Letting go isn't the same as excusing – it's reclaiming the space that resentment has been quietly occupying.
“To err is human, to forgive, divine.”
– Alexander Pope
“He ruined my life. But now it’s unruined, and I don’t hate him anymore. In fact, I don’t have any particular feelings about him!”
June, a client I wrote about here, had been systematically raped by her uncle (as well as being continually beaten by her grandparents, who were her ‘guardians’, as her father had been incarcerated for killing her mother).
At the start of our work together, when she was still having vicious flashbacks and nightmares, she’d said:
“I just don’t think I can ever forgive him. What he’s done to me!”
Now, right off the bat, some things are unforgivable – but we can also see continued resentment as a kind of self-harm.
It had been 30 years since June had last seen her uncle, yet she had recently seen him at a family wedding. He was old and frail, and June said he just seemed “like nothing” to her now.
At no point did she try to forgive him because, in a way, she didn’t need to. As we resolved her trauma, the anger and bitterness naturally dissolved too.
She did say at the end of our work that she had forgiven “even him” – but the time had to be right, and it was only right when the PTSD had been properly processed.
He was no longer hurting her through the mechanism of her own mind, so it became almost natural to forgive him once the pain had gone. At least, that’s how she described it.
But it’s not always great trauma we’re dealing with. And sometimes we should help clients forgive, because there’s a huge amount to be gained from forgiving.
Forgiving as part of a healthier lifestyle?
In one major study, it was found that people who tend to be more forgiving often experience better mental health and wellbeing over time.1 Forgiving others was associated with lower anxiety and depression, greater life satisfaction, and a stronger sense of meaning and purpose.
In addition to its mental health benefits, forgiveness has been linked to positive physical health outcomes, including lower blood pressure, reduced cortisol levels, and better self-reported health.2
Forgiveness also appears to be an effective way of managing emotions, helping us move on from negative past experiences.3 Another study found that women who forgive others are less likely to become depressed.4
So there is a decent amount of evidence that being generally more forgiving isn’t just good for relationships,5 but also for the mental and physical health of the person doing the forgiving. Better self-forgiveness might be included here.
So if it seems that forgiveness (of others) is important for your client, how might you help them do that?
One: Don’t insist they have to forgive
At no point with June did I suggest she was supposed to or had to forgive her predatory uncle. We might ask, “Would you ever want to forgive that person?”, but we don’t need to insist that in order to move on they must forgive.
We can talk about the benefits of forgiveness or suggest that we can help them be much less bothered by the past so they don’t have to ruminate so much on it.
So we might almost negotiate with the client:
“Would it be good to, say, think about what they did to you 90% less of the time so that you can get on with other things?”
Notice this isn’t about forgiving so much as leaving the wound alone to heal without continually picking at it.
I might even suggest:
“You know, when you do choose to think about it, you can still keep some of that anger or resentment, but maybe at a level that bothers you much less… as well as spending less time renting space out to that person in your head…”
So you’re not suggesting they totally forgive, which, after all, may be unrealistic for some people at some times in their lives.
Now, just as self-compassion can aid self-forgiveness, so too tolerance and compassionate understanding of others can aid in outwardly directed forgiveness.
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Two: Understanding and tolerance
People tend to naturally become more tolerant and forgiving as they age.6 Maybe more life experience produces a greater overview of the foibles and imperfections of other people generally, so empathy can increase.
Yet to be tolerant of the intolerant or the downright evil may be tantamount to encouraging wicked behaviour in others. Forgiveness is not about dismantling boundaries or being taken for a fool in future.
So becoming more tolerant of others’ transgressions towards us is dependent on context. We can gently explore:
- Did the person mean to cause you harm?
- What limitations or difficulties was the person experiencing at the time?
- Does or did the person help you or try to help you at other times and in other ways?
- What do you think might have been going through that person’s head when they did it?
- Was there any aspect of that person’s past that may explain their behaviour towards you?
Notice I say “explain”, not “excuse”.
Tread carefully! This has to be done congruently to avert the risk of seeming to side with the transgressor.
Three: Focus on the future
One piece of research found that focusing on the future – more specifically, how a couple imagined they’d feel one year in the future after an infraction by their partner – greatly increased forgiveness and relationship satisfaction.7
This technique of giving yourself a little psychological distance in time has all kinds of potential benefits.
It can help clients to see themselves more objectively, to transcend the current emotional state in order to see the bigger picture and increase emotional self-control.
If you are skilled in the psychotherapeutic science and art of hypnosis, you can make this even more powerful.
One client, Shirley, told me how she just couldn’t forgive her generally decent husband for getting a bit drunk at her work Christmas party. She was now almost continually ruminating on how he had let her down in front of her co-workers (who hadn’t, it seems, minded his tipsiness in the least).
I hypnotized Shirley, and she relaxed very quickly. During trance I asked her to float into the future. A year from now, on vacation in Africa (where she’d told me they planned to visit). I asked her how she felt about that Christmas party now.
“Oh, I don’t even think about it now. And if I do it’s sort of funny.”
I asked her to focus on all that was loving and kind in her husband, and to go way into the future to see him as a very old man. She smiled and a small tear came to her eye as she hugged him.
When she came out of trance after having ‘visited’ the nearer and far distant future, she said she felt “absolutely fine” about the Christmas party now.
“In the great scheme of things,” she told me, “it’s really nothing at all.”
Four: Help them avoid bad generalizing
Shirley, in the example above, had taken one incident and begun to negatively generalize it to cover the whole of her relationship with her husband. Before our hypnotic work together I asked her Socratically whether:
- A generally intelligent person could ever do anything dumb?
- A place with a generally great climate can ever have a lousy and rainy day?
- A generally kind and considerate partner could ever do something less considerate sometimes?
She got the point pretty fast, as you can imagine. But it’s important. There’s a danger to not forgiving what can be forgiven.
Bitterness does not make for a happy life. Quite the opposite. And bitterness and resentment can partly be caused by negative generalizing – what psychologists call “globalizing the negative”.
Depressed people tend to generalize negatives. “That relationship failed, so all relationships are doomed to fail!” or “You didn’t help me today [specific]; you are just a horrible person [general]!” But we can all fall prey to this pattern sometimes, especially during times of heightened emotion.
Last, we can help our clients forgive but not forget.
Five: Forgiving not forgetting
President John F. Kennedy once said, “Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.”
Although I guess it might have helped if he’d known about a certain Lee Harvey Oswald ahead of time.
But seriously, forgiving doesn’t need to mean forgetting. Life contains lessons here and there. And while we don’t want to overgeneralize the likelihood of ill treatment from others because it’s happened before (remember, strong emotion makes us overgeneralize), we also don’t want to forget, as we need to learn from the past.
I will often ask clients what they learned from a bad experience that will help them in the future. This can have the positive effect of helping the client feel that at least they gained something from what occurred.
Shirely said she learned that her husband “is only human and can let his hair down sometimes.”
June told me she’d learned that she was strong and could get through anything –and for that she was grateful!
Forgiving not forgetting means that we don’t necessarily start to trust the untrustworthy or give responsibilities to the feckless, but we do perhaps gain in confidence as far as negotiating life and human relationships.
If forgiveness looks like it would be good for our client and they express a wish to forgive, then we can teach forgiveness skills.
As June told me (and I’m paraphrasing) all those years ago:
“Forgiveness works best when you just live your life in the best possible way you can.”
And she did.
Do you work with clients who are stuck in resentment, replaying past hurts and struggling to move forward?
The Conversational Reframing Course equips you with artful, natural techniques to help shift those entrenched negative beliefs without getting drawn into an arguing trap. Explore the Conversational Reframing Course.
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About Mark Tyrrell
Psychology is my passion. I've been a psychotherapist trainer since 1998, specializing in brief, solution focused approaches. I now teach practitioners all over the world via our online courses.
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Notes:
- Cowden, R. G., Worthington, E. L., Padgett, R. N., Felton, C., Weziak-Bialowolska, D., Wilkinson, R., Jackson-Meyer, K., Chen, Z. J., Bradshaw, M., Johnson, B. R., & VanderWeele, T. J. (2026). Longitudinal associations of dispositional forgivingness with multidimensional well-being: a two-wave outcome-wide analysis in the Global Flourishing Study. npj Mental Health Research, 5: 3.
- Rasmussen, K. R., Stackhouse, M., Boon, S. D., Comstock, K., & Ross, R. (2019). Meta-analytic connections between forgiveness and health: the moderating effects of forgiveness-related distinctions. Psychology & Health, 34(5), 515–534.
- Noreen, S., Bierman, R. N., & MacLeod, M. D. (2014). Forgiving you is hard, but forgetting seems easy: Can forgiveness facilitate forgetting? Psychological Science, 25(7), 1295–1302.
- Ermer, A. E., & Proulx, C. M. (2016). Unforgiveness, depression, and health in later life: The protective factor of forgivingness. Aging & Mental Health, 20(10): 1021–1034.
- Ogolsky, B. G., Monk, J. K., Rice, T. M., Theisen, J. C., & Maniotes, C. R. (2017). Relationship maintenance: A review of research on romantic relationships. Journal of Family Theory and Review, 9: 275–306.
- Steiner, M., Allemand, M., & McCullough, M. E. (2011). Age differences in forgivingness: The role of transgression frequency and intensity. Journal of Research in Personality, 45(6): 670–678.
- Huynh, A. C., Yang, D. Y.-J., & Grossmann, I. (2016). The Value of Prospective Reasoning for Close Relationships. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 7(8), 893–902.
