The Experience
A 7 session journey from grievance to forgiveness to gratitude.
Introduction
Grudges and grievances seem to be unavoidable in human affairs. Whether with loved ones, colleagues at work, drivers on the road, rival teams, political opponents or even the world itself, they keep us in their grip and even define our core identity.
There are clearly benefits to grievance. They propel us to identify problems in the world and seek redress, even found new countries. The US Declaration of Independence is a giant stack of grievances against George III, justifying the colonies' separation from Great Britain. Our popular stories celebrate the deep satisfaction when a grievance has been addressed, whether in a court of law (you can't handle the truth!) or when the hero takes justice into their own hands in repeated loops in comic books, John Wick, Taken, The Godfather and Tarantino films.
Yet decades of research has found that it's the grievance holder, not the object of the grievance that suffers. Keeping grievances alive boomerangs back on ourselves, resulting in psychological trauma, unhappiness and even compromised physical health. And it degrades our relationships, especially with those near and dear to us. Worse, grievances blind us from seeing the truth of our situation and we make one bad decision after another.
What's the antidote? Forgiveness. But what IS forgiveness and how does it work? In its current understanding, it seems extremely effortful and difficult, reserved for the special few who can muster it.
There is a hidden architecture to grievance and its companion forgiveness. Once viewed through this lens, both grievance and forgiveness are harnessed into something entirely transformational.
Welcome to the JOurneY of Grievance, Forgiveness and Gratitude!
The Princess Bride
We explore grievance, forgiveness and gratitude through iconic characters from this cult classic.
Inigo
Wracked by grievance and consumed by revenge, Inigo is where we find ourselves at the beginning of the JOurneY.
Vizzini
Reveals the deeper lesson grievance teaches us. In his refusal to heed grievance's gift, he pays the ultimate price.
Westley
Our destination at the end of the JOurneY Experience. Moves through the world grievance-free, enabling him to overcome obstacles and master challenging situations.
Forgive for Good
How grievance runs us and how we suffer from it
Science of Revenge
Our brain's addiction pathways get activated when we create grievances and take revenge on others.
Age of Grievance
Grievance has been weaponized throughout human history, but it's especially acute today with a potent cocktail of politics, technology and grievance entrepreneurs.
Steve Jobs in Exile
When Steve was ousted from Apple he was consumed with Grievance. This led to numerous bad decisions in the early days of NeXT Computer.
Dopamine Nation
The dopamine loop is the hidden biological driver of grievance.
Grief Recovery Method
Grief and Grievance are siblings. While the former is directed outward, the latter is directed inward. They both point to the same core issue.
Get Started
Session 0: Pre homework: Listen to No Hard Feelings episode in the Hidden Brain Podcast (0:00 to 38:00). Listen: A Proven Prescription for Health and Happiness in the Feel Better, Live More Podcast (0:00 to 50:30). Select chapters from Dr. Luskin's book Forgive for Good will be read throughout the experience.
S1: Grievance's Ancient Roots
S2: Grievance Loop, Part 1
S3: Grievance Loop, Part 2
S4: Fix the Grievance Loop, Part 1
S5: Fix the Grievance Loop, Part 2
S6: The Hidden Gift
S7: Model Dialogues
JoG-F-G is the Prologue Module in the JOurneY of Communication Experience.
Participant Experience
I came into this course with reasonable self-awareness and thought I'd worked through most of my stuff. I had not. What Bijoy built is closer to surgery than self-help. Session by session, he takes you through the mechanics of grievance — the courtroom of your own mind, the faulty models underneath it, the evolutionary mismatch between the machinery we're running and the world we're actually living in.
There were three moments in particular I could never have arrived at unguided, where I saw a logical fallacy in how I'd always interpreted the world — and once seen, there was no going back. First: the models I'd assumed were proxies of reality don't hold enough information to be trusted. Second: the capacity of the mind is minute compared to the scope of things to be aggrieved about, so any attempt to scale that process is doomed to end in arbitrary decisions and failure. Third: there are systems designed to scale to the level of societal conflict, and they don't belong in our individual minds. When you realize the delusion of using your mind as a tool it was never designed to be, it frees you from a Sisyphean curse.
By the end I described it this way: it's like picking up dog shit your whole life, and your yard keeps getting bigger, and one day someone tells you there never was a dog, and you're free to leave. The grievance cloud lifted. And I stopped forming new ones. I feel the change in very real terms. And the course doesn't leave you there. The final session turns relief into a way forward: what used to become grievances now become signals that point to root causes, with strategies to resolve the misalignment — often through better communication. Bijoy has built on the body of work that came before him and done something few others have: reduced concepts that had been purely theoretical to practical scientific models you can actually inspect and change. What price do you put on learning to suffer less?
-Chad A
JOurneY Guarantee
If for any reason this program is not moving you along your grievance journey, we'll refund your fees. Anytime before Session 4 if you need to cancel, get in touch and you will receive a 100% refund.