The groups that were studied also included a control group, in order to ensure that the information drawn from the study was truly applicable to more than just the study participants.

The study looked at forgiveness, as well as other measures of emotional health. It found that there was no effect seen from the interventions that were decision-based, but that process-based group interventions showed some effect. The largest effect was from the process-based individual interventions, which showed significantly large effects. That was very important to the study, because it provided the authors with the understanding that forgiveness in clinical settings through the use of process-based interventions could be highly valuable for a number of people. It...

Some people need more than that decision to move past hurt that has been brought on by another person, and a clinical setting can help with that.
Reflection

When it comes to studies that have been done on forgiveness, the article provides a lot of good insight in compiling past information and analyzing it properly. The study is a good way to see that there are many different ways to work toward forgiving someone, and that not all of them are equally effective. While that is unfortunate for people who are trying to forgive and having trouble doing so, it is important to remember that forgiveness is different for each person. Some of them struggle to forgive even the smallest infraction, while others are capable of forgiving very serious crimes and related difficult behavior. It may be about the person and what he or she chooses to allow, but it can also be about how the idea of forgiveness is presented to that person. A decision-based option does not seem to be as effective as a process-based option. This would make sense, because deciding to forgive someone is a process, even though there is ultimately a decision at the end of that process.

The process is also very individualized, which would indicate why the individual process-based option worked better than the group-based option when it came to truly helping people forgive and move past any issues they…