You Don’t Have to Forgive Anyone: A Trauma Therapist on Why Forgiveness Is Not Required for Healing

HEALING & RECOVERY • March 05, 2016

The Moment She Was Told to Forgive

She’s sitting across from her mother at the kitchen table, hands around a mug that’s gone cold. Her aunt is there too, leaning in with a look that’s meant to be kind. And then it comes — the sentence she’s been dreading since she walked through the door.

“You need to forgive him, sweetheart. Holding onto this anger is only hurting you. It’s been two years.”

Her body goes rigid before her mind even processes the words. Something in her chest closes like a fist. She feels the heat rise behind her eyes — not just sadness, something more complicated than that — and she watches herself begin the familiar calculation: Do I say what I actually feel, or do I keep the peace?

She knows what they want her to say. She knows the script. Forgiveness is the ending everyone around her needs — because if she forgives, then the family can breathe again, the holidays can go back to normal, the thing that happened can be placed, gently, in a box somewhere out of sight. Her forgiveness, she understands in this moment, is not actually for her. It’s for them.

And her body knows it too. That recoil isn’t weakness. It isn’t bitterness, or spiritual immaturity, or an inability to move forward. It’s information. It’s her nervous system — the same system that absorbed the original harm — telling her with full clarity: not yet, and maybe not ever, and that has to be okay.

If you’ve ever been in that seat — if you’ve felt your body react that way when someone told you it was time to forgive — this post is for you. Because I want you to hear something clearly: you don’t have to forgive anyone. Not because forgiveness is wrong or impossible or not valuable. But because it’s yours to give or not give, on your timeline or none at all, and your healing doesn’t depend on it.

You Don’t Have to Forgive: What the Experts Actually Say

These two leading voices don’t fully agree with each other — and that’s the point. Forgiveness is not a settled clinical question. There are thoughtful, rigorous researchers on both sides. What they do agree on is this: forced forgiveness, pressured forgiveness, forgiveness as a social obligation or spiritual performance — that’s not healing. That’s self-abandonment.

Dr. Enright, who has devoted his career to the scientific study of forgiveness, is explicit: forgiveness must come from free will. It cannot be coerced. It is not something someone else can require of you. And Dr. Spring goes further, arguing that “acceptance” — coming to terms with what happened, grieving fully, honoring your anger, and protecting yourself — can achieve everything that genuine healing requires, without forgiving at all. Her four categories — cheap forgiveness, refusing to forgive, acceptance, and genuine forgiveness — reframe the entire question. Healing is possible in multiple forms, and one of those forms doesn’t require forgiving your offender.

What this means clinically is significant: there is no credible, evidence-based argument that you must forgive in order to heal. And there is a growing body of clinical literature specifically arguing that pressuring survivors to forgive can actively interfere with recovery.

You may eventually want to forgive. Many people do. But wanting to — choosing to, freely, on your own timeline — is entirely different from being told you have to. The former can be part of healing. The latter is harm.

The Science: What Does the Research Actually Show?

The cultural narrative around forgiveness and healing is remarkably confident: forgive, and you’ll feel better. Hold onto anger, and you’ll destroy yourself. The research, though, tells a more complicated — and more honest — story.

There is genuine evidence that forgiveness, when freely chosen, can reduce depression, anxiety, and anger in some populations. Dr. Enright’s Forgiveness Therapy research has shown meaningful psychological benefits, particularly for people who were ready and motivated to engage in a structured forgiveness process. Studies on forgiveness interventions have found decreases in anger and increases in well-being in groups including incest survivors and college students dealing with parental hurt.

But — and this is where the cultural narrative goes wrong — the research base for forgiveness as a universal requirement for healing is far thinner than the popular story suggests. Amanda Ann Gregory, LCPC, a trauma psychotherapist with over fifteen years of experience, reviewed the existing evidence and concluded that few studies have explored the specific impact of forgiveness on trauma survivors, that existing positive studies tend to have small sample sizes, and that many have been conducted or funded by forgiveness advocates. Her clinical observation, shared with thousands of trauma survivors: “I’ve treated many trauma survivors who’ve experienced recovery without forgiving their abusers.”

A 2024 study published in PubMed examined 110 women who had experienced intimate partner violence. It found that women’s beliefs about forgiveness varied widely, and — crucially — that women who believed forgiveness required reconciliation or treating their abuser better than before were more likely to return to dangerous relationships. The belief that forgiveness is required, in other words, can create safety risks. It can reconnect survivors with people who haven’t changed.

The research on who benefits from forgiveness interventions and under what conditions is also notably inconsistent. Forgiveness therapy appears to be helpful for some survivors in some circumstances — particularly when the forgiveness process is self-directed, not pressured, and paired with thorough grief work. It does not appear to be universally beneficial. There’s no study showing that survivors who don’t forgive heal less well than those who do, when the comparison group is doing full trauma processing work. What heals trauma isn’t forgiveness. What heals trauma is processing — grieving, feeling the anger fully, integrating what happened into your narrative rather than dissociating from it.

There is also clinical writing specifically documenting the harms of pressured forgiveness in trauma contexts. Gregory identifies several: it can silence survivors who need to speak their narrative to heal; it can focus treatment on the relationship with the abuser rather than on the survivor’s own internal processes; it can discourage reporting, because seeking accountability feels contrary to forgiving; and it can repeat the original trauma of being expected to prioritize the comfort of others over your own experience.

The bottom line from the science is nuanced but clear: forgiveness can be valuable. It is not necessary. And when it’s pressured, it can be actively harmful.

Camille’s Story: When Forgiveness Became the Enemy of Healing

Camille was 29 when her stepfather died. She’d spent the previous fifteen years managing the secret of what he’d done — carrying it the way she’d learned to carry everything, quietly, efficiently, without troubling anyone. She’d built a successful career. She’d cultivated friendships she genuinely valued. From the outside, she looked like someone who had moved on.

When her therapist — at the time, a well-meaning but directive clinician — told her she needed to work toward forgiveness in order to heal, Camille did what driven women do: she tried. She read the books. She did the exercises. She attempted to imagine her stepfather’s childhood, his own wounds, the chain of harm that might explain what he’d done. Some part of her understood, intellectually, how the cycle of trauma worked. She could hold that understanding and still feel the sick clench in her stomach at the mention of his name.

What nobody had told Camille — and what took years and a different therapist to surface — was that she’d never been allowed to be angry. The grief, the terror, the rage that belonged to what had happened to her had been entirely bypassed in service of the forgiveness project. She’d been trying to get to the end of the road without ever traveling the beginning. When she finally let herself be furious — really, bodily furious, in a session with a trauma therapist who knew how to work with that kind of activation — something cracked open. Not in a bad way. In a way that felt, for the first time, like the truth. The anger was the door. And on the other side was the grief she’d been avoiding for fifteen years.

Camille’s story is not unusual. In my work with women navigating betrayal trauma and childhood harm, the pressure to forgive before grieving is one of the most consistent obstacles to healing I see. It short-circuits the process. It asks people to arrive at equanimity without first having traversed the anger and sorrow that give equanimity its genuine ground.

A second vignette is worth including here. Leila is 36, a software engineer at a Bay Area tech company, and her harm was subtler — not abuse, but years of childhood emotional neglect. A mother who was present physically but vacant emotionally. A household where feelings were treated as inconveniences. Leila had been in therapy twice before and described herself as “someone who doesn’t really need to forgive anyone because nothing that bad happened.” What she meant was: the harm was invisible enough that she’d never let herself call it harm. And without naming it as harm, she couldn’t grieve it. And without grieving it, she couldn’t heal it.

The moment of shift, in her case, wasn’t about forgiveness at all. It was about permission — permission to say, simply, that she had deserved more than she got. That her mother’s unavailability had been a real loss, even if it came without bruises or overt cruelty. That the child she’d been had carried something genuinely hard, and that adult Leila was allowed to grieve that. Once she had that permission, forgiveness stopped being the question. Healing was.

Both/And: Forgiveness May Serve You Eventually AND You Don’t Owe It to Anyone

This is the place in the conversation about forgiveness where nuance is most essential — and most commonly collapsed. The clinical Both/And is this: forgiveness can be a meaningful, even profound part of healing for some people at certain points in their recovery. And it is not a requirement. Both things are true, and holding them simultaneously is the more honest position.

The research does show that some people find genuine relief through a deliberate forgiveness process — particularly when that process is self-directed, unpressured, and paired with thorough grief work. If forgiveness eventually becomes available to you — if you move through the anger and the sorrow and one day find yourself at something that resembles release — that is a valid and valuable outcome. It doesn’t mean the forgiveness was required. It means it was possible, for you, at that point. There’s a difference.

The problem is when forgiveness is presented as the goal rather than as a possible byproduct. When survivors are told — by therapists, by family, by spiritual communities — that healing requires forgiving, the implicit message is that the anger and grief are obstacles rather than necessary stages. This inverts the process. You can’t skip to forgiveness. You have to earn it through the work that comes before it: the full telling of what happened, the metabolizing of the anger, the deep and thorough grieving of what was lost. If forgiveness comes at the end of that road, it will be real. If it’s performed before that road has been traveled, it’s what Janis Abrahms Spring, PhD calls “cheap forgiveness” — a performance that leaves the wound unaddressed and the survivor carrying the cost alone.

The Both/And also holds space for the possibility that forgiveness may simply not arrive for some harms. That there are betrayals and violations for which full emotional forgiveness — the genuine shift in feeling — may never come. That this doesn’t mean you’re broken. It may mean the harm was large. It may mean the offender has shown no remorse or accountability. It may mean your healing requires something other than forgiving. Acceptance — fully processing what happened, grieving it, integrating it, and protecting yourself — is complete healing. It doesn’t require forgiving in order to count. For more on what recovery actually looks like, trauma-informed therapy with someone trained in this work can be a transformative support.

The Systemic Lens: Who Gets Told to Forgive?

The forgiveness imperative is not distributed equally. Understanding who is told to forgive — and who rarely is — reveals a great deal about the social functions that forgiveness pressure is serving.

Women are told to forgive more than men. Survivors of sexual violence are told to forgive more than survivors of other crimes. People in religious communities are subjected to forgiveness pressure with a frequency and intensity that people outside those communities often aren’t. Adult children who were harmed by parents are frequently told — by the same parents, by extended family, by cultural scripts about honoring your family — that forgiveness is their obligation. People from communities where communal harmony is highly valued are often pressured to forgive in ways that serve the community’s comfort rather than the survivor’s healing. This connects to broader patterns of intergenerational trauma — harms that get perpetuated in part because accountability is never required and forgiveness is demanded instead.

The pressure to forgive, when examined systemically, often functions as a form of social management. It serves the people around the survivor: the family that doesn’t want to take sides, the community that doesn’t want its values challenged, the offender who would benefit from being forgiven. The survivor’s actual healing — which might require naming what happened, setting limits on the relationship with the offender, allowing anger to exist — is frequently inconvenient for these systems. Forgiveness, as typically construed, smooths things over. It restores the status quo. It allows everyone except the person who was harmed to feel comfortable again.

This doesn’t make forgiveness wrong. It does make the pressure to forgive worth examining very carefully. When you’re told you need to forgive, it’s worth asking: who benefits from that? Is it genuinely in service of your healing, or is it in service of someone else’s comfort? The answer shapes everything about how you respond — and whether doing the trauma recovery work you actually need becomes possible.

The Path Forward: What Actually Heals

If forgiveness isn’t the destination, what is? The answer, based on both the clinical literature and what I see consistently in the room with clients, is: full processing. Genuine healing from trauma involves telling the true story of what happened — not the sanitized version, not the one that protects everyone else — and feeling all of it. The anger. The grief. The specific, sometimes complicated love for people who hurt you. The losses that came from the harm. None of this requires forgiving. All of it requires being deeply, safely witnessed in it, usually in the context of a therapeutic relationship designed to hold that weight. For women navigating complex family trauma, this often means exploring how the same wound looked different for different family members, and why.

What heals is grieving fully — which is different from ruminating. Grief has direction. It moves. It metabolizes. Rumination circles. What heals is allowing the anger its full expression in a safe context, rather than performing equanimity before the anger has been honored. What heals is building a present that is genuinely different from the past: safer relationships, clearer limits, a developing sense of self that isn’t organized around the original harm. Many trauma survivors find that the impulse to withdraw and be alone intensifies during this phase — understanding that impulse as protective rather than pathological is part of the healing.

What also heals, for many people, is meaning-making. Finding some way to understand what happened, place it in a larger context, and eventually bring something forward from it — without being required to be grateful for the harm, and without rushing that process before it’s genuinely available. This is what David Kessler, grief expert and collaborator with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, calls the sixth stage of grief: finding meaning. It’s not bypassing the earlier stages. It’s what becomes possible when you’ve actually moved through them. You can explore these ideas further through Annie’s grief about childhood resources, or through the Fixing the Foundations course.

You don’t have to forgive to heal. You do have to feel — fully, honestly, with enough support that the feeling doesn’t become overwhelming. You do have to grieve what was lost. You do have to allow the anger. And then, from that place of actual processing rather than performed resolution, you get to decide what you want to do with the relationship to the person who hurt you — including whether to offer forgiveness, maintain distance, or simply carry forward your own healing without reference to them at all. That choice is yours. It always was.

If you’re ready to begin — or to go deeper than you’ve been able to go before — working with a trauma-informed therapist who understands the nuance of this territory is one of the most reliable paths forward. You can also explore whether childhood trauma is shaping other areas of your life in ways you haven’t yet fully mapped.

Warmly,
Annie

Medical Disclaimer

Medical Disclaimer