How to Forgive: A Practical Guide in Five Steps

Claire told Tom, a friend of fifteen years, that she was waiting for test results and asked him to keep it to himself. Three weeks later a colleague who plays football with Tom brought it up. Two years on the two of them no longer speak, and Claire thinks about it most weeks, while Tom remembers it maybe once a year.

That gap points straight at the least intuitive thing we know about the subject. Forgiveness is mostly a favor you do yourself. The other person often has no idea it happened, and their life does not change in the slightest because of it.

Four myths about what forgiving means

Most of the resistance to forgiveness is not aimed at forgiveness itself but at a caricature of it. People hear the word, picture something no sensible person would ask of themselves, and then back away, quite reasonably. It pays to clear four common mistakes out of the way first.

• Forgetting the injury is not possible and is not the goal either. Memory has no off switch.
• Forgiveness does not say the act was allowed. What happened keeps every bit of its weight.
• Reconciliation takes two people. Forgiveness manages with one, the person who was hurt.
• You do not have to rebuild the relationship. Sometimes it is healthier if it stays unbuilt.

The line between forgiveness and reconciliation is usually the most useful thing anyone takes away from this topic. Reconciliation is trust being rebuilt, and that is a process the other person enters with their own behavior. Forgiveness happens inside you. You can forgive someone you will never speak to again, someone who forgot you exist, and someone who has died in the meantime.

In practice that means you never have to choose between peace and boundaries. Claire can forgive Tom and still never tell him anything confidential again. That is not a contradiction, it is a lesson learned. Forgiveness changes your relationship to the past, boundaries protect the future, and one without the other rarely works well.

What forgiveness actually is

A workable definition has two parts. Forgiveness is a decision you make at one specific moment, and at the same time an inner process that then drags on for weeks or months. Without the decision the process never starts, and the decision on its own is not enough.

The image of a debt helps. Someone took something from you: time, reputation, a sense of safety, your appetite for trusting people. You then spend years paying interest out of your own pocket, because the attention you give that injury goes nowhere else. To forgive is to write the debt off. Not because the claim was invalid, but because collecting on it costs more than the original sum.

The same logic says who the main beneficiary is. Anger you carry for years is no burden on the other person. It is a burden on you, because it runs on your energy, in your head and through your nights. Stopping the payments excuses nobody. It simply returns the resources you were putting in.

What research says about forgiveness

The American psychologist Everett Worthington has studied forgiveness for decades, and his work became widely known partly through a personal test of it. In 1996 his mother was murdered during a break-in at her home. He had to apply his own model to himself, and he later wrote that his first reaction was not nobility but a wish for revenge.

His most useful contribution is a distinction between two things that normally hide under one word. The decision to forgive is an intention: I am changing the way I intend to treat this person, and I am no longer planning payback. Emotional forgiveness is something else. It means bitterness and anger are gradually replaced by another feeling, ideally compassion, often just calm.

The practical consequence of that distinction is large. A decision can be made in a single afternoon, while feelings take no orders. Plenty of people therefore conclude that forgiveness "does not work" for them, because they decided and woke up angry the next morning anyway. Nothing strange happened. They took the first step and waited for the result of the second.

Research on forgiveness suggests a link with less rumination, meaning the endless replaying of the injury in your head, and also with better sleep and lower levels of experienced stress. Which way that link runs is always a careful question, and no serious person claims forgiveness heals the body. What deserves attention is simply that forgiveness behaves more like relief than like sacrifice.

How to forgive, step by step

Worthington summed his approach up in five steps under the acronym REACH. What follows is a description in our own words, without the therapeutic tone, because it is a fairly plain sequence you can walk through alone with a notebook.

1. Recall the injury the way it actually happened. No censoring, no playing it down along the lines of "it was nothing really", but no revenge fantasies either. The aim is to describe the event as precisely as you can, including what you felt at the time.
2. The second step is about the other person's motives. It is not a hunt for an excuse, it is the recognition that people almost never act out of pure malice. Usually there is carelessness in it, or their own fear, drink, stupidity, or the fact that they remember the whole situation completely differently than you do.
3. Then you offer forgiveness as a gift, not as a trade. Worthington suggests remembering a time when somebody forgave you, and how much lighter you felt afterwards. A gift has the property that nothing is expected back for it.
4. Commit to what you have done. Write it down, tell someone close to you, put a date on it. Without that, the decision dissolves at the first unpleasant memory.
5. Then comes the longest part: holding on when the feelings come back. They will come back, usually at three in the morning. The return of anger does not mean the forgiveness is void, only that memory is doing its job. At that moment it helps to remind yourself that you decided, even when you do not feel it.

Claire would probably get stuck at step two. Tom's motives were not evil, more like shabby: he was talking with a group of friends, he wanted something to say, and it did not occur to him that he was handing out something that was not his. Seeing that means seeing a man who behaved stupidly instead of a man who wanted to hurt her. It changes nothing about the weight of what he did, but it changes the shape of the memory.

With deep injuries such as abuse, long-term mistreatment or childhood trauma, it makes sense to go through this process with a therapist, because it opens up material that is hard to work with alone.

When the other person never apologized

An apology makes forgiveness far easier. It takes part of the work off your shoulders, because it confirms that you did not imagine it and that the wrong was a wrong. The bad news is that most people never get one, not even years later.

Behind the silence there is more often discomfort than arrogance. Admitting fault means seeing yourself as a person who hurt someone, and plenty of people simply will not let that picture into their heads. Tom almost certainly remembers the episode in a version where there was no secret involved, just a remark among friends that somebody else then passed on clumsily.

The condition "I will forgive once they apologize" sounds fair and is a trap. You hand the key to your own peace to a person who has already shown they cannot be relied on with it. Sometimes there is nobody left to say the words, because the person is far away or no longer alive, and then the wait stretches out with no end. Peace that hangs on somebody else's decision is exactly as uncertain as that decision.

The other side of this equation is worth knowing too. Most of us are also the person who owes something to somebody, and the difference between an apology that repairs the situation and one that makes it worse is not accidental; what an apology that really works looks like we have covered separately. If you are waiting for one, there may be somebody waiting for one from you.

Forgiving yourself is usually harder

Most people hold themselves to a stricter standard than they hold anyone around them. You forgive a friend for missing your wedding, and you do not forgive yourself for not calling your grandmother in time, and you carry that for ten years. Your own offences are also permanently within reach, because you are the one witness who never leaves.

The interesting part is that being hard on yourself tends to drive repetition rather than guard against it. Anyone who gnaws at themselves for months over one delay or one failure burns the energy they would need for putting it right, and is more likely to put the same thing off again next time. Self-forgiveness is not softness. It is a way of getting back into the game.

The procedure differs from the previous one in a single respect: there is no other person here to give a gift to, so the work divides up differently. First an admission with no "but", then repairing whatever can be repaired, then coming to terms with the fact that the rest cannot be. And finally the decision to stop charging yourself for it, which you will have to renew more than once.

Anger is a phase, not a failure

The sentence "you have to forgive" does a surprising amount of damage. It usually arrives from people who have heard the story for the fifth time, and it pushes someone into declaring something they do not feel. Premature forgiveness then looks like forgiveness but works like suppression. It comes back, usually at a bad moment and in a worse form.

Anger meanwhile carries information. It tells you where your boundary runs, what had value for you and what must not happen again. Until you have read it, there is not much to forgive, because you do not yet know exactly what you lost. Only once the information has been mined does anger turn into pure cost.

So the question worth asking is about timing, not obligation. How much of the past month went on replaying one particular injury, and what could that time have gone to instead? The answer to that usually tells you more than any advice from outside.

How we handle being wronged, and what conflict has to do with it

The way people forgive tracks their behavior in conflict fairly closely. One person goes into open confrontation and forgives only once the apology has been spoken. Another withdraws, never raises the injury out loud, and carries it quietly for years. A third forgives far too fast, because they cannot stand tension in the room, and is then surprised that it keeps coming back around.

One way to describe this is the dual concern model, which came from Blake and Mouton. It tracks two independent things: how hard you push your own interest, and how much you take the other person's interest into account. The combinations produce five typical conflict resolution styles, from competing through to accommodating. None of them is right in itself, because each has situations where it works and situations where it does damage.

Your own pattern is easier to see from outside than from within. That is what our conflict style test is for: 30 questions, roughly four minutes, and the result is a primary and a secondary style plus your position on the assertiveness and cooperativeness map. Treat it as a tool for self-knowledge, not as a diagnosis.

If forgiveness has taken hold, you usually notice it in something small. Somebody says the name over lunch, you pause for a second and then carry on talking calmly, because you no longer need to tell the whole story from the beginning. The memory stayed. It just stopped collecting a toll.