The Forgiveness Trap: What If We Don’t Need It?
What if forgiveness isn’t necessary? The question came up for me after a friend said, “You need to find forgiveness.” Something about the sentence bothered me. Not because forgiveness is inherently bad, and not because I wanted to remain angry, but because it carried an assumption I had never really examined: that when someone hurts us, forgiveness is the destination we are supposed to reach.
Another friend had once suggested that forgiveness might actually be redundant. I had not thought much about it at the time, but now the idea came back. What if I didn’t need to forgive anyone? What if there were other ways to understand what happened, process what it meant, decide what I wanted to do with it, and eventually stop carrying it? That question changed the way I thought about forgiveness.
What Forgiveness Assumes
Forgiveness usually begins with an offence. Something happened. Someone crossed a line, broke an agreement, betrayed us, harmed us, disappointed us, or behaved in a way that had consequences. Forgiveness then becomes the process through which we release some part of the anger, resentment, blame, or debt attached to what happened. That can be enormously useful.
The idea becomes more complicated when forgiveness is treated as something we must eventually provide. Then forgiveness can become another obligation placed on the person who was hurt. You experienced the harm, you lived with the consequences, and now apparently you also have a piece of emotional homework to complete before the experience can be considered finished. I’m not convinced that is always necessary.
Sometimes an experience can be fully acknowledged without being forgiven. You can understand why someone behaved as they did without deciding that what happened was acceptable. You can stop wanting revenge without offering absolution. You can stop carrying a relationship without repairing it. You can recognise another person’s humanity while also recognising the effect their choices had on you. There are many ways for an experience to become complete.
Understanding Is Different From Absolving
People act through their own history, beliefs, fears, desires, capacities, blind spots, adaptations, and choices. Understanding those things can change the way we hold what happened. Someone may have hurt you because they were frightened. Someone may have lied because they were trying to protect themselves. Someone may have behaved badly because that behaviour was normal in the world they came from. Someone may simply have chosen what they wanted despite knowing it would affect you.
Context can help us understand behaviour. It does not erase behaviour. This distinction matters because compassion can become distorted when it requires us to explain away what actually happened. Understanding why someone did something does not require you to pretend that it did not hurt, that it was somehow secretly good for you, or that you should have been able to interpret it differently. Sometimes somebody did something shitty. That can be true at the same time as everything else.
The Part That Belongs to Us
Where I do think our own perception becomes interesting is in what happens after the event. We interpret experience. We create meaning around it. We make decisions about ourselves, other people, relationships, safety, trust, love, and what we expect to happen next.
Someone betrays us and the event may become, “People cannot be trusted.” Someone leaves and it becomes, “Everyone eventually abandons me.” Someone rejects us and it becomes, “There must be something wrong with me.” Those meanings are worth examining because they can continue shaping our lives long after the original person has gone.
The behaviour belonged to them. What we carry forward from it becomes part of our experience. That gives us somewhere to exercise choice without making ourselves responsible for what another person did.
What If the Goal Is Freedom?
This is where forgiveness starts to become optional for me. Perhaps the real question is not, “Have I forgiven them?” Perhaps it is, “Am I still organised around what happened?” Can I remember the experience without allowing it to determine every relationship that follows? Can I recognise what I learned from it without turning that learning into a permanent rule? Can I think about the person without needing them to become someone different before I can live my own life?
Those questions interest me more than whether I have achieved a state called forgiveness. Freedom may involve forgiveness for some people. For someone else it may involve understanding. For another person it may be grief, acceptance, a boundary, a conversation, distance, indifference, or simply reaching the point where the experience no longer occupies much space. There does not need to be one correct emotional ending.
You Don’t Have to Make the Experience Good
One of the ideas I used to hold was that every difficult interaction served some higher purpose and that eventually I should be able to find the gift inside it. I think differently about that now.
Something useful can emerge from an experience without making the experience itself necessary. You may become clearer about your boundaries after betrayal. You may understand yourself better after a painful relationship. You may develop discernment after trusting someone who turned out not to be trustworthy. Those capacities belong to you. You created something from what happened. That is different from saying the harm itself was a gift.
Adaptation is extraordinarily creative. Human beings can build wisdom, capacity, discernment, humour, strength, compassion, boundaries, art, relationships, and entire new lives from difficult experiences. That does not require us to be grateful for the thing that made those capacities necessary.
Love Doesn’t Require Access
I also used to connect forgiveness closely with unconditional love. I still think there is something valuable in being able to see another human being as more than the worst thing they have done. People are complicated. They act badly and beautifully, consciously and unconsciously, sometimes within the same afternoon.
But love does not require access. Compassion does not require reconciliation. Understanding does not require trust. Seeing someone’s humanity does not require giving them another opportunity to hurt you.
You can care about someone and decide that you do not want them in your life. You can understand someone and maintain a boundary. You can love someone and recognise that the relationship you had with them is finished. Those positions are not contradictions. They are part of the complexity of relationship.
Maybe Forgiveness Is a Choice
So I no longer think of forgiveness as an achievement we are required to work toward. I think of it as one possible choice. If forgiveness brings you peace, forgive. If understanding is enough, understand. If you need to grieve, grieve. If something needs to be named clearly, name it. If a boundary needs to remain in place, keep it there. And if one day you realise that you have stopped thinking about whether you forgive them at all, perhaps that is completion too.
The question that interests me now is much simpler: What relationship do I want to have with this experience from here?
That question puts the choice back where it belongs. With you.
