RELATIONAL TRAUMA

No. You don't have to forgive your abuser.

SUMMARYForgiveness is often held up as the ultimate goal of healing — but for many survivors of abuse, being told you have to forgive your abuser adds a second layer of harm to the first. This post makes the case that forgiveness is not a moral requirement for healing, that you can heal without forgiving, and that the pressure to forgive often serves everyone except the survivor. Your anger is not a wound. It’s information.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Elena Kept Hearing the Same Thing at Every Family Dinner
2. What Is Forgiveness Shaming — and Why Does It Happen?
3. What the Research Actually Says
4. How Forced Forgiveness Shows Up in Driven Women
5. Anger, Grief, and the Biology of Being Wronged
6. The Both/And Reframe
7. The Real Cost of Premature Forgiveness
8. The Systemic Lens
9. What Healing Without Forgiveness Actually Looks Like

Elena Kept Hearing the Same Thing at Every Family Dinner

The holidays were the hardest. Elena would walk into her mother’s house — the same house where the abuse had happened — and within twenty minutes, someone would corner her.

“Don’t you think it’s time to let it go? He’s getting older. You have to forgive him.”

She’d learned to nod, to deflect, to move toward the kitchen and busy herself with something. But inside, something clenched. She wasn’t “holding on” to anything. She just hadn’t forgotten what happened to her. And the pressure to perform forgiveness — to smile across the dinner table at the man who had hurt her — felt less like an invitation to heal and more like a demand to disappear. Again.

Elena’s situation is one I see over and over in my work with clients healing from relational trauma. The abuse itself was the first wound. The insistence that she forgive, move on, and protect the family peace was the second. This post is for every woman who’s been told she needs to forgive before she’s ready — or at all.

Let me say the thing that doesn’t get said enough: no, you don’t have to forgive your abuser. You don’t have to forgive anyone you’re not ready to forgive. And if you never get there, that doesn’t make you broken, bitter, or spiritually deficient. It makes you a person with a legitimate response to illegitimate harm.

What Is Forgiveness Shaming — and Why Does It Happen?

There’s a subtle but pervasive pattern I see in families and social groups: forcing, shaming, or pressuring someone into forgiveness before they feel truly ready. I call it forgiveness shaming and blaming. And it’s worth naming it clearly, because it causes real harm.

DEFINITION
FORGIVENESS SHAMING AND BLAMING

Forgiveness shaming and blaming refers to the social, familial, or religious pressure placed on a survivor of harm to forgive their abuser before — or instead of — doing the genuine work of healing. It typically manifests as statements that frame unforgiveness as a moral failure, a spiritual deficiency, or a sign of emotional immaturity. It redirects concern away from the survivor’s experience and onto the comfort of the family system or the abuser’s reputation.

In plain terms: It’s when someone makes you feel like the problem isn’t what was done to you — it’s that you’re not over it yet. It’s the “you need to forgive and forget” conversation that somehow always happens at the worst moment, on someone else’s timeline, for someone else’s comfort.

Forgiveness shaming usually isn’t malicious. Many people who push it genuinely believe they’re helping. They’ve absorbed cultural and religious messages that frame forgiveness as the endpoint of healing, and they feel genuine discomfort watching someone they love carry pain. So they push for the resolution they can recognize: the formal performance of forgiveness.

But that push almost always serves the observer more than the survivor.

When someone says “you need to forgive him,” they’re often saying: “your visible pain makes me uncomfortable,” or “I don’t want to have to choose sides at family gatherings,” or “the story I have of this person can’t contain what you’re telling me.” The forgiveness demand protects the family narrative. It protects relationships with the abuser. It protects people from the discomfort of believing you.

And it asks the person who was harmed to take on one more burden — the burden of managing everyone else’s feelings about what happened to her.

DEFINITION
FORGIVENESS VS. ACCEPTANCE

In trauma healing, forgiveness and acceptance are distinct processes that are frequently conflated. Acceptance means acknowledging what happened — not that it was acceptable, but that it occurred — and releasing the demand that reality should have been different. It’s a release of the fight against the past. Forgiveness, in contrast, involves a deliberate decision to release ill will toward the person who harmed you. Acceptance is generally useful for healing; forgiveness is optional, deeply personal, and should never be coerced or rushed.

In plain terms: You can fully accept that something terrible happened to you — and build a whole, beautiful life from that truth — without ever forgiving the person who did it. These are two different movements. Don’t let anyone collapse them into one.

What the Research Actually Says

There is a body of research suggesting that forgiveness, when freely chosen and self-directed, can support psychological well-being. Loren L. Toussaint, PhD, professor of psychology at Luther College and director of the Laboratory for the Investigation of Mind, Body, and Spirit, has studied the relationship between forgiveness and health extensively, finding associations between self-chosen forgiveness and reduced anxiety, depression, and chronic stress.

But here’s the word doing a lot of work in that sentence: self-chosen.

The research on forgiveness and well-being is largely drawn from studies of voluntary, internally motivated forgiveness — not the kind extracted under social pressure. When forgiveness is coerced, rushed, or performed before a survivor is ready, the clinical picture changes significantly. What looks like healing on the outside may be suppression, compliance, or what complex trauma researchers call fawn response — the adaptive habit of appeasing others to stay safe.

“Healing depends on the discovery of restorative love in her own life — not on the contrition of the perpetrator.”

JUDITH LEWIS HERMAN, MD, Psychiatrist, Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Trauma and Recovery

Judith Lewis Herman, MD, psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, is one of the most cited trauma researchers in the world. Her 1992 book Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence — from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror remains foundational to the field. Herman’s framework for recovery identifies three stages: establishing safety, reconstructing the traumatic story, and restoring connection. Forgiveness of the perpetrator appears nowhere in that framework. Nowhere.

In her 2023 follow-up, Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice, Herman went further. She found that survivors aren’t big on forgiveness — what they want is truth, accountability, and the prevention of future harm. These are not the same thing as releasing ill will toward someone who hurt them.

This matters because it challenges the cultural script. The assumption that a healed person is a forgiving person isn’t supported by the clinical evidence. It’s a story we’ve inherited — from religious traditions, from pop psychology, from the cultural preference for tidy resolutions — and it deserves to be examined.

Thema S. Bryant, PhD, professor of psychology at Pepperdine University, director of the Culture and Trauma Research Laboratory, and 2023 president of the American Psychological Association, has written directly about how mandated forgiveness can harm survivors of interpersonal trauma — particularly when that pressure is rooted in cultural or religious expectations that position survivors as responsible for the relational repair. Her work on trauma in its cultural context makes clear that forgiveness is never a neutral act. It carries the weight of who’s being asked to forgive, and who has the power in that relationship.

How Forced Forgiveness Shows Up in Driven Women

When Maya first reached out, she described herself as “a pretty functional person.” She was a physician. She ran her department. She exercised, meditated, showed up to her therapy appointments with a neatly organized list of things to discuss. (Name and identifying details changed for confidentiality.)

What she hadn’t told anyone — not her husband, not her previous therapist — was that she’d forgiven her mother. Formally. Out loud. In a conversation at her parents’ kitchen table, she had said the words. She’d watched her mother tear up. She’d received the family’s relief like a prize she’d earned.

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And then, every few months, she’d wake at 3 a.m. with her chest tight and her mind running. She’d lie there thinking about things her mother had done when Maya was ten, twelve, fifteen. The memories weren’t fading. The anger wasn’t gone. She’d just gotten very good at suppressing it during daylight hours.

In our work together, it became clear that Maya hadn’t healed. She’d managed. She’d performed the forgiveness she was told would set her free, and it had set everyone else free — her mother from accountability, her family from discomfort — but not her. She was still carrying the original injury, plus the shame of having “already forgiven” and still feeling this way.

This is what I see consistently with driven, ambitious women from relational trauma backgrounds: the same competence and self-discipline that makes them exceptional at work becomes a mechanism for managing pain rather than processing it. They excel at compliance. They’re skilled at emotional performance. And when they’re told that forgiveness is what healed people do, they do it — with the same efficiency they bring to everything else. And then they wonder why they still feel the way they feel.

The problem isn’t that they forgave too slowly or not enough. The problem is that forgiveness was presented as a destination, when healing is an entirely different journey — one that doesn’t require forgiving at all.

Anger, Grief, and the Biology of Being Wronged

One of the reasons forgiveness gets pushed so hard is that anger makes people uncomfortable. And if you’ve experienced abuse, you may carry a great deal of anger. But let’s be clear about what that anger actually is.

Anger is not pathology. It’s not evidence that you’re “not over it.” Anger is your nervous system’s signal that a boundary was violated, that something wrong was done to you, that you matter. It’s a biological response to injustice, and in the context of abuse, it’s a healthy one.

What I see consistently in my work is that women who’ve been taught to suppress their anger — through direct prohibition (“stop being so angry”), through religious framing (“anger is a sin”), or through the slow pressure of forgiveness demands — don’t lose the anger. They move it inward. It becomes hypervigilance, or chronic physical tension, or a pervasive sense of low-level dread, or depression. The body stores what the mind has been told it can’t feel.

Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher, author of The Body Keeps the Score, has written extensively about how trauma — including the emotional content of trauma like rage and grief — is stored in the body’s nervous system, not just the thinking mind. When we suppress emotional responses rather than processing them, those responses don’t disappear. They organize themselves in the body and show up as physical symptoms, relational patterns, and psychological suffering.

This is why forcing forgiveness before a survivor is genuinely ready doesn’t work. It bypasses the body’s processing. It asks someone to perform a cognitive decision — “I release ill will toward you” — over an emotional and physiological wound that hasn’t been addressed. The wound remains. The performance of forgiveness just adds a layer of denial on top of it.

Grief works similarly. When you’ve been harmed by someone who was supposed to love you — a parent, a partner, a sibling — you’re not just grieving the specific acts of harm. You’re grieving the relationship you deserved and didn’t get. You’re grieving the version of your childhood that could have been. You’re grieving the safety that was taken from you. That grief doesn’t resolve on a timeline driven by other people’s comfort. It resolves when it’s honored, witnessed, and worked through at the survivor’s own pace — and sometimes in trauma-informed therapy with a clinician who knows how to hold that weight.

The Both/And Reframe

Here’s something true that doesn’t get said clearly enough: it’s possible to hold two things at once.

You can understand why someone hurt you — their own history, their own damage, the systems that shaped them — and still hold them accountable for what they did. You can have compassion for someone’s pain and refuse to minimize your own. You can choose not to maintain a relationship with someone and still wish them no specific harm. You can let go of the obsessive re-running of events and still carry legitimate anger.

None of those things require forgiveness. They require something harder and more honest: the ability to hold complexity without collapsing it into a clean narrative.

Camille came to that realization slowly. She’d spent years in what she called “the forgiveness loop” — being told to forgive, trying to forgive, feeling like she’d failed when the anger returned. (Name and identifying details changed for confidentiality.) What shifted for her wasn’t a decision to forgive. It was the recognition that she didn’t have to.

“I thought healing meant I’d eventually feel nothing when I thought about what happened,” she told me. “What I actually got was — I feel something, and it doesn’t control my whole day anymore. The feelings don’t run me. I run them.”

That’s the both/and. She can feel the original anger — and it can live at a manageable size. She can remember what happened — and it doesn’t flood her every time. She can decline contact with her abuser — and still build a full life. These aren’t contradictions. They’re the actual texture of healing.

Healing is not the absence of difficult feelings. It’s the development of a relationship with those feelings that doesn’t leave you at their mercy. You don’t have to erase what happened to move forward. You don’t have to release ill will toward someone who genuinely harmed you in order to reclaim your own life.

The goal of relational trauma recovery isn’t to become someone who doesn’t remember what was done to them. It’s to become someone who can remember — and still choose, freely, how to live.

The Real Cost of Premature Forgiveness

When forgiveness is performed before it’s genuinely felt — when it’s offered under social pressure, religious coercion, or family demand — it doesn’t heal. It suppresses. And suppression has costs.

The first cost is to your relationship with your own internal experience. When you’ve been taught that your anger is wrong, sinful, or a sign of failure, you start to distrust your own perceptions. You learn to override what you feel with what you’re supposed to feel. Over time, this erodes your sense of yourself as someone whose inner life is trustworthy. This is one of the most insidious forms of secondary harm that forgiveness pressure causes — it deepens the same wound that abuse opened.

The second cost is relational. When you perform forgiveness before you feel it, you often find yourself having to maintain proximity to the person who harmed you — because “you’ve forgiven them,” so how could you possibly not come to the family reunion? The performance of forgiveness can trap you in continued contact with your abuser, continued exposure to minimization, continued pressure to “not bring it up again.” Forgiveness, when socially coerced, can function as a mechanism for keeping survivors silent and systems unchanged.

The third cost is to healing itself. Genuine processing of attachment trauma requires honesty about what happened and what you feel about it. When the cultural message is “forgive and forget,” many survivors try to skip the processing entirely — to jump from “it happened” to “I’ve released it” without doing the grief work in between. The result is unresolved trauma that resurfaces, often unpredictably, for years.

None of this means forgiveness is bad. It means premature, coerced, or performed forgiveness is bad. The distinction matters enormously.

The Systemic Lens

The pressure to forgive doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s part of a larger cultural pattern that consistently asks survivors — and disproportionately, women — to manage the emotional consequences of harm rather than to name it, confront it, or demand accountability for it.

Think about the cultural vocabulary around forgiveness: “be the bigger person,” “take the high road,” “don’t let them live rent-free in your head.” These phrases are offered as wisdom, but they embed a particular set of assumptions. That the problem is the survivor’s ongoing response, not the original harm. That emotional processing is a form of weakness or self-indulgence. That the morally superior position is to release and move on — regardless of whether the harm has been acknowledged, regardless of whether it’s still happening, regardless of the survivor’s actual readiness.

Thema S. Bryant, PhD, has written and spoken about how forgiveness as a cultural mandate operates differently across communities. In many religious and cultural traditions, women in particular are socialized to prioritize relational harmony over personal truth — to forgive quickly, to keep the peace, to protect the family. This isn’t neutral spiritual guidance. It’s a pattern that systematically discourages accountability and protects those with more power from consequences.

The pressure Elena experienced at those family dinners wasn’t just personal. It was systemic. It reflected a family culture, a religious framework, and a broader social expectation that women absorb harm and then graciously release it — without making too much fuss in the process.

Judith Lewis Herman wrote that “it is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator.” It takes no courage to remain neutral when one person has harmed another. But systems — families, religious communities, workplaces, cultures — routinely do exactly that. They ask for neutrality in the name of peace, which functionally means asking survivors to carry more than their share. Again.

Recognizing this doesn’t mean every family dinner is a site of political struggle. It means it’s worth noticing: whose comfort is being prioritized here? Whose experience is being asked to shrink? And whose story is being protected?

What Healing Without Forgiveness Actually Looks Like

If forgiveness isn’t the goal, what is?

In my clinical work, I’ve seen clients heal — genuinely heal — without ever forgiving the people who harmed them. What that healing looks like isn’t the elimination of difficult feelings. It’s the development of a different relationship with those feelings. Here’s what it actually involves.

Processing, not performance. Genuine healing requires acknowledging what happened — in all its specificity, without minimizing or catastrophizing — and grieving it fully. That might mean months or years of working through anger, grief, shame, and longing with a skilled trauma therapist. It’s not a quick transaction. It’s sustained work.

Building a coherent narrative. Judith Herman identifies the development of a coherent narrative of the traumatic experience as central to recovery. This means being able to tell the story of what happened — including what was done to you and how it affected you — without being flooded by the original feelings. The story becomes integrated into your larger life story, rather than being a foreign object lodged in your memory.

Reclaiming your own authority. Many survivors of abuse have had their perceptions, memories, and feelings systematically undermined. A central piece of healing is reclaiming trust in your own internal experience — your anger, your grief, your knowing that something wrong was done to you. This is not compatible with being told that your anger is a problem that needs to be resolved through forgiveness.

Choosing your relationships deliberately. Healing often involves making clear-eyed decisions about which relationships to maintain, which to limit, and which to end entirely. You don’t owe proximity to anyone who harmed you, regardless of the family role they occupy. You don’t have to sit across the table from someone who hurt you because someone else decided you should have forgiven them by now.

Creating a life shaped by your values, not your wounds. The ultimate marker of healing isn’t how you feel about your abuser. It’s whether you’re living a life that reflects who you actually are — your desires, your values, your relationships, your work — rather than a life organized around managing the aftermath of what happened to you. That’s possible. It doesn’t require forgiveness. It requires time, support, and honest work.

If you’re somewhere in this journey — if you’ve been told you need to forgive and the words feel like a demand you can’t meet — please hear this: your pace is your own. Your process is your own. Healing is possible for you. And it doesn’t have any requirements that your healing serve someone else first.

What I see consistently, across hundreds of clients, is that the women who heal most completely are not the ones who forgave fastest. They’re the ones who were given permission to be honest about what happened, to take their anger seriously, to grieve without a timeline, and to make decisions about their relationships based on their own safety and well-being rather than on other people’s comfort. If you’re ready for that kind of support, I’d be honored to work alongside you — whether that’s through individual therapy, trauma-informed coaching, or the community that gathers around the Strong & Stable newsletter each week.

You deserve a life that feels as good as it looks. Not because you forgave the right people at the right time. But because you did the honest, courageous work of healing on your own terms.

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