Why You Don’t Need To (Or Have To) Forgive
Forgiveness can be meaningful when it is freely chosen, but pressure to forgive can ask a hurt person to abandon their own reality before they are ready. This essay names forgiveness shaming and blaming, explains why it can be harmful, and affirms your right to heal on your own timeline.
When Forgiveness Becomes a Demand
“I don’t know what happened between you two but you NEED to forgive him!”
“You’ll feel so much better if ONLY you can find forgiveness in your heart.”
“The Bible teaches us we need to forgive. Why can’t YOU do that with her?”
“Don’t you WANT to forgive and forget? It will make you the bigger person.”
Does any of this sound familiar? Have you ever been at the receiving end of comments like this? Or maybe have you ever told anyone else something to this effect? If so, today’s blog post is for you.
If your nervous system learned the safest way to exist was to manage everyone else's world, my self-paced course Enough Without the Effort is the recovery map.
You see, in my work as a psychotherapist and as a fellow human doing this whole life thing, there’s a subtle but pervasive pattern I see that happens in families and social groups all too often: forcing or shaming or blaming someone else into forgiveness before they feel truly ready to forgive.
I call this Forgiveness Shaming and Blaming and I think we need to talk about it.
Today I want to share with you what I think Forgiveness Shaming and Blaming is, how this happens, why this can be destructive, and why you actually don’t “need” or “have to” forgive anyone or anything if you truly don’t want or feel ready to.
Forgiveness Shaming and Blaming can look like any message you receive from someone that explicitly or implicitly asks or insists that you abandon your experience and act in a way that they find more preferable, in this case, practicing forgiveness when you don’t really feel ready or want to.
(The statements in this blog post’s intro are good examples of it.)
As defined in this essay, forgiveness shaming and blaming is any explicit or implicit pressure to abandon your experience and offer forgiveness before you feel ready or want to.
In plain terms: It is what happens when someone else treats your pain as inconvenient and asks you to move on so they can feel more comfortable.
The Cost of Self-Abandonment
Forgiveness blaming and shaming can be subtle or overt and it can often be hard to see, particularly if you’re part of a family, community, religious group, or any other collective that all buys into the same belief: that you should forgive someone.
Please understand I’m not at all devaluing forgiveness. I think forgiveness can be a beautiful process that can have a multitude of physiological and psychological benefits for the person who is self-directedly working towards and practicing it.
What I find troubling is when individuals, families, or groups send the message to a person who has suffered that they should or have to experience forgiveness before they’ve fully worked through all of the painful feelings of the event or events that may have happened to them.
In these cases, asking/insisting that someone forgive before or even if they genuinely want and feel capable of doing so sends a message to those who’ve been hurt that they should, essentially, self-abandon and feel something other than what they genuinely feel. And this, pressure to self-abandon by rushing to forgiveness, is usually the very last thing victims of abuse, trauma, or painful life circumstances need.
Self-abandonment is the act of disconnecting from or overriding your own feelings, needs, perceptions, or boundaries in order to meet another person’s expectations or preserve connection.
In plain terms: If you are being asked to feel something you do not genuinely feel in order to make someone else comfortable, you may be leaving yourself behind.
The reality is that forgiveness often requires a deep process of grieving and healing that looks and feels different for everyone. There is no prescribed timeframe, no generalized benchmark for the forgiveness process. It takes as long as it takes. And what’s more, some people may never get to the point where they feel like they can or want to forgive someone who has hurt them. And that’s okay, too.
But when individuals, families or groups send the message that forgiveness is the end goal and something someone should or must do, it can, in my opinion, often be detrimental and further emotionally damaging to people in pain.
Why People Pressure Us
In my experience as a psychotherapist, the reasons why some individuals, families, and groups shame or blame others into forgiveness are complex and varied.
Perhaps it’s about “keeping the family together.” After all it’s hard to pretend things are hunky dory when there’s a member of the family angry and hurting about the abuse he suffered at the hands of another family member…
Perhaps it’s because the person saying you “need” or “have to” forgive received those very same messages from her parents. Maybe this is all she knows to be true and is now projecting that belief onto you…
Perhaps it’s about a group staying comfortable. If victims step forward, speak out, and aren’t “forgiving” their abusers, institutions and groups may have to do the very hard work of self-reflection and systems change that led to the victimization in the first place…
Perhaps it’s hard and triggering for the other person to see you have your feelings of anger, grief, hurt. What does it bring up for them that you’re having these feelings and not willing/ready/able to forgive? What’s so intolerable about your feelings for them?
There are a multitude of reasons why people may subtly or overtly, conscious or unconsciously shame or blame others into forgiveness and while it can be helpful to explore this, I think it’s far more important for you to be able to recognize when you’re personally being shamed, blamed or forced into forgiveness so that you can hold your boundaries, trust your own process, and heal according to your own timeline.
Your Process Is Your Own
I think the most important thing you can “do” when someone starts to subtly shame or blame you into forgiveness is to remember this:
You have a right to feel your feelings. All of them. You have a right to not forgive someone or something that’s hurt you. Whatever you feel about that right now is okay. Your healing process is your own and you don’t have to be anywhere other than where you are. You are not responsible for making anyone else feel comfortable by feeling something other than what you feel. You get to have your experience.
The more you can check in with yourself, trust and honor your own process, and allow yourself to believe that you get to have your experience, the more empowered you may be to 1) recognize when your experience or boundaries are being dismissed or crossed and 2) advocate or educate the other person about this if that’s what you need/want.
You know, in my experience, most people aren’t consciously or maliciously intending to shame or blame others into forgiveness. They simply don’t know what they don’t know and, in many cases, simply perpetuate the messages and beliefs that they themselves have received.
Finally, I want you to remember this: Even if you reach a place of forgiveness with someone, that doesn’t mean you have to allow them into your life. And what’s more, if you never reach a place of forgiveness with someone or something, that’s okay, too.
Q: Do I have to forgive someone who hurt me?
A: No. The essay’s central point is that you have the right to your own experience and timeline. Forgiveness cannot be meaningfully forced, and some people may never reach a place where it feels possible or desired.
Q: Why does pressure to forgive feel so harmful?
You've been holding everything together. You're allowed to put some down.
A focused self-paced course on overfunctioning, achievement-first self-concept, and the trauma response that masquerades as a personality. Not a productivity problem. Not a boundary problem. A nervous system that learned competence was the only safety.
A: It can send the message that you should abandon what you genuinely feel before you have worked through the pain. For people harmed by abuse, trauma, or difficult circumstances, that pressure can cause further emotional damage.
Q: Is forgiveness always a bad idea?
A: No. The essay does not devalue forgiveness. It can be a beautiful process with benefits when a person is self-directedly working toward it, rather than being compelled by family, community, or religious pressure.
Q: Why might family members insist that I forgive?
A: The reasons can be complex. They may want to keep the family together, repeat messages they learned themselves, avoid confronting harm, or find another person’s anger, grief, or hurt difficult to witness.
Q: If I forgive someone, do I need to let them back into my life?
A: No. Reaching a place of forgiveness does not obligate you to allow someone into your life. Your boundaries and your decisions about contact remain your own.
EMDR-trained, trauma-informed therapy for driven women healing relational and developmental trauma.
Trauma-informed coaching for driven women navigating leadership, burnout, and identity.
Annie’s signature course for relational trauma recovery. The framework, in your own time.
Annie Wright, LMFT
Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist · Relational Trauma Specialist · Author, W.W. Norton 2027
“Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.”
Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist with 15,000+ clinical hours since 2013 and an EMDRIA Certified Therapist. She’s the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she successfully exited. She’s currently writing her first book, The Everything Years: Navigating the Pressure and Promise of Your Thirties, with W.W. Norton (2027). Her expert commentary has appeared in Psychology Today, Forbes, Business Insider, NBC News, and The Information.
CA LMFT95719 · CO MFT.0003236 (telehealth only) · CT 003806 · DC LMFT200001447 · FL TPMF356 (out-of-state telehealth registration) · IL 166.012270 · ME MF8600 · MD LCM1206 · NH 1030 · NJ 37FI00254800 · NY 002805 · TX 206391 · UT 14300323-3902 · VA 0717002589 · WA MFT.LF.70098096
Annie Wright, LMFT
LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · Author, W.W. Norton 2027
Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.
Annie Wright is an EMDR-certified licensed psychotherapist and relational trauma specialist with over 15,000 clinical hours, and she's been in practice since 2013. Trained in EMDR, psychodynamic, and somatic modalities, she is licensed in 14 U.S. jurisdictions and registered to provide telehealth in Florida (California, Colorado (telehealth only), Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Florida, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Washington). Annie works with driven and ambitious women from relational trauma backgrounds, and everything she writes about is field-tested across thousands of clinical sessions. She is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited, and is currently writing her first book, The Everything Years: Navigating the Pressure and Promise of Your Thirties, with W.W. Norton (2027). A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information.
Work With Annie