How to forgive someone who isn’t sorry
Forgiveness can be a challenging journey, especially when the other party shows no remorse. Explore the path to emotional liberation, understanding the power of forgiveness, even when an apology is absent. Discover how to heal and move forward, unburdened by resentment.
Forgiveness is often viewed as the “happily ever after” ending in a story of wrongdoing or injustice
Someone enacts harm, but eventually sees the error of their ways and offers a heartfelt apology.
- You, the hurt person, are faced with a choice: Show mercy, granting yourself peace in the process, or hold a grudge forever. The choice is yours.
Don’t let fear of “losing” stand in the way of forgiving someone
Forgiving someone can feel like you’re capitulating
- Hang on to anger for a short time because it shows you’re a person of worth and dignity, and no one should treat you this way
- Over time, it brings us down with fatigue, rumination, becoming far more pessimistic in life
There’s real work involved in forgiving, and it takes time
Enright has studied forgiveness extensively
- His research group at the University of Wisconsin Madison was the first to publish a scientific study on forgiveness, in 1989
- Their research has led to the development of a step-by-step process for forgiveness, which can happen in therapy (ideally with someone who is trained in forgiveness therapy), or through a self-guided process using his workbook
- There are four major phases of forgiveness: uncovering, decision, work, discovery, and forgiveness
- The uncovering phase: The person who has been treated unfairly focuses on the effects of the injustice in their life
- Decision: This is where you determine whether you want to try to forgive the person who hurt you
- Work: At this point, you’ll aim to broaden your narrative about the other person and develop empathy for them
- Forgiveness takes time and can’t be engineered through therapy; it has to emerge
Expand your view of what forgiveness is
Forgiveness exists separately from reconciliation, and also from accountability – which is why forgiving someone doesn’t require an apology or even their participation.
- While forgiveness is separate from accountability, it’s not at odds with justice. Forgiving someone can help you take a more clear-eyed approach to justice because you’re no longer, as he put it, “seething with rage.”
- Perhaps most importantly, forgiveness does not require you to pretend the hurt didn’t happen.
Don’t be too hard on yourself if you’re struggling to forgive someone
Things can shift in surprising and dramatic ways with the passage of time
- Forgiveness is something that comes at the end of a long process of healing
- In my personal experience, it was a gift. I did my own work, and naturally, feelings of forgiveness arose
Think of forgiveness as something you’re doing primarily for yourself
Forgiveness doesn’t have to exist anywhere outside of you
- You are the one who was wronged, so why do you have to now give them something?
- Once you remove reconciliation as a goal, it’s easier to see how forgiveness will benefit you as much as – if not more than – the other person
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