Faith & Formation
When Forgiveness Becomes Another Burden
On faith, psychological healing, and why the wounded should not have to rush their recovery to make others comfortable
There is something I have been thinking about concerning forgiveness.
We talk about it as though it is always a gift. Something beautiful. Something liberating. Something that allows a person to move forward without remaining imprisoned by what happened. And I believe forgiveness can be all those things.
But I have also seen how the language of forgiveness can become another burden placed on someone who is already carrying more than enough.
Someone is hurt. Someone is betrayed. Someone experiences something that changes the way they understand themselves, their relationships, or even God. And before they have had an opportunity to understand what happened, someone offers what sounds like spiritual wisdom. You need to forgive. Let it go. Don't carry that bitterness. God wants you to move forward.
Sometimes those words come from genuine concern. Sometimes they come from people who do not know what else to say. And sometimes, if we are willing to acknowledge it, they come from people who would rather see the wounded person become quiet than confront the circumstances that caused the wound.
That possibility troubles me. Because I believe forgiveness matters. But I am becoming increasingly convinced that forgiveness loses something important when it becomes a demand imposed on the wounded for the comfort of everyone else.
We are often more comfortable with resolution than pain
Human beings like completed stories. Something happened. Someone apologized. The injured person forgave. Everybody learned something. Life continued.
There is comfort in that arrangement. It gives suffering a beginning, middle, and end. But real life rarely follows such a convenient structure.
Sometimes the person who caused the harm never apologizes. Sometimes they apologize without understanding what they did. Sometimes they apologize because consequences are approaching. Sometimes they acknowledge one part of the harm while denying everything else. Sometimes they are genuinely remorseful but have not changed the behavior.
And sometimes the person who was hurt does not yet know what forgiveness would even mean. They are still trying to understand what happened. Still trying to determine what was lost. Still trying to separate the event from the beliefs it created about themselves. Still trying to decide whether they can trust their own judgment again.
That work cannot always be completed on someone else's schedule.
Yet we often become impatient with people whose pain does not resolve quickly enough. We want the relationship repaired. The family reunited. The church restored. The conflict settled. The uncomfortable conversation finished. We want the story to move forward.
But perhaps we should ask whether we are pursuing healing or simply relief from the discomfort of witnessing someone else's suffering. Those are not necessarily the same thing.
Forgiveness is not the same as pretending
One of the most damaging misunderstandings about forgiveness is the assumption that it requires minimizing what happened. It wasn't that bad. They didn't mean it. Everybody makes mistakes. You have to move on.
Those statements may sound compassionate, but they can quietly erase the seriousness of the injury.
Forgiveness does not require us to revise history. Something can be forgiven and still have been wrong. A person can release a desire for revenge without denying the damage. A relationship can be approached with compassion while still requiring accountability. And a person can choose forgiveness without returning to the conditions in which the original harm occurred.
I think this distinction matters because we sometimes treat forgiveness as though it is supposed to make the past less real. But the past does not become less real because we have changed our relationship to it. The event happened. The consequences may remain. The trust may have been damaged. The person may still be grieving.
Forgiveness does not have to erase the truth in order to change what the truth does to us.
There is a difference between forgiveness and reconciliation
I believe this is one of the distinctions we need to make more carefully, particularly within Christian communities. Forgiveness and reconciliation are related. They are not identical.
Forgiveness concerns how we respond to a wrong and to the person who committed it. Reconciliation concerns the restoration of a relationship.
A relationship involves more than one person. It requires participation. Trust. Honesty. Responsibility. Sometimes repentance. Sometimes changed behavior over a significant period. Sometimes the willingness to acknowledge consequences that cannot be reversed.
One person may be able to begin the work of forgiveness without the other person's cooperation. But genuine reconciliation cannot be manufactured by the injured person alone.
If someone continues lying, forgiveness does not make them trustworthy. If someone continues violating boundaries, forgiveness does not make those boundaries unnecessary. If someone remains abusive, forgiveness does not make returning to that relationship safe. And if someone has betrayed a responsibility, forgiveness does not automatically restore their authority.
We should be careful about asking injured people to demonstrate spiritual maturity by placing themselves back into circumstances where they may be harmed again.
Compassion does not require abandoning discernment. Grace does not eliminate accountability. And forgiveness does not create an obligation to provide someone with unrestricted access to your life.
Sometimes the wound is larger than the event
This is where psychology becomes particularly important. An injury is not always limited to what happened. It can also involve what the event came to mean.
A child experiences abandonment and begins believing they are unworthy of being chosen. A spouse experiences betrayal and begins questioning their ability to recognize truth. A veteran experiences institutional betrayal and struggles to trust organizations that claim to exist for his benefit. A church member experiences spiritual manipulation and begins associating faith with danger.
The original event matters. But so do the meanings that develop around it.
This is one reason I think we have to be careful about treating forgiveness as though it is a simple decision that automatically resolves psychological distress. A person may sincerely decide to forgive and still experience fear. They may still struggle with trust. They may still have intrusive memories. They may still experience grief, anger, or confusion. They may still need professional support.
Those continuing responses do not necessarily mean the forgiveness was dishonest. They may mean the injury affected more than one part of the person's life.
A moral decision and a psychological recovery process are not always completed at the same moment. We should not confuse the two.
Moral injury complicates the conversation
My interest in moral injury has made me think about forgiveness from another direction.
We often imagine forgiveness as something one person extends to another. But what happens when the person seeking forgiveness is also the person who caused the harm? What happens when a veteran cannot reconcile something he did, failed to do, witnessed, or was ordered to participate in with the person he believed himself to be? What happens when someone is carrying responsibility for a decision that cannot be undone?
The usual advice to forgive yourself can become inadequate. Not because self-forgiveness is meaningless, but because the moral questions may be more complicated than the advice acknowledges.
Was there genuine wrongdoing? Was the person operating under coercion? What did they know at the time? What alternatives were available? Who was harmed? What responsibility remains? Is repair possible? What would repentance look like now? What does it mean to live faithfully after doing something that cannot be changed?
These questions deserve serious attention. I explored some of them in What Did Your Service Cost You Internally?, and they apply here too. Sometimes guilt points toward responsibility. Sometimes shame turns a particular action into a condemnation of the entire self. Sometimes a person assumes responsibility for something that was never within their control. Those experiences require different responses.
Telling every person to simply forgive themselves risks overlooking the distinctions that matter most.
I do not believe healing requires pretending that conscience has nothing important to say. Sometimes conscience is precisely where the work must begin.
The church should be a place where truth can survive
Christianity places forgiveness near the center of its moral and spiritual life. That is not something I want to weaken. But I do think we need to examine how we teach and practice it.
Consider the Psalms. They do not present spiritual maturity as the absence of distress. They contain anger. Fear. Confusion. Grief. Questions about justice. Questions about abandonment. Questions about why the wicked seem to prosper. The writers do not always arrive at peace quickly. Sometimes they bring their pain directly into the presence of God without pretending to understand it.
That matters. It tells me there is room within faith for honest suffering. There is room to name injustice. There is room to grieve. There is room to ask difficult questions. There is room to admit that something has not yet been resolved.
And when I consider the ministry of Jesus, I do not see someone who treated wrongdoing as irrelevant. Jesus extended mercy. He also confronted hypocrisy. He challenged those who exploited religious authority. He spoke about repentance. He defended people whose dignity had been disregarded. His compassion did not require moral indifference.
That should matter to us. If our teaching about forgiveness consistently protects the powerful from accountability while pressuring the wounded into silence, we need to examine whether we are representing the heart of the teaching or merely using its language.
Peace is not always the same as restoration
I think we sometimes confuse the absence of conflict with the presence of healing.
A family stops arguing. A church stops discussing the incident. An organization moves forward. The injured person no longer brings up what happened. Everyone appears relieved.
But what actually changed? Was the harm acknowledged? Was responsibility accepted? Were appropriate safeguards established? Was trust rebuilt? Did the wounded person receive meaningful support? Or did the situation simply become quiet?
Silence can be mistaken for peace. Compliance can be mistaken for forgiveness. Distance can be mistaken for healing. And a person's decision to stop explaining their pain can be mistaken for evidence that the pain no longer exists.
I am increasingly convinced that genuine restoration requires more honesty than that. Sometimes it begins with admitting that the relationship cannot return to what it was. Sometimes the appropriate outcome is reconciliation. Sometimes it is a different relationship with firmer boundaries. Sometimes it is permanent separation. Sometimes it is accountability without restored trust. And sometimes the most meaningful progress is simply that the injured person no longer feels obligated to organize their life around the person who harmed them.
Not every healed relationship becomes a restored relationship. That does not automatically make the healing incomplete.
Forgiveness should not become another performance
There is a particular danger for people who have spent much of their lives being responsible for everyone else's wellbeing. They may approach forgiveness as another obligation to complete. I need to be mature. I need to be the bigger person. I need to demonstrate my faith. I need to show that I have moved on. I need to make everyone comfortable again.
And so they say the words. I forgive you.
Perhaps they mean them. Perhaps they want to mean them. Perhaps they are trying to become the kind of person who can mean them. But internally, there may still be work that has not been acknowledged.
That does not mean they should abandon forgiveness. It means forgiveness should not become another performance through which they earn acceptance. There is a difference between pursuing spiritual maturity and pretending to have reached it.
I would rather hear someone say, "I want to forgive, but I am struggling," than watch them feel compelled to announce a peace they have not experienced. There is honesty in that struggle. And honesty gives us somewhere to begin.
We have to make room for accountability
I also want to be careful not to turn this conversation into permission to avoid responsibility. The person who caused harm has work to do as well.
An apology matters. But an apology is not always repair. Saying "I'm sorry" does not automatically address the consequences. It does not rebuild trust. It does not restore what was lost. It does not establish that the behavior will change.
Sometimes repentance requires accepting that another person may never trust us in the same way again. That can be difficult. We may genuinely regret what happened. We may have changed. We may want reconciliation. But we cannot demand that another person recognize our growth on our preferred timeline.
If forgiveness cannot be forced, neither can trust. And perhaps one of the clearest demonstrations of repentance is the willingness to accept appropriate consequences without treating them as evidence that forgiveness has been withheld.
A person can be forgiven and still be accountable. A person can be remorseful and still need to make restitution. A person can change and still have relationships that remain permanently altered.
Grace does not make those realities disappear. It gives us a way to face them without concluding that our worst actions must be the final word about who we can become.
What does healing actually require?
I do not think there is one answer for every person.
Some people need space to grieve. Some need an opportunity to tell their story without interruption. Some need to understand why an experience affected them so deeply. Some need protection. Some need practical support. Some need a trustworthy community. Some need professional treatment. Some need spiritual counsel that takes their pain seriously. Some need to confront their own responsibility. Some need to recognize that they were never responsible for what happened. Some need time.
Most need more than one of these things.
That is why I believe trauma-informed care and spiritually sensitive support should not compete with one another. When practiced responsibly, both can help us approach suffering with humility. Psychology can help us understand how experiences affect emotions, beliefs, behavior, relationships, and the capacity to trust. Faith can help us engage questions of meaning, morality, grace, justice, repentance, and restoration.
Neither should be used to silence the questions the other helps us recognize. And neither should turn a wounded human being into a project that must be completed quickly.
Perhaps forgiveness begins with telling the truth
I have been wondering whether we sometimes begin the conversation in the wrong place. We ask: Have you forgiven them?
Maybe we should first ask: What happened? What did it cost you? What changed afterward? What are you still carrying? What do you believe about yourself because of it? What would accountability look like? What would safety require? What would healing mean to you?
Those questions do not reject forgiveness. They take the wound seriously enough to understand what forgiveness is being asked to address.
And perhaps that is part of the work of loving people well. Not rushing them toward the answer we believe they should eventually reach. Not making their pain into a theological argument. Not measuring their spiritual maturity by how quickly they become comfortable discussing what happened. But remaining present long enough for truth to emerge.
There is a difference between guiding someone toward healing and demanding that they demonstrate it.
Mercy should never require us to abandon truth
I still believe in forgiveness. I believe people can change. I believe repentance matters. I believe relationships can be restored. I believe grace reaches into places where human beings have done real damage. And I believe no one should be permanently reduced to the worst thing they have ever done.
But I also believe the person who was harmed matters. Their dignity matters. Their safety matters. Their voice matters. Their recovery matters. Their ability to make decisions about their own relationships matters.
We cannot speak seriously about restoration while treating the wounded person as an obstacle to everyone else's peace.
Sometimes the work of forgiveness is long. Sometimes it is complicated. Sometimes it involves difficult conversations. Sometimes it requires boundaries that other people do not understand. Sometimes it happens without an apology. Sometimes it unfolds alongside grief. Sometimes a person can sincerely desire to forgive while still struggling with anger. And sometimes the most faithful thing we can do for someone is stop demanding an answer and give them room to tell the truth.
Because forgiveness was never meant to become another instrument of harm. It should not be used to protect wrongdoing. It should not be used to erase accountability. It should not be used to make silence look like spiritual maturity. And it should not require the wounded to pretend they are whole before they have had an opportunity to heal.
Perhaps the question we need to ask is not simply whether someone has forgiven. Perhaps we should also ask whether we have created the conditions in which truth, accountability, dignity, and genuine healing are possible.
I do not want a version of forgiveness that merely makes everyone comfortable again. I want one that can stand in the presence of what actually happened. One that does not fear difficult questions. One that allows responsibility without denying grace. One that makes room for mercy without sacrificing justice. One that recognizes healing as something deeper than the absence of conflict.
Because I believe forgiveness can be liberating. But liberation should not require the wounded person to carry the responsibility for everyone else's peace.
And perhaps before we ask someone to lay down the burden of what happened, we should make certain we are not placing another burden in their hands.
Jamaal Russell is a U.S. Army veteran and a doctoral student in psychology. He writes from Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic. This essay is a personal and scholarly reflection, not clinical advice. If you are a veteran in crisis, contact the Veterans Crisis Line by dialing 988 and pressing 1.