I teach forgiveness to a lot of different audiences: at-risk kids in group homes, corporate executives, church groups, people in the middle of divorces, people who haven’t spoken to a parent in decades. Nearly every time, before I can say what forgiveness is, I have to spend most of my time clearing away what people think it is, because those wrong ideas are usually the reason they haven’t been able to do it.
Forgiveness Is Not Denying Someone Hurt You
The first thing people get wrong is thinking forgiveness requires pretending the wound wasn’t there. It doesn’t. If anything, forgiveness requires the opposite, because you cannot forgive something you haven’t been honest about.
I spent fourteen years in an orphanage because my mother couldn’t or wouldn’t raise me. My father attempted suicide and lived the next twenty-six years unable to feed himself. Forgiving them did not require me to decide those things didn’t happen or didn’t hurt. They happened, they hurt, and true forgiveness never asked me to deny a single fact of it. If someone tells you that forgiving means acting like the wound wasn’t there, they’re describing something else.
Forgiveness Is Not Excusing What They Did
The second mistake is thinking forgiveness means deciding the other person’s behavior was acceptable, or at least understandable enough to let slide. This is probably the biggest reason people refuse to forgive, because on some level they’re refusing to say the thing that hurt them was okay. They’re right to refuse that, and forgiveness isn’t asking them to.
My mother’s chaos, the years of instability, the way she wounded me over and over, was not okay. I never decided it was okay. I never told myself she had good reasons or couldn’t help it in a way that made her actions acceptable. What I had to forgive her for was the chaos itself, without ever naming that chaos as acceptable. Excusing and forgiving are two different acts, and confusing them keeps a lot of people stuck for decades, believing forgiveness betrays their own pain.
Forgiveness Is Not Justifying What They Did
Related to excusing, but worth naming separately: forgiveness does not require you to construct a reasonable explanation for why the other person did what they did. You don’t have to find the logic in it, and you don’t have to walk yourself through their childhood or their pain or their circumstances until their behavior starts to make sense.
I understand now, decades later, that my mother was likely dealing with mental illness and addiction she never got treatment for. That understanding came slowly, and it helped me see her as a broken person rather than a villain, but having that understanding was not a requirement for forgiving her. I didn’t need a justification in hand to release the anger. Justification can come later, if it comes at all, and it’s a separate project from forgiveness, not a prerequisite for it.
Forgiveness Is Not Dismissing What They Did
The fourth misunderstanding is thinking forgiveness means deciding the offense doesn’t matter, waving it off as small so you can move past it more easily. This one is subtle because it can look like maturity from the outside. People say things like “it’s not a big deal” or “I’m over it” when what they mean is they’ve buried it somewhere they don’t have to look at it.
What happened to me was not a small thing. Fourteen years in an orphanage is not a small thing. I have never told myself it was minor in order to make forgiving easier. Forgiveness that requires you to shrink your own wound down to something manageable isn’t forgiveness. It minimizes wearing forgiveness as a disguise, and it tends to fail eventually, because a wound you’ve only pretended is small has a way of resurfacing at full size when you least expect it.
What Forgiveness Is
Once you clear away those four misunderstandings, what’s left is simpler than people expect, though not easier.
Forgiveness is releasing your anger and rage so you can become the person you were meant to become, rather than the person your wound would otherwise turn you into.
That’s the definition I teach. It has nothing to do with the other person’s remorse, their apology, their awareness of what they did, or their presence in your life at all. My mother never fully understood the damage she caused, and she never needed to for me to forgive her. Forgiveness was never a transaction between us; it was a decision I made about what I was willing to keep carrying.
I want to be specific about the word releasing, because it’s doing the most important work in that definition. Not forgetting, not resolving, not fixing the relationship, but releasing and putting the anger and rage down because carrying it was shaping me into someone I did not want to become, someone whose decisions were being made by an old wound instead of by the person underneath it.
Why This Definition Matters in Recovery
I’ve talked to a lot of people working through recovery, from addiction, from abusive relationships, from childhood wounds that took decades to even name. The biggest obstacle I see, again and again, is that people believe forgiveness requires one of the four things I just described. They think forgiving their father means saying what he did was fine. They think forgiving an ex means admitting the relationship wasn’t that bad. They think forgiving themselves means excusing choices that hurt other people.
None of that is true, and believing it is often the exact thing standing between a person and the freedom forgiveness is supposed to offer. If you’ve been unable to forgive someone because forgiving them feels like betraying your own pain, I want you to hear this clearly: you were right to refuse the wrong definition. You just haven’t been offered the right one yet.
Choosing Forgiveness Without Feeling Ready
I did not feel ready to forgive my mother when I decided to do it. I did not feel forgiving in any emotional sense. What I had was a deliberate decision not to let anger keep determining who I was becoming.
That decision came before the feeling, not after it. If you’re waiting to feel forgiving before you choose it, you may be waiting for something that only arrives after the choice. Forgiveness, in my experience, is closer to an act of will than an act of emotion. You decide, and then the feelings people associate with forgiveness, the lightness, the peace, tend to follow over time, sometimes a long time, rather than leading the way.
What I Want You to Take From This
If you’ve spent years unable to forgive someone because every version of forgiveness you’ve been offered felt like a betrayal of what happened to you, I understand that resistance, and I think it’s often a sign of good judgment rather than a character flaw. The problem was never your unwillingness to forgive; it was the definition you were working from.
Forgiveness doesn’t ask you to deny, excuse, justify, or dismiss what happened. It asks you to release what it’s costing you to keep carrying it, so you can become who you were meant to be instead of who your wound would otherwise make you.
If you want to hear how I came to understand forgiveness this way, and what it cost me to live it out, you can start with the free first chapter of my book.
In Hope.
