Forgiveness: Do We Really Need to Forgive?

As a human being, I’ve been heartbroken and hurt more times than I can count. At an early age, I was taught to get rid of pain as quickly as possible, that was simply what I understood was expected. Whenever I went through something difficult, I turned to books for guidance. Many of them said the same thing: until you forgive the person who hurt you, you remain imprisoned, by the pain and by their thoughts, and once you forgive, you release them and yourself both. I tried it, multiple times. The pain remained anyway. I kept looking back at those painful events, no matter how many times I told myself I’d forgiven them.

Forgiveness Can Become Another Way of Avoiding

It isn’t only forgiveness. It could be distraction, blaming, endless analysing, positive thinking, spirituality, even meditation itself, or simply telling yourself “I’ve moved on.” Any of these can become a way of escaping an uncomfortable inner experience rather than actually meeting it. Forgiveness isn’t false, and someone can genuinely choose to forgive. But the real question worth asking first is simpler: am I actually experiencing what is here, or am I trying to get rid of it?

What Watching Actually Did

My meditation journey showed me a different way. During my own self-healing moments, I found that watching those events helped, not once, but returned to again and again. At first it was genuinely painful to go through them. But as I revisited the same moments and watched them from different perspectives, the pain slowly began to loosen. The mark of it would still remain. It just stopped running the show.

Notice what’s there. Allow it to be there. Stay a little longer than feels comfortable. Watch it, without rushing to fix it, explain it, or forgive your way past it. Give it time to reveal whatever it’s going to reveal.

You Suffer Once. You Relive It Many Times.

A person can hurt you once. But when you visit that same moment again and again in your thoughts, you’re the one hurting you now, over and over, long after the original moment has actually passed. A teaching attributed to the Buddha stayed with me through this: you suffer once in reality, but many times over in your thoughts. That distinction became an anchor. The first hurt wasn’t within my control. The replaying of it, again and again, largely was.

The Image We Build, and What It Costs

A friend once told me something that stayed with me longer than I expected: “you don’t need to be angry at other people, everyone is doing what’s best for them.” At first it sounded almost too simple to be useful. But sitting with it longer, I think it points at where expectation actually starts. We tend to believe that because we’re exchanging love or closeness with someone, they’ll act in what’s best for us. But people, even the ones who love us, are still oriented toward what’s best for themselves first. Love doesn’t cancel that out. It just means our good and their good will often, hopefully, overlap. The hurt tends to show up exactly in the moments they don’t.

Somewhere along the way, we build an image of who someone should be, a parent, a partner, a friend, and when they don’t match it, we feel betrayed by the gap. This doesn’t mean their behaviour was necessarily fine. It means there are two separate things worth looking at: what actually happened, and what you expected to happen. Both are real. They’re just not the same thing, and blurring them together is usually where the deeper resentment lives.

None of this means expectations are the problem. Honesty, respect, and someone keeping their word are reasonable things to want from people close to you. The real question is more precise: when does an expectation quietly turn into an image someone is required to live up to, one they never actually agreed to?

When Forgiveness Serves the Ego

Sometimes forgiveness stops being about the other person at all. “I am the bigger person.” “I have forgiven you.” “I am above this.” It can quietly become another identity to hold, another way of feeling superior rather than actually free.

Ego doesn’t actually care whether you heal or not, it isn’t an entity with its own will, working for or against you. It’s more superficial than that, closer to a personality trait shaped by comparison and image than anything with real depth. What it responds to is a story that makes you look good: that you were wronged, and that you rose above it. Forgiving quickly, or publicly, or dramatically, can satisfy that without ever touching what actually happened underneath. You get to look like you’re bigger than the person who hurt you, without needing to have actually felt the hurt itself.

So it’s worth asking, honestly, the next time forgiving someone feels urgent: who is it that wants to forgive? Not to answer that intellectually. Just to watch what’s actually asking.

Don’t Tell Someone What They Should Feel

Years ago I joined a group called “emotional wellness” with some friends. Everyone was asked to write about the person who had affected their life the most. Most people wrote about their mothers, and most started by writing how much they loved her, then moved into how much they blamed her, how much they resented what she’d done. Then the group was asked to release those feelings and forgive her, right there, in that session.

But feelings carried for years don’t resolve because an instructor asks the room to let them go. People followed the instructions anyway. They looked astonished by their own responses, overwhelmed by what had surfaced, and many believed they’d found the truth of it. But that was only one layer. Nobody was given the space to go further. What stayed with me from that room wasn’t a conclusion about mothers, some parents genuinely do cause real harm, and that’s not something to explain away. What stayed with me was simpler: don’t tell someone what they should feel before they’ve had the chance to actually discover what they feel.

Who Was Hurt?

During one of my meditation sessions, a question arose that I hadn’t gone looking for: who was hurt, I, or the body I am in? It changed something in how I sat with pain afterwards. The body carries the sensation, the tightness, the ache, the tears. But something else notices the body carrying it, something that isn’t identical to the hurt itself.

I don’t think this question resolves itself quickly, and I’m still sitting with it, the way I’m still sitting with a similar question about who it is that asks about purpose, or who it is that wants to forgive. Each time it returns, it seems to loosen something a little further. I don’t know that it needs a final answer. Watching the question itself may already be most of the point.

Meditation, for me, became less about reaching some final truth and more about having a space to sit with whatever was actually there, without immediately trying to change it. Watch. Stay. Let it be there. See what remains once you stop fighting it. This is the same space Learning to Sit with the Present was written about, and it turns out to hold hurt just as well as it holds any other feeling that shows up uninvited.