Forgiveness: Releasing What You Were Never Meant to Carry Forever

Free Yourself...Free Your Soul

Forgiveness is one of the most powerful—and perhaps most misunderstood—parts of healing.

We are often told that we need to forgive.

Forgive the person who hurt you.

Forgive your parents.

Forgive your partner.

Forgive the past.

Forgive yourself.

But when someone has deeply hurt us, forgiveness can feel almost offensive.

Why should I forgive them?

What they did was wrong.

They don't deserve my forgiveness.

They aren't even sorry.

And perhaps all of those things are true.

Because forgiveness isn't necessarily about what another person deserves.

Forgiveness is about what you deserve to stop carrying.

Forgiveness Does Not Mean It Was Okay

This is one of the most important things to understand about forgiveness.

Forgiveness does not mean that what happened was acceptable.

It doesn't mean you weren't hurt.

It doesn't mean you imagined it.

It doesn't require you to minimize what happened or find something positive about it.

And it certainly doesn't mean you have to allow someone back into your life.

You can forgive someone and still have a boundary.

You can forgive someone and never speak to them again.

You can forgive someone and decide that they no longer have access to you.

You can forgive and still hold someone accountable.

Forgiveness and reconciliation are not the same thing.

Reconciliation involves a relationship.

Forgiveness can happen entirely within you.

What Are We Carrying?

When something painful happens, the event eventually ends.

But our relationship with the event can continue for years.

We replay the conversation.

We imagine what we should have said.

We wonder why they did it.

We wish they understood what they did to us.

We wait for an apology that may never come.

We carry anger.

Resentment.

Betrayal.

Grief.

Shame.

Sometimes we carry the experience for so long that it becomes woven into the story we tell about ourselves.

And without realizing it, something that happened to us begins occupying enormous space within us.

Forgiveness is not pretending that the event never happened.

It is deciding that the event no longer gets to live inside you in the same way.

You Don't Have to Wait for an Apology

One of the greatest traps we can fall into is believing that we cannot heal until the person who hurt us understands what they did.

We wait for them to acknowledge it.

To take responsibility.

To finally see our pain.

To say they're sorry.

But what happens if they never do?

What if they aren't capable of understanding?

What if their version of what happened is completely different from yours?

What if they never change?

Does that mean you have to remain emotionally connected to the wound forever?

No.

Your healing does not have to depend upon another person's awareness.

Their apology may be meaningful.

Their accountability may matter.

But your freedom cannot require their participation.

Forgiveness allows you to take your healing back into your own hands.

Sometimes We Have to Understand Before We Can Release

Forgiveness doesn't always begin with saying, I forgive you.

Sometimes it begins with understanding.

Not understanding in order to excuse someone's behavior—but understanding the larger story.

People often act from their own wounds, conditioning, fear, limitations, and survival identities.

That doesn't make harmful behavior acceptable.

But it can help us stop making someone else's behavior mean something about our worth.

A parent's inability to love you in the way you needed was not proof that you were unlovable.

Someone's betrayal was not proof that you weren't enough.

Someone's rejection did not determine your value.

Someone else's inability to see you clearly does not define who you are.

Sometimes forgiveness begins when we finally separate what someone did from what we decided it meant about us.

I learned this lesson personally.

A Wound I Carried for Years

There was a wound I carried for many years involving my mother-in-law.

When I was younger, there were times when I would drive her home, just the two of us in the car. Looking back, I often felt cornered in those moments because there was nowhere for me to go and no easy way to end the conversation.

She would say things that were incredibly hurtful.

I remember driving while crying because of the things she was saying to me. One comment in particular stayed with me for years:

“My son married the wrong sister.”

She also criticized how much money I made and said other things that left me feeling hurt, confused, and rejected.

I couldn't understand why someone would intentionally say things like that to another person.

And for a long time, I carried the wound.

Years later, however, I learned something about her story that completely changed the way I understood mine.

When she was young, her own father had told her that he didn't love her and wished she had never been born.

Suddenly, I could see something I couldn't see when I was sitting behind that steering wheel.

This was a woman who had experienced profound rejection from someone whose love she desperately needed. She had never been shown the kind of love she needed in order to learn how to fully hold that love within herself.

And I began to understand that perhaps she had spent much of her life searching outside herself for it.

Her children became an important source of love and connection for her. And from her wounded perspective, I may not simply have been her son's wife.

I may have represented someone taking away one of the places where she believed her love came from.

That realization didn't suddenly make the things she said to me okay.

They weren't okay.

I didn't deserve to be spoken to that way.

But eventually I could look at those experiences and realize:

Maybe those words were never really about me.

They came through me, and they certainly hurt me, but they originated somewhere else.

They came from her story.

Her wounds.

Her rejection.

Her fear.

Her unmet need for love.

And understanding that changed something within me.

Compassion Does Not Require Self-Abandonment

This is one of the greatest lessons forgiveness has taught me.

Understanding why someone hurt you does not require you to deny that they hurt you.

Compassion and accountability can exist at the same time.

I can have compassion for the little girl whose father told her she wasn't loved.

And I can have compassion for the younger version of me sitting behind that steering wheel, crying and wondering why someone would treat her that way.

One person's wound does not cancel out the other's.

Both deserve compassion.

This is important because sometimes, particularly when we are trying to be loving, compassionate, or spiritual, we rush too quickly to understand the other person.

They were wounded.

They did the best they could.

They didn't know any better.

Perhaps.

But you were wounded too.

Forgiveness should not require you to abandon yourself in order to have compassion for someone else.

There may be anger that needs to be acknowledged.

There may be grief that needs to be felt.

There may be a boundary that needs to be established.

There may be a younger version of you who needs to finally hear:

You didn't deserve that.

Only then may we be ready to look at the larger story.

Wounds Can Be Passed Forward

When I learned more about my mother-in-law's story, I began to understand something much larger about human behavior.

Wounded people can unknowingly—or sometimes knowingly—pass their wounds forward.

Rejection can become control.

Abandonment can become possessiveness.

Fear can become anger.

A desperate need to be loved can become an attempt to hold tightly to the people who provide that love.

Until someone becomes conscious of the wound, the pattern can continue.

That doesn't mean we have to accept harmful behavior.

It means we can begin to understand where the behavior came from without continuing to make it mean something about us.

Her words weren't proof that I wasn't good enough.

They weren't proof that I was the wrong person.

They weren't proof that I needed to become different so she would accept me.

They were expressions of something she was carrying long before I ever entered her life.

And once I understood that, I didn't have to keep carrying it for her.

That, for me, became part of forgiveness.

Forgiving Yourself

There is another kind of forgiveness that can be even more difficult.

Forgiving ourselves.

We look backward with the awareness we have today and judge the person we were then.

I should have known.

Why did I stay?

Why didn't I speak up?

Why did I let that happen?

Why didn't I leave sooner?

How could I have made that choice?

But the person looking backward today has something the earlier version of you did not have:

everything you've learned since.

We cannot fairly judge an earlier version of ourselves using awareness that was gained through living the very experiences we're judging them for.

That person was making choices from what they knew, what they believed, what they feared, what they had experienced, and what they were capable of at the time.

Maybe they were trying to survive.

Maybe they were trying to belong.

Maybe they were afraid of being alone.

Maybe they didn't yet know what a healthy boundary looked like.

Maybe they were doing the best they could with what they had.

Forgiving yourself means turning toward that earlier version of you and saying:

I understand now.

Not, What was wrong with you?

But:

What happened to you? What did you believe? What were you afraid of? What did you need that you didn't know how to give yourself?

That is where judgment can begin turning into compassion.

Forgiveness Doesn't Have to Be Forced

There is something else I believe is important:

Forgiveness cannot be rushed.

Sometimes people are encouraged to forgive before they have even had the opportunity to acknowledge that they are angry.

Before they have grieved.

Before they have told the truth about what happened.

Before they have created safety.

Before they have established boundaries.

That isn't necessarily forgiveness.

Sometimes it's another form of self-abandonment.

True forgiveness does not require us to bypass our emotions in order to appear spiritual.

Forgiveness can come when you are ready.

And sometimes it comes in layers.

Forgiveness Is an Act of Release

Eventually, we can ask ourselves a very different question:

Do I still want to carry this?

Not because the experience didn't matter.

But because you matter.

There is a difference between remembering something and carrying it.

You can remember what happened without reliving it.

You can learn from an experience without remaining emotionally imprisoned by it.

You can keep the wisdom and release the weight.

That is forgiveness.

It is not saying:

It didn't matter.

It is saying:

It mattered. It affected me. I learned from it. And I am choosing not to carry it with me forever.

When Not Forgiving Keeps Us Connected

There is another realization that changed the way I think about forgiveness.

Sometimes we believe that holding on to anger or resentment gives us power.

I'm not forgiving them after what they did to me.

And I understand that feeling.

But eventually, I had to ask myself:

Who is actually holding the power when I continue carrying what someone else did to me?

If thinking about that person can still change my emotional state…

If remembering what they did can still make me angry, hurt, or upset…

If I am still replaying conversations in my head…

If I am still waiting for them to understand, apologize, change, or somehow make it right…

Then in some way, I am still allowing that person to have power over me.

They may not even be in my life anymore.

They may be completely unaware that I'm still carrying it.

And yet something they did years ago can still reach into my present and affect how I feel today.

That isn't freedom.

Sometimes we hold onto resentment because it feels like putting down the anger means letting the other person off the hook.

But forgiveness isn't letting them off the hook.

It's taking yourself off the hook.

It's saying:

You don't get to occupy this space inside me anymore.

You don't get to determine how I feel today.

I don't need your apology in order to heal.

I don't need you to understand in order for me to move forward.

I don't need you to change in order for me to be free.

Forgiveness is one way we take our power back.

We stop waiting for another person to give us the peace that we can begin creating for ourselves.

We stop allowing yesterday's wound to control today's emotions.

And we recognize that releasing our attachment to what happened doesn't give the other person power.

It takes their power away.

Because perhaps one of the greatest freedoms we can give ourselves is reaching the point where we can say:

What you did was part of my story. But you no longer get to control how the rest of my story is written.

Forgiveness and the Heart

Resentment can keep us emotionally connected to the very thing we want to be free from.

Forgiveness begins loosening that connection.

As we release what we have been carrying, we create more room within ourselves for peace, compassion, connection, and love.

We return to the heart.

Not an unprotected heart.

Not a heart without boundaries.

A wiser heart.

A heart that can remain open without abandoning itself.

A heart that understands that compassion and discernment can coexist.

A heart that can say:

I release you—and I still choose me.

Keep the Wisdom. Release the Wound.

Our painful experiences become part of our stories, but they don't have to become our identities.

We can keep what they taught us.

The discernment.

The strength.

The boundaries.

The wisdom.

The understanding.

The compassion.

And we can begin releasing the pain we no longer need to carry.

Perhaps forgiveness isn't about forgetting the past at all.

Perhaps forgiveness is reaching a place where we can finally say:

I no longer need you to be different for me to be free.

And sometimes the person we most need to say that to is ourselves.

Forgive the version of you who didn't know yet.

Forgive the version who stayed.

Forgive the version who was afraid.

Forgive the version who chose from a wound.

Forgive the version who was simply trying to survive.

Take the lesson.

Keep the wisdom.

Release the weight.

And allow yourself to move forward.

Because forgiveness isn't about changing what happened yesterday.

It's about deciding how much of yesterday you are willing to carry into tomorrow.