If you’re searching for how to forgive someone who hurt you, I want to start by telling you something most articles won’t: the fact that you’re even asking the question means you’re further along than you think. Because most people who’ve been deeply wounded don’t search for forgiveness. They search for ways to stop the pain. They search for confirmation that what happened to them was wrong. They search for permission to leave, to stay, to feel what they feel.
The fact that you’ve arrived at the word “forgiveness” tells me something about you. It tells me you’re ready to stop circling the wound and start moving through it.
I’m Figs O’Sullivan, a licensed marriage and family therapist with over 16 years of clinical experience working with couples and individuals navigating the aftermath of betrayal, broken trust, and relational pain. I’ve sat with hundreds of people in the exact place you’re in right now. And what I’ve learned is that forgiveness is one of the most misunderstood concepts in all of psychology. It’s simultaneously the most demanded and the least understood thing we ask of ourselves.
So let’s get into it. Not the greeting card version. The real thing.
What Forgiveness Actually Is (And What It Absolutely Is Not)
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Before we talk about how to forgive someone who hurt you, we need to dismantle some deeply embedded misconceptions. Because most of the reason forgiveness feels impossible is that we’re trying to do something we were never actually asked to do.
Forgiveness is not condoning. When you forgive someone, you are not saying what they did was acceptable. You’re not minimizing the harm. You’re not rewriting history so the wound disappears. The wound happened. It was real. Forgiveness does not require you to pretend otherwise.
Forgiveness is not reconciliation. This is the one that trips people up most. Forgiveness is an internal process. Reconciliation is an interpersonal one. You can forgive someone completely and still choose never to speak to them again. You can forgive someone and still decide to end the relationship. Forgiveness does not obligate you to restore access to someone who has proven they will misuse it. These are two entirely separate processes, and confusing them is one of the primary reasons people resist forgiveness. They think forgiving means going back. It doesn’t.
Forgiveness is not trust. Trust is rebuilt (or not) through sustained behavior over time. It’s earned through what I call “proof of work,” which is the ongoing evidence that someone has genuinely changed their patterns, not just apologized for the last incident. Forgiveness can happen without trust being restored. And trust can be rebuilt whether or not the word “forgiveness” is ever spoken aloud. They overlap, but they are not the same thing. (If trust rebuilding is what you’re specifically working on, I’ve written about that process here.)
Forgiveness is not a single decision. This might be the most important thing I say in this entire article. Forgiveness is not a moment. It’s not a declaration. It is a process, and sometimes a very long one. The idea that you can simply “choose to forgive” and be done is not only clinically inaccurate, it’s harmful. It leads people to believe something is wrong with them when the anger comes back, when the images return, when they feel the betrayal fresh in their body despite having “already forgiven.” You didn’t fail at forgiving. You’re in the middle of it.
Why Forgiveness Is So Hard (The Neuroscience of Holding On)
Here’s what nobody tells you about resentment and unforgiveness: your brain is doing its job. When someone hurts you deeply (especially someone you love, someone you trusted, someone you were attached to), your nervous system encodes that experience as a survival threat. Your amygdala flags that person, that situation, that category of vulnerability as dangerous. And it does this to protect you.
This is why you can intellectually understand that holding onto anger is hurting you. You can read every quote about forgiveness on the internet. You can want to forgive with every conscious fiber of your being. And your body still won’t let you. Because your nervous system doesn’t care about your philosophy. It cares about your safety.
This is what I mean when I tell my clients: you cannot think your way into forgiveness. You cannot logic your way through a wound. Sound healing, like sound love, is not intellectual. You can analyze and describe a mango’s texture and origin for an hour, but that is not the same thing as tasting the mango. Understanding forgiveness conceptually is not the same as experiencing the physiological shift that forgiveness actually requires.
That shift, the moment when your body finally releases the protective grip it has on your pain, requires something more than a decision. It requires a new experience. And usually, it requires grief.
The Role of Grief in Forgiveness (Why You Have to Mourn Before You Can Move)
This is the part most forgiveness advice skips entirely, and it’s the most important piece of the puzzle.
Before you can genuinely forgive someone who hurt you, you have to grieve what the hurt cost you. Not abstractly. Specifically. What did you lose? What version of yourself existed before this happened? What future did you imagine that is no longer possible in the same way? What innocence, what trust, what sense of safety was taken from you?
Grief is the bridge between anger and forgiveness. Without it, you’re trying to jump from one bank to the other across a chasm. Anger says: “This shouldn’t have happened.” Grief says: “But it did. And it cost me something real.” Forgiveness can only emerge after grief has done its work, because forgiveness requires you to accept a loss that you didn’t choose, didn’t deserve, and may never fully understand.
I see this constantly in my practice. A client comes in and says, “I just want to forgive him and move on.” And when I slow them down, what I find underneath is an ocean of unprocessed grief. The loss of the marriage they thought they had. The loss of the friend they believed was loyal. The loss of the parent they deserved but didn’t get. Until that grief is honored, forgiveness remains a concept rather than an experience.
This is also why premature forgiveness is so dangerous. When someone pressures you to forgive (or when you pressure yourself) before the grief has been fully felt, you don’t actually release the pain. You bury it. You perform forgiveness while the wound festers underneath. And it will resurface. It always does. Sometimes as resentment. Sometimes as emotional distance. Sometimes as an explosion that seems to come out of nowhere but has actually been building for years.
Real forgiveness cannot be rushed. It respects the timeline of grief. And grief, as anyone who has truly grieved knows, does not operate on a schedule.
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How to Forgive Someone Who Hurt You: The Clinical Path
Now that we’ve established what forgiveness actually is (and isn’t), and why it’s so hard, let’s walk through the process. These aren’t steps you complete in order and check off. They’re phases you move through, sometimes circling back, sometimes spending months in one before moving to the next. That’s normal. That’s how this works.
Phase 1: Acknowledge the Full Impact
You cannot forgive what you haven’t fully faced. The first phase of genuine forgiveness is allowing yourself to honestly reckon with the damage that was done. Not minimizing it. Not contextualizing it. Not explaining it away with “they were going through a hard time” or “they didn’t mean it.”
What happened? How did it affect you? What changed in you because of it? How did it alter the way you move through the world, the way you trust, the way you let people close?
This is harder than it sounds. Many of us were raised in systems that taught us to minimize our pain, to be the bigger person, to not make a big deal out of things. If that’s your history, this phase will feel wrong. It will feel selfish or dramatic or indulgent. It’s none of those things. It’s necessary.
Write it down if that helps. Say it out loud. Tell a therapist, a trusted friend, the wall. But let the full weight of it exist outside of you, not just inside your body where it’s been compressing itself into tension, anxiety, and hypervigilance.
Phase 2: Sit in the Anger (Without Acting From It)
Anger is not the enemy of forgiveness. It’s a prerequisite. Anger is the psyche’s way of saying, “I mattered. What happened to me was wrong. I deserved better.” If you skip anger, you skip the part of yourself that believes you had value in the first place.
The key is to feel the anger without letting it drive your decisions. Anger is a brilliant informer but a terrible driver. Let it tell you what it needs to tell you. Let it burn through the numbness. Let it wake you up to the reality of what you lost. But don’t let it write your emails, make your phone calls, or determine your long-term strategy.
Some people stay in this phase for a long time. That’s okay. Anger needs as long as it needs. The danger is not in feeling angry. The danger is in making anger your identity, in constructing a permanent self around the wound. There’s a difference between “I am angry about what happened” and “I am a person who was wronged.” The first is a feeling. The second is a fortress.
Phase 3: Grieve What Was Lost
We covered this above, but it bears repeating as a distinct phase because most people try to skip it. After the anger has done its informing work, grief is what remains. And grief, unlike anger, doesn’t feel powerful. It feels like surrender. It feels like admitting that you can’t undo what happened, that no amount of righteous fury will give you back what was taken.
Grief sounds like: “I really believed they were different.” “I thought we would grow old together.” “I trusted them with the most vulnerable parts of me, and they used it against me.” “I will never get those years back.”
Let yourself grieve. Cry if you need to. Be still if you need to. The grief phase is where the real transformation begins, because grief is the body’s way of letting go of something it was still holding onto. You can’t release what you haven’t first agreed to lose.
Phase 4: Develop Compassion (Starting With Yourself)
This is where the work gets subtle and, in my experience, where many people either break through or get stuck for years.
Compassion in the forgiveness process doesn’t start with the person who hurt you. It starts with you. Compassion for the part of you that trusted when maybe there were signs not to. Compassion for the part of you that stayed too long, loved too hard, gave too much benefit of the doubt. Compassion for the part of you that is still hurting, still angry, still not “over it.”
In my clinical framework, I use a concept called Empathy Cubed. It’s the practice of holding three levels of compassion simultaneously: compassion for me, compassion for you, and compassion for the tragic system we co-created together. Most approaches to forgiveness focus only on the second one (developing empathy for the person who hurt you). But that’s premature if you haven’t first developed genuine compassion for yourself.
Once self-compassion is in place, you can begin to see the person who hurt you with more dimensionality. Not to excuse them. Not to minimize what they did. But to see them as a full human being who, for whatever reason (their own trauma, their own limitations, their own unprocessed pain), did something that caused you tremendous harm. This doesn’t make it okay. It makes them human. And seeing their humanity is what eventually frees you from the prison of the story in which they are the villain and you are the victim. Not because those roles aren’t real, but because living permanently inside that story keeps you trapped in the moment of the wound.
Phase 5: Release the Debt
This is the core of forgiveness, and it’s the hardest thing I’ll ask you to consider.
When someone hurts us, we unconsciously create a ledger. They owe us. They owe us an apology, an explanation, accountability, changed behavior, suffering, or at the very least, the acknowledgment that they destroyed something important. And in many cases, they genuinely do owe us those things.
But forgiveness is the decision to stop waiting for the debt to be paid. Not because it isn’t owed. But because the waiting is costing you more than the original wound.
Think of it this way. If someone breaks your window and walks away, you can spend years standing at the broken window demanding they come back and fix it. You’d be right that they should. But meanwhile, it’s raining into your house. Releasing the debt isn’t about letting them off the hook. It’s about finally boarding up the window yourself so you can stop living in the storm.
This doesn’t mean they’re absolved. It doesn’t mean justice doesn’t matter. It means you are choosing to stop outsourcing your peace to someone else’s conscience. You are taking your power back from the person who hurt you by refusing to let their actions continue to determine the quality of your life.
Phase 6: Integrate the Experience
The final phase of how to forgive someone who hurt you is integration. This is where the wound becomes part of your story without being the whole story. Where you can say, “That happened to me, and it was terrible, and I survived, and it shaped me, and I am more than it.”
Integration doesn’t mean you feel nothing when you think about it. It means the charge has dissipated. You can touch the memory without it burning you. You can talk about what happened without your heart rate spiking and your palms sweating and your body flooding with the same cortisol it produced in the original moment.
Integration looks like wisdom without bitterness. Discernment without paranoia. Open-heartedness with better boundaries. It’s the place where the experience has been metabolized rather than just stored.
And here’s the thing about integration: it’s not a permanent state. Just like all emotional healing, it’s a place you return to. You’ll have moments, maybe triggered by an anniversary, a song, an unexpected encounter, where the old pain surfaces again. That doesn’t mean you haven’t forgiven. It means you’re human, and your nervous system still remembers. The difference is that now, you know the way back. You’ve walked this path before. The return to equilibrium gets faster each time.
Why “Just Forgive Them” Is Terrible Advice
I want to spend a moment on this because it matters deeply, especially for anyone who has been told by a well-meaning friend, family member, pastor, or even therapist to “just forgive and move on.”
This advice, however well-intentioned, does real harm. It collapses a months-or-years-long process into a single moment. It invalidates the complexity of what you’re going through. It implies that if you haven’t forgiven yet, the problem is your willingness rather than the depth of your wound.
Telling someone to “just forgive” is like telling someone with a broken leg to “just walk.” The instruction isn’t wrong in the abstract. You will, eventually, walk again. But right now, the bone is broken. And it needs to be set, immobilized, given time to heal, and then carefully rehabilitated before walking is possible. Skipping those steps doesn’t speed up healing. It causes re-injury.
If someone in your life is pressuring you to forgive before you’re ready, you have my permission (for whatever a stranger’s permission is worth) to say: “I’m working on it. In my own time. In my own way.” That’s enough. You don’t owe anyone a performance of forgiveness to make them more comfortable with your pain.
Forgiveness in Romantic Relationships: A Special Case
When the person who hurt you is your partner (someone you’re still in a relationship with, or trying to decide whether to stay with), forgiveness takes on additional complexity. Because you’re not just processing a wound from the past. You’re trying to build a future with the person who created it.
In my work with couples, I’ve found that the healing process requires something beyond individual forgiveness. It requires what I think of as a shift from “me versus you” to “us versus the pattern.” Most couples who are stuck in the aftermath of betrayal or deep hurt are operating from what I call the Versus Illusion: the belief that one person is the problem and the other is the victim, that the relationship is a courtroom where someone needs to be found guilty.
But relationships are systems. And while individual responsibility for specific actions absolutely matters (if someone cheated, they cheated, full stop), the relational dynamics that create vulnerability to betrayal are almost always co-created. Not the act itself, but the distance, the disconnection, the missed bids for closeness that preceded it.
For couples, genuine forgiveness involves both partners developing the capacity to see their shared system with compassion. Both people are hurting. Both people are reacting. And the painful dynamic between them only exists because they matter deeply to each other. If they didn’t, there would be nothing to forgive, because there would have been nothing to lose.
This is the hardest and most beautiful work I do with couples. When two people can look at the wreckage between them and say, “We both built this. Not equally, not in the same ways, but we both contributed to the conditions that led here. And we’re both willing to build something different,” that’s when real healing begins. Not through a single conversation, but through the sustained, ongoing proof of work of showing up differently, repairing after rupture, and co-creating new experiences that gradually overwrite the old ones.
If you’re navigating this kind of forgiveness, I strongly recommend working with a couples therapist who understands attachment and systemic dynamics. This work is too nuanced and too important to navigate alone. (We’d also welcome you to explore how we work at Empathi.)
How to Forgive Someone Who Hurt You When They Haven’t Apologized
This might be the hardest version of this question. And it’s more common than most people realize.
Sometimes the person who hurt you doesn’t think they did anything wrong. Sometimes they’ve minimized the harm so thoroughly that your pain literally doesn’t register for them. Sometimes they’ve died, disappeared, or are simply not safe to be in contact with. Sometimes they’ve apologized in words but the apology was hollow, performative, or designed to get you to stop being upset rather than to actually acknowledge your experience.
Can you still forgive in these situations? Yes. But the forgiveness looks different, because it has to be entirely self-sourced.
This is where forgiveness becomes most clearly about you and not about them. When there is no apology, no accountability, no changed behavior to point to, forgiveness becomes the radical act of saying: “I am not going to let this person’s inability to reckon with what they did determine how I carry this forward. They may never apologize. They may never understand. And I refuse to spend the rest of my life waiting for something that may never come.”
This kind of forgiveness often requires professional support. A skilled therapist can help you process the grief that comes with accepting that you’ll never get the closure you deserve, and help you build your own sense of resolution in the absence of theirs. (If you’re looking for a concrete framework for what a good apology actually looks like, I wrote about the elements of genuine apology here.)
How to Know When You’ve Truly Forgiven
People ask me this all the time: “How will I know when I’ve forgiven them?”
Here’s what I tell them. You’ll know because the story will change from present tense to past tense. Not in your words, but in your body. Right now, when you think about what happened, your body responds as if it’s happening again. Your chest tightens. Your jaw clenches. Your thoughts race. The wound is still live.
When forgiveness has genuinely taken root, the memory becomes a memory rather than a reliving. You can think about it without being consumed by it. You can talk about it with clarity rather than activation. You might still feel a twinge of sadness, a ripple of anger, but it moves through you rather than taking you over.
Another sign: you stop wishing things had been different. Not because you’re glad it happened, but because you’ve accepted the reality of what occurred and you’ve stopped mentally rewriting the past. The energy that was bound up in “if only” and “they should have” gets freed up for your actual life, the one happening right now, in front of you.
And perhaps the clearest sign of all: you can wish the person well (or at least wish them neutrally) without it costing you anything. Not because they deserve your goodwill. But because carrying ill will toward them was always more expensive for you than it was for them.
How to Forgive Someone Who Hurt You: A Summary of the Process
If you take nothing else from this article, take this:
- Forgiveness is a process, not a moment. Give yourself permission to take as long as you need.
- Forgiveness is not reconciliation. You can forgive and still walk away. You can forgive and still maintain boundaries.
- Grief is the gateway. You must mourn what was lost before you can release the person who caused the loss.
- Compassion starts with yourself. Before you can see the other person’s humanity, you must honor your own pain.
- Premature forgiveness is harmful. Don’t let anyone rush you. Forgiveness that is forced is forgiveness that hasn’t actually happened.
- Releasing the debt is the core act. You stop waiting for them to pay what they owe and you start rebuilding your own house.
- Integration is the goal. Not forgetting. Not being unaffected. But being able to carry the experience as wisdom rather than as a wound that still bleeds.
If you’re in the middle of this process right now, I want you to know: the fact that it’s hard doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. It means you’re doing it honestly. And that’s the only way it works.
Forgiveness is not for the faint of heart. It’s one of the bravest things a human being can do. And if you’ve been hurt deeply enough to need it, you’ve already survived the hardest part. The wound. What comes next is the healing. And you’re more ready for it than you think.
If what you’ve read here resonates and you want to understand the deeper patterns driving your relationships, including how you respond to hurt, how you protect yourself, and what it would take to let someone back in, the Empathi assessment might be a useful next step. (If you’re also working through letting go of resentment, that’s a related but distinct process that many people work on simultaneously with forgiveness.)
Figs is a licensed marriage and family therapist with 16+ years of experience working with couples. He’s the co-founder of Empathi, host of the “Come Here to Me” podcast, and author of an upcoming book on relationships and the systems that shape how we love.
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