Narratives of Forgiveness : Using Targeted Booklists & Playlists for Therapy

Abstract

Nurses need forgiveness intervention tools because forgiveness affects their patients’ health. The goal of this project was to review peer-reviewed literature to discover what lists of books or other media help people to forgive. Bibliotherapy utilizes narrative in the form of fiction, biography, theology, etc., for therapeutic effect. There is limited information on how to build targeted book or media lists to help people forgive. We searched databases, using the search terms, “bibliotherapy”, “forgiv*”, “media”, “qualitative”, and “quantitative” to answer our research question: What reading material and mass media helps people forgive? Our research indicates that while scholars have developed processes that help people forgive, none developed lists of narrative or didactic literature that helped people forgive. We also found that intentionally modeled behavior, broadcast as a radio drama, encouraged the forgiveness process in areas of the Democratic Republic of Congo. These findings connect to research conducted by Albert Bandura, who showed that behavior modeled by others is one way that encourages people to change their own behavior. This research revealed gaps in the scholarly literature to answer our research question, therefore this literature review is the first step in the development of a qualitative study to fill this gap.