You may have been told that you must forgive in order to heal.

Perhaps a pastor, spiritual teacher, therapist, or well-meaning friend told you that holding on to anger would poison you. That forgiveness is something you do for yourself, not for the other person. That unless you forgive, you will never be free.

Some go even further. They warn that unforgiveness will make you emotionally—or even physically—ill.

But what if you are not ready to forgive? What if the person who harmed you has never acknowledged what they did? What if the pressure to forgive becomes one more demand that you silence yourself, override your own experience, and become the “good” person?

Here is the conclusion I have reached through my own healing and decades of psychotherapeutic and spiritual work: you don’t have to forgive to heal.

You do, however, need some way of letting go.

Forgiveness and letting go are not the same thing. Understanding the difference can protect us from spiritual bypassing while still making genuine freedom possible.

When Forgiveness Becomes Another Form of People-Pleasing

For almost 30 years, I worked within the Christian tradition. I absorbed the familiar teaching that forgiveness should be unconditional. When Jesus was asked how often we should forgive, the answer was not merely seven times, but “seventy times seven.” The spiritual ideal seemed clear: a good person forgives, repeatedly and without qualification.

Later, as I began doing deeper work on my own history, this understanding became less convincing.

I came to see more clearly what I call the catastrophic failure of love: the shattering experience of being harmed by somebody who was supposed to love and protect you. When this happens early in life, we do not merely feel hurt. We organize ourselves around surviving the conditions in which we find ourselves.

We curate a personality.

We learn to anticipate what others want, suppress our own reactions, minimize our needs, and become whoever we need to be to preserve attachment. This is one of the deepest origins of people-pleasing.

In that context, pressure to forgive can easily become another people-pleasing demand:

Do not make anyone uncomfortable. Do not remain angry. Do not tell the whole truth. Do not become difficult. Rise above it. Be gracious. Forgive.

The survivor is once again asked to abandon their own experience in order to maintain somebody else’s preferred story.

That is not healing. It is the original adaptation dressed in spiritual language.

The Rush to Forgiveness

During a plant-medicine ceremony, I once experienced the reality of what had happened to me without the usual psychological buffers. I felt the devastation of it—the fall from innocence and the shattering that had shaped my personality.

When I spoke about this afterward, somebody immediately asked, “But you’ve forgiven her, right?”

My inner response was immediate: That seems awfully early to be asking.

I was just beginning to let in the truth. There was still so much to understand, feel, and grieve. Yet forgiveness was already being presented as the desired conclusion.

We sometimes see this publicly when people who have suffered an unimaginable loss announce their forgiveness within days of the event. Their forgiveness may be entirely authentic; we cannot know another person’s inner experience. But we should at least question the cultural and religious pressure surrounding such declarations.

What might happen if, instead of applauding immediate forgiveness, we said:

You have been through something devastating. You need support. You are allowed to feel this fully. You do not need to arrive anywhere before you are ready.

Forgiveness should never become a performance through which the harmed person demonstrates spiritual goodness.

Forgiveness Is Relational

I have come to believe that genuine forgiveness is a process between two people: the person who caused the harm and the person who suffered it.

For forgiveness to become possible, several conditions may be necessary.

The person who caused the harm must first recognize what they did. They must be willing to listen to its impact without minimizing, defending, rationalizing, or making themselves the victim.

They must communicate that they understand. The injured person needs to be able to say, in effect, Yes—you finally understand what this was like for me.

There must also be credible remorse. Not a hurried apology designed to end the conversation, but a response that shows genuine contact with the suffering caused.

Wherever possible, the person should make amends. And there must be a sincere commitment not to repeat the harm—to this person or anyone else.

Even when all these conditions are present, forgiveness cannot be demanded. The harmed person remains free to say, “I hear your apology, but I do not forgive you.” They are also free to forgive without resuming the relationship.

Forgiveness does not automatically restore trust. It does not erase consequences. It does not require reconciliation or renewed access to your life.

Letting Go Is Different From Forgiveness

What happens when the person who harmed you is dead, absent, unwilling, or incapable of taking responsibility?

This is where I distinguish forgiveness from letting go.

Forgiveness is relational. Letting go can be unilateral.

Letting go is not pretending that the harm no longer matters. It is not deciding that what happened was acceptable. It is not suppressing anger or manufacturing compassion for the person who hurt you.

Letting go is the inner work of ensuring that the worst thing that happened to you does not continue to determine your future.

This work is not easy. In my experience, it is an ordeal.

It means seeing clearly what happened. It means feeling the anger, grief, and devastation that you may have spent a lifetime avoiding. It means recognizing how your personality formed around the injury and how those survival strategies continue to shape your relationships.

It also means facing the unbearable unfairness of it.

Sometimes there will be no justice. No apology will arrive. The person responsible may never understand what they did. Nothing can restore the childhood, relationship, opportunity, innocence, or sense of safety that was lost.

Before we can genuinely let go, we may need to grieve all of that.

Grief Creates the Conditions for Grace

For much of my life, I carried a sadness whose source I did not fully understand. When I finally allowed myself to encounter it, the grieving was messy. There were tears, rage, and a lifetime of pain that needed to move.

Then, at some point, something unexpected happened.

I discovered spaciousness.

It did not feel like a moral achievement. I had not successfully forced myself to forgive. Grace simply appeared after I had stopped denying the truth.

Near the end of my mother’s life, she looked up at me with tears in her eyes and asked, “We’re okay, right?”

I told her, “Yes, we’re okay.”

It was true. But it was not true because she had fully acknowledged what happened or because we had completed a formal process of forgiveness. She could not face the whole truth; it would have been too devastating to her sense of herself.

We were okay because I had travelled through the grief. I had let go. I was no longer waiting for her to become somebody she was incapable of becoming.

That is different from saying the past was acceptable. It means the past no longer held absolute authority over my present.

Accepting the Unacceptable

Letting go asks us to do something paradoxical: accept what remains unacceptable.

The harm was unacceptable. The injustice was unacceptable. The failure of love was unacceptable. Part of us may continue to insist, No, this cannot be how my story happened.

But it did happen.

Acceptance does not mean approval. It means ending the impossible negotiation with reality in which we demand that the past become different before we permit ourselves to live.

This tension cannot always be resolved by the thinking mind. It resembles a Zen koan: the unacceptable must somehow be accepted. If we remain with that tension—feeling it rather than explaining it away—something may eventually shift at the level of the heart.

We discover that we can carry the truth without being entirely organized by it.

You Are Allowed to Heal in Your Own Time

If you have been harmed, you do not owe anyone a premature declaration of forgiveness.

You are allowed to tell the truth. You are allowed to be angry. You are allowed to grieve. You are allowed to require accountability and to decide that somebody no longer gets access to you.

You are also allowed to discover compassion if and when it arises naturally. But compassion cannot be coerced, and grace cannot be scheduled.

The goal is not to become the spiritually impressive person who forgives everything. The goal is to become free enough to live your own life—to speak your truth, express your creativity, love without abandoning yourself, and create a future that is not determined by the worst of your past.

You don’t have to forgive to heal.

But you deserve the support, truth, grief, and grace that allow you to let go.

Book an appointment with Bruce: bruce@brucesanguin.ca