What I Mean When I say Forgiveness

Some thoughts on forgiveness, reconciliation, and learning that healing doesn’t mean never feeling angry again.

If you asked five people, “What does it mean to forgive?”

I bet you’d get five different answers.

I’ve asked myself this question many times. I’ve asked other people, too.

For a long time, I thought forgiveness meant letting go.

Letting go of the anger. Letting go of the hurt. Letting go of whatever happened and somehow reaching a place where it no longer bothered me.

Which sounds lovely.

It also made forgiveness feel almost impossible sometimes.

Because the more I’ve tried to actually practice it, the more I’ve realized that we can’t simply decide not to feel something anymore.

We have to move through those feelings. Sit with them. Understand them. Let them tell us what they’re trying to tell us before we can expect them to loosen their grip.

And even after doing all of that, sometimes there are still triggers.

I’ll work through something, feel like I’ve made peace with it, and then a few months later something consciously or subconsciously brings those feelings back up again.

And I’m sitting there thinking, didn’t I deal with you already?

That’s where I’ve started to understand forgiveness differently.

For me, sometimes forgiveness looks like being triggered by something I’ve already worked through and deciding, I’m not going to put this person back on trial for something I’ve already processed.

That doesn’t mean I can’t feel angry again.

And it certainly doesn’t mean accepting the same harmful behaviour over and over again.

Which brings me to reconciliation.

Not all things can be reconciled. Yet these days, I think all things can eventually be forgiven.

If you told me a year ago that I would say that, I wouldn’t have believed you. There were things I genuinely felt were unforgivable.

Now, I understand what people mean when they say we don’t forgive for the other person. We forgive for ourselves.

Not because anger, blame or resentment are inherently bad emotions. They’re often necessary information. They tell us when we’ve been hurt, when something mattered, when a boundary was crossed.

But when we carry them for too long, they can start affecting us in ways that have very little to do with the person who hurt us in the first place.

So now, when I think about forgiveness, I see two separate buckets.

The first is forgiveness: moving through the emotions, processing what happened and eventually reaching a place where I don’t need to keep carrying it.

The second is reconciliation: deciding what kind of relationship, if any, I want to have with that person moving forward.

Before I reconcile these days, I ask myself:

Is this person genuinely showing that they no longer want to treat me in the way I found harmful?

I don’t think they always need to be sorry.

Because that’s another thing I’ve learned through all of this: sometimes, they may not need to be.

Someone can genuinely have their reasons for doing or saying something. Maybe their intention wasn’t to hurt me, even though it landed that way. Maybe we experienced the same situation completely differently.

Sometimes there isn’t a villain.

Sometimes there are just two imperfect people trying to understand each other.

But sometimes, someone did know they were hurting you. And I think forgiveness gets harder there.

I can still work toward forgiveness of what happened for my own sake. But reconciliation asks for something more. I need to see that the person understands the hurt they caused and genuinely wants to do things differently.

Forgiveness might be something I can eventually find on my own.

Reconciliation takes two people.

On paper, maybe all of this sounds simple.

It hasn’t been simple for me.

Becoming a mother has made me think about it even more because now I’m trying to teach forgiveness to another human being.

And I’ve realized I don’t want to teach my son to forgive simply because “we forgive people.” I want him to know what to do with anger. I want him to understand the difference between forgiveness and reconciliation. I want him to know that compassion and boundaries can exist at the same time.

And if I’m going to teach him those things, I want to know how to practice them myself.

So I’ve had to sit with this forgiveness thing—not just to define it, but to figure out what I actually want it to look like in my own life.

I also think we’re living in a culture, particularly online, that can sometimes make relationships feel incredibly black and white.

One wrong move and they’re done.

One opinion too far from mine and they’re done.

One mistake and suddenly it becomes evidence of who that person is as a whole.

I also grew up in a family system that prioritized protecting your own peace. Often, that meant distancing yourself from people who felt toxic to you.

And I still believe there is value in that. Some relationships genuinely do require distance. Some people should not continue to have access to us simply because we have forgiven them.

Especially as we get further into adulthood, when time becomes more limited and who we choose to spend it with becomes increasingly important.

But I’ve also started to wonder whether, somewhere along the way, we began confusing discomfort with harm.

Sometimes choosing yourself means walking away.

Sometimes it means setting a boundary.

Sometimes it means having an uncomfortable conversation.

Sometimes it means extending grace to someone who got it wrong.

And sometimes it means forgiving someone while still deciding that the relationship cannot return to what it once was.

All of this to say, my definition of forgiveness has changed.

I don’t think forgiveness simply means letting go, forgetting or accepting.

I think it means viewing everything as information and using that information to decide what choosing yourself looks like.

Honouring what you need and what you don’t. Processing the emotions as they come. Allowing them to tell you what they need to tell you, without letting them drag you all the way back to square one every time they visit.

Maybe forgiveness isn’t never feeling angry again.

Maybe it’s learning not to build a home there.

It’s allowing yourself to feel the anger when it returns, listening to it, and then finding your way back to compassion when you’re ready.

Not necessarily compassion that says, What you did was okay.

But compassion that says, I don’t need to carry what happened everywhere I go.

That, at least right now, is what forgiveness means to me.

I’m curious—what does forgiveness mean to you?