Forgiveness is not reconciliation: what forgiveness is and what it does not require

“Oh, come on, forgive her. She’s your mother, after all. She’s old, she won’t be around for ever.” The sentence lands at Sunday lunch, somewhere between the soup and the main course, spoken by an aunt who means well. The person it is aimed at goes quiet. Two things sit in his chest at once: anger, because once again he is the one cast as making trouble, and a quiet doubt about whether he might simply be stubborn. Nobody at the table asks what exactly he is supposed to forgive. And nobody notices that the aunt is not really asking for forgiveness. She is asking for the holidays to be shared again.

Two things are tangled together in this scene, and language likes to glue them into one: forgiveness and reconciliation. The first happens inside one person. The second happens between two. Anyone who doesn’t separate them tends to end up facing a false choice: either I forgive and go back to the relationship as it was, or I stay bitter. There is a third option, and this post is about it.

I am not writing it to talk you into forgiving. Forgiveness is not a duty and it is not proof of maturity. It is a possibility worth knowing precisely — including what it does not ask of you.

What forgiveness is

The American psychologist Robert Enright, who has been studying forgiveness since the 1980s, describes it roughly like this: a person who has been treated unjustly deliberately gives up resentment and the wish for payback — even though they would be entitled to both — and over time comes to feel some goodwill towards the one who hurt them. Two things in that description are essential. First: the injustice was real. Forgiveness does not begin with shrinking the wound but with acknowledging it at its full size. Second: forgiveness is something you give, not something the other person earns or can collect.

Everett Worthington, the other major researcher in this field, adds a useful distinction. Decisional forgiveness is a resolution about how you will behave towards the person: that you will not take revenge, that you will not treat them as an enemy. Emotional forgiveness is slower — the gradual replacement of resentment, bitterness and hostility with something softer. You can do the first in an afternoon. The second takes months or years and cannot be ordered into being. Many people make the decision and are then disappointed in themselves when the anger flares up again at the first memory. That is not a sign the decision was insincere. It only means that feelings walk more slowly than resolutions.

What actually gets released in forgiveness is easiest to describe with the word resentment: anger that has hardened and moved in for good. Resentment has its own logic. It guards the memory of an injustice when nobody else will acknowledge it. That is why people don’t let go of it lightly — and they are right not to.

What forgiveness does not require

Most resistance to forgiveness is not aimed at forgiveness itself but at things wrongly attached to it. Let me list them.

• It does not require forgetting. “Forgive and forget” is a saying, not a description of how memory works. You can forgive something you will remember for the rest of your life.
• It does not require excusing. To forgive is not to say “it wasn’t that bad” or “he couldn’t help it”. If nothing was wrong, there is nothing to forgive.
• It does not require an apology. It is good when one comes. But if you make forgiveness conditional on it, you have handed the key to your own peace to the person who hurt you.
• It does not require you to say so. You can forgive without the person ever finding out.
• It does not require trust. Forgiveness refers to the past, trust to the future. Trust is earned through behaviour.
• It does not require giving up on justice. You can forgive and still file a report, insist on a contact arrangement, or keep a boundary you have set.
• It does not require reconciliation. This is the point where most people get stuck, so I give it the most room.

If you remember a single line from that chart, let it be the last one: forgiveness is yours, and you need nobody else for it. For reconciliation you need the other person — and that other person has to do something.

What the research shows

Forgiveness is not only a nice idea; it is also reasonably well studied. In 2014 Nathaniel Wade and colleagues published a meta-analysis covering 54 studies with more than 2,300 participants. All of them worked on a specific hurt, with a programme explicitly designed to promote forgiveness. The finding: people who went through such a programme forgave to a greater degree than those who did not, and they also reported less depression and anxiety and more hope. Longer programmes had a larger effect than short ones. To me that is the most honest news of all: forgiveness can be supported, but it cannot be hurried.

It is also interesting what happens in the body during resentment. Charlotte vanOyen Witvliet and two colleagues asked participants to imagine, in turn, nursing a grudge against someone who had hurt them and forgiving that person. While nursing the grudge, their heart rate, blood pressure and facial muscle tension rose; while imagining forgiveness, these measures settled. The study was small and laboratory-based, so it does not support grand conclusions about health. But it says something many people know from experience: the body lives through ruminating on an old injustice as if it were happening again.

The most telling study, for me, is the one Suzanne Freedman and Robert Enright published in 1996. They worked with twelve women who had survived incest in childhood. Each worked individually with a therapist along Enright’s model for more than a year. At the end they had less anxiety and depression and more hope than the comparison group. I want to stress something that tends to be overlooked about this study: none of them needed contact with the perpetrator for it, let alone reconciliation with him. The forgiveness was inner work from start to finish.

Reconciliation takes two

Reconciliation means the relationship is restored. Forgiveness is not enough for that; it needs conditions that are not in your hands. The other person has to admit what they did — without a “but” and without “if I hurt you”. Their behaviour has to change and stay changed long enough to be an experience rather than a promise. And the relationship has to be safe: physically, emotionally, sometimes financially too.

What a good apology looks like, and what separates it from an empty one, I described in How to apologise and how to forgive — yourself included, so I won’t repeat it here. How trust is rebuilt after it has broken is the subject of Loss of trust after betrayal: when what you relied on collapses.

Nor is reconciliation a switch with two positions. Between “everything as before” and “never again” lie many in-between forms: polite contact at holidays, conversations about everyday things that leave the old subjects alone, contact by phone only, contact only with a third person present. With parents, partial reconciliation is more common than complete; there is more on that in Adult children and parents: can the relationship still be repaired?.

A note on the word itself. In Slovenian, “sprava” — reconciliation — carries a great deal of weight, some of it historical, and many people hearing it feel that something large and final is expected of them. In everyday family life reconciliation is often far more modest: two people who can sit in the same room again without either of them having to deny what happened.

Forgiveness without contact

Sometimes reconciliation is not possible. The person has died. The person denies everything. The person is still dangerous, or every contact with them is a fresh wound. Sometimes you ended the contact yourself, after long thought, and do not wish to resume it. In all these cases forgiveness remains an open possibility — precisely because you do not need the other person for it.

A conversation like that might sound like this (composed for illustration, not a real person):

“Everyone keeps telling me to forgive my father. But I don’t want to start going there again.”
“What would happen if you separated those two things?”
“Separated how?”
“One question is whether you want to go on carrying the resentment. The other is whether you want to visit him.”
“I’m sick of the resentment. But the visits … no. I’m ill for a week afterwards every time.”
“Then perhaps you have two different answers. And both can be right.”

Forgiveness without contact often has a flavour of grief. When you let go of resentment, you also let go of the hope that the other person will one day understand, apologise, become the parent or partner you needed. That loss is real even though the person is still alive; it is the subject of Grieving someone who is still alive: dementia, addiction, estrangement. Writing that goes nowhere can help with this kind of forgiveness — you will find a description under the exercise The letter you don’t send.

Two routes: Enright and REACH

How do you go about forgiving at all? Two models have been studied most, and it is worth knowing that both begin in the same place: with the wound, not with forgiveness.

Enright’s process model has four phases. In the first, the uncovering phase, a person looks at what happened and what it did to them — including the anger, the shame and everything they lost because of the wound. In the second they decide whether they want to try forgiveness at all; the decision is free and can also be “not now”. The third is the work: an attempt to see the one who caused the hurt as a whole person with a history of their own, without the act thereby becoming acceptable. In the fourth, the person notices what has changed in them and often finds some meaning in the experience. The phases are not a staircase. People go back, stall, skip.

Worthington’s REACH model is shorter and has five steps, named after the initials of the English words. Worthington is not only a theorist here: in the mid-1990s his mother was murdered, and he has written openly about testing the model on himself.

The same caveat applies to both models. They describe a path a person chooses for themselves, not a prescription issued by those around them. And both reckon with time measured in months.

When forgiveness comes too soon

Forgiveness has a shadow side too, and researchers are describing it with increasing precision. James McNulty followed newlyweds over several years. Among those who forgave their partner quickly and easily, the partner’s psychological and physical aggression continued over the years; among those who forgave less readily, it declined. Forgiveness without consequences can therefore tell the other person that the behaviour carries no cost.

Laura Luchies and colleagues named the phenomenon “the doormat effect”. Someone who forgives a person who has made an effort to repair the damage, and has shown them they are safe and valued in the relationship, comes out with more self-respect. Someone who forgives a person who has done no such thing ends up with less — and with a weaker sense of who they are and what matters to them.

Premature forgiveness is often not forgiveness at all. It is a way of avoiding anger, because in your family anger counted as dangerous or ugly. It is giving in to pressure so that there will be peace again. It is the fear of being left alone. But anger is an emotion that carries information: a boundary was crossed here. Skip the anger and you skip the information. What happens to anger with nowhere to go is the subject of Suppressed anger: when you are “always calm” and always tired, and anger directed at parents is covered in Anger at your parents in adulthood: what to do with it.

I would also pay attention when forgiveness is demanded by someone else — the one who caused the hurt, or the family on their behalf. “If you loved me, you’d forgive me” is not a request for forgiveness; it is pressure. How to recognise that kind of pressure is described in When others keep you in guilt: recognising emotional blackmail.

Faith, no faith, and the sentence “you ought to forgive”

For many people forgiveness is not a psychological topic but part of their faith. A prayer they know by heart mentions it every day. That can be a great source of strength: forgiveness has a meaning that reaches beyond how they happen to feel, and they are not alone in it. But it can also become a burden when it turns from a gift into a deadline. A person who cannot yet forgive then carries, on top of the wound, the feeling of being a poor believer. As far as I know religious traditions, no serious one claims that forgiveness is quick or that it means going back into danger — but in the family kitchen that distinction is easily lost.

For someone else, it is precisely the religious overtone that makes them reject the word. It sounds like a sermon, like a demand to be better than the person who wronged them. That is understandable too. Such a person may feel closer to words like “letting go” or “no longer carrying it”. The research I have mentioned is not tied to a world view: Worthington’s model has been tested in both secular and religious versions, Enright’s with people of very different convictions.

Neither starting point is the more advanced one. A believer does not have to prove they are forgiving “for the right reasons”; a non-believer does not have to find a spiritual vocabulary in order to be allowed to put resentment down. The question that applies to both is the same: am I choosing this myself, or is someone exacting it from me?

An exercise: two questions, two sheets

Give yourself twenty minutes and two sheets of paper. Choose one specific hurt — a medium-sized one rather than the biggest of your life.

1. At the top of the first sheet write “What happened”. In a few sentences describe the act and what it did to you. No “but then again” and no shrinking it. If you catch yourself looking for excuses for the person, cross them out.
2. Below that write “Resentment”. What does it give you (the sense of being right, protection, a memory of the injustice) and what does it cost you (sleep, thoughts, holidays)? Both are true.
3. At the top of the second sheet write “The relationship”. What would have to happen for you to be glad to be in the same room as this person again? Write down specific behaviours, not qualities: “that she stops commenting on my weight”, not “that she becomes kind”.
4. Next to each behaviour, note whose hands it is in. It often turns out that the first sheet is almost entirely yours and the second almost entirely theirs.
5. For each sheet separately, write one sentence that is true today. For example: “I’d like to start letting go of the resentment.” And: “The contact stays as it is.” The two answers don’t have to match, and in six months they may be different.

If the exercise floods you, stop. Some wounds are not for working on alone at the kitchen table, and that is not a defeat.

Where this does not apply

You do not have to forgive. Research shows that forgiveness helps many people; it does not show that it is the only way. Some people find peace in acceptance: they acknowledge what happened, stop waiting for an apology, look after themselves and get on with living — without ever feeling anything warm towards the person who hurt them. That can be a good outcome too. Someone who does not forgive is not necessarily bitter.

While the hurt is still going on, the first question is safety. Forgiveness refers to something that has ended. If violence, humiliation or control are still happening, a conversation about forgiveness comes too early and may even do harm. In Slovenia, the SOS helpline for women and children who are victims of violence is available on 080 11 55, and in an emergency you can call 112 or the police on 113. Work with the consequences of violence and severe trauma belongs with professionals specifically trained for it; I am not one of them, but I can help you look for the right route.

Sometimes the real subject is reconciliation, not forgiveness. If the other person has acknowledged the hurt, has changed and is waiting, and you cannot move, it may be that the resentment is guarding something else — the fear of being hurt again, for instance. That is no reason for self-reproach, but it is a question worth looking at, alone or in conversation. Where both people are staying in the relationship, couples therapy or family therapy is a fitting place for it; I am a therapist in training under supervision, my sessions take place in person in Ljubljana, and I also work with English-speaking clients.

If thoughts about what was done or what you lived through are pulling you towards hopelessness, do not stay alone with them: in Slovenia, the Mental Distress Helpline (Klic v duševni stiski) can be reached on 01 520 99 00 (every day from 7 pm to 7 am) and the Samarijan confidential helpline on 116 123 (24 hours a day).

What to remember

• Forgiveness happens inside one person, reconciliation between two; the first is possible without the second.
• To forgive is not to forget, excuse, trust or return — and it does not require the other person to find out at all.
• Research shows that forgiveness a person chooses for themselves, and is given time for, reduces anxiety and depression.
• Premature forgiveness, with no change on the other side, can wear away self-respect and prolong bad treatment.
• Nobody — not family, not faith, not a therapist — can forgive in your place or set you a deadline.