What forgiveness actually means and who it's really for

We have been told a story about forgiveness that harms the very people it claims to help.

Someone said something to me recently that has stayed with me. She had been in an emotionally abusive relationship, had found her way out, and was doing the hard work of rebuilding her life. She told me she wished she could learn to forgive her ex-partner. She said it with a kind of heaviness, as if it were the final task, the thing standing between her and being fully free.

I found myself saying something that surprised her: "You can't forgive him. His karma is his own. What he did is his own, and no act of will on your part can reach into his life to release him from it. That isn't how people work. That isn't how harm works."

There is a teaching in the Buddhist commentarial tradition that puts it this way. If you carry anger towards someone who does not accept it, it does not land on them. It is like offering a gift that is refused. The gift returns to the giver. His actions belong to him, and yours belong to you. No act of resentment, however justified, can enter another person's karmic account. What it can do is occupy yours.

That is not a reason to suppress anger. It is a reason to stop expecting it to do what it was never designed to do.

What she could learn to forgive, I suggested, was something closer to home. The anger she still feels. The resentment that rises unexpectedly. The grief that isn't finished yet. Those feelings aren't failures. They are honest responses to what genuinely happened. They don't need to be overcome, silenced, or transcended. They need to be met with the same presence and compassion she might offer a friend who has been through what she has.

This is a very different kind of forgiveness from the one our culture tends to prescribe.

The conventional story goes like this: if you haven't forgiven the person who hurt you, you remain attached to them. Your resentment is a chain. Forgiveness is how you break it and reclaim your freedom. It sounds reasonable. It even sounds wise.

Look at what it actually asks of the person who was harmed. It asks them to do something for someone who hurt them. When they realise they can't, because they're human, because the wound is real, because some things take a very long time, they end up feeling they have failed in their own healing.

That is a cruelty dressed up as wisdom.

The anger and resentment that follow emotional or physical abuse are not character flaws. They are the psyche's way of registering that something is wrong. Rushing past them, or demanding they dissolve in the name of forgiveness, repeats the original injury, implying that what they feel is the problem rather than what was done to them.

What I am suggesting instead is something more patient and more honest. To allow the feelings to be there. To give them space. To stop fighting them and meet them with compassion instead. Not because that will definitely make them fade, though they may, but because those feelings are part of you, and you deserve your own kindness.

If they don't fade, if the anger is still there on a Tuesday morning six months from now, the invitation is not to try harder. It is to forgive yourself for still feeling it. To say: Of course. Of course, this is still here.

The balance is not to feed the feelings, nor to suppress them. It is the practice of allowing the felt-sense to exist without feeding the hurt narrative.

This is where the real work lives. Not in reaching out to someone who caused harm, but in turning towards yourself with the steadiness and warmth you may never have received from them.

There is one more thing to say, because life is rarely simple. Sometimes the person who hurt us remains present, not by our own choice but because of circumstances we cannot fully control. Children who are connected to both parents. Financial dependencies that take time to unravel. The complicated loyalties of family. In those situations, forgiveness in the conventional sense is not only impossible but beside the point.

What matters then is something more like clear seeing. The ability to recognise what is actually happening, to name manipulation when it masquerades as generosity, and to hold on to your own reality even when someone else is working hard to distort it.

That is its own kind of freedom, subtler than the dramatic release promised by the forgiveness narrative. It is perhaps more honest and more durable.

You can't forgive him. You were never meant to. What you can do, slowly, imperfectly, in your own time, is forgive yourself for being human after something hard.

Rory Singer

You can also read this post on our Substack journal, Unfolding.