Forgiveness is often misunderstood. Here’s why

Two in five Americans have fought with a family member about politics, according to a 2024 study by the American Psychiatric Association. One in five have become estranged over controversial issues, and the same percentage has “blocked a family member on social media or skipped a family event” due to disagreements.

Difficulty working through conflict with those close to us can cause irreparable harm to families and relationships. What’s more, the inability to heal these relationships can be detrimental to physical and emotional well-being, and even longevity.

Healing relationships often involve forgiveness—and sometimes we have the ability to truly reconcile. But as a professor and licensed professional counselor who researches forgiveness, I believe the process is often misunderstood.

In my 2021 book, Practicing Forgiveness: A Path Toward Healing, I talk about how we often feel pressure to forgive and that forgiveness can feel like a moral mandate. Consider 18th-century poet Alexander Pope’s famous phrase: “To err is human; to forgive, divine”—as though doing so makes us better people. The reality is that reconciling a relationship is not just difficult, but sometimes inadvisable or dangerous, especially in cases involving harm or trauma.

I often remind people that forgiveness does not have to mean a reconciliation. At its core, forgiveness is internal: a way of laying down ill will and our emotional burden, so we can heal. It should be seen as a separate process from reconciliation, and deciding whether to renegotiate a relationship.

But either form of forgiveness is difficult—and here may be some insights as to why.

Forgiveness, karma, and revenge

In 2025, I conducted a study with my colleagues Alex Hodges and Jason Vannest to explore emotions people may experience around forgiveness, and how those emotions differ from when they experience karma or revenge.

We defined forgiveness as relinquishing feelings of ill will toward someone who engaged in a harmful action or behavior toward you. “Karma” refers to a situation where someone who wronged you got what they deserved without any action from you. “Revenge,” on the other hand, happens when you retaliate.

First, we prompted participants to share memories of three events related to offering forgiveness, witnessing karma and taking revenge. After sharing each event, they completed a questionnaire indicating what emotions they experienced as they retold their story.

We found that most people say they aspire to forgive the person who hurt them. To be specific, participants were about 1.5 times more likely to desire forgiveness than karma or revenge.

Most admitted, though, that karma made them happier than offering forgiveness.

Working toward forgiveness tended to make people sad and anxious. In fact, participants were about 1.5 times more likely to experience sadness during forgiveness than during karma or revenge. Pursuing forgiveness was more stressful, and harder work, because it forces people to confront feelings that may often be perceived as negative, such as stress, anger, or sadness.

Two different processes

Forgiveness is also confusing, thanks to the way it is typically conflated with reconciliation.

Forgiveness researchers tie reconciliation to “interpersonal forgiveness,” in which the relationship is renegotiated or even healed. However, at times, reconciliation should not occur—perhaps due to a toxic or unsafe relationship. Other times, it simply cannot occur, such as when the offender has died or is a stranger.

But not all forgiveness depends on whether a broken relationship has been repaired. Even when reconciliation is impossible, we can still relinquish feelings of ill will toward an offender, engaging in “intrapersonal forgiveness.”

Not all forgiveness has to involve renegotiating a relationship with the person who hurt you.

I used to practice counseling in a hospital’s adolescent unit, in which all the teens I worked with were considered a danger to themselves or others. Many of them had suffered abuse. When I pictured what “success” could look like for them, I hoped that, in adulthood, my clients would not be focused on their past trauma—that they could experience safety, health, belonging, and peace.

Most often, such an outcome was not dependent upon reconciling with the offender. In fact, reconciliation was often ill-advised, especially if offenders had not expressed remorse or commitment to any type of meaningful change. Even if they had, there are times when the victim chooses not to renegotiate the relationship, especially when working through trauma.

Still, working toward intrapersonal forgiveness could help some of these young people begin each day without the burden of trauma, anger, and fear. In effect, the client could say, “What I wanted from this person I did not get, and I no longer expect it.” Removing expectations from people by identifying that we are not likely to get what we want can ease the burden of past transgressions. Eventually, you decide whether to continue to expend the emotional energy it takes to stay angry with someone.

Relinquishing feelings of ill will toward someone who has caused you harm can be difficult. It may require patience, time, and hard work. When we recognize that we are not going to get what we wanted from someone—trust, safety, love—it can feel a lot like grief. Someone may pass through the same stages, including denial, anger, bargaining, and depression, before they can accept and forgive within themselves, without the burden of reconciliation.

Taking stock

With this in mind, I offer four steps to evaluate where you are on your forgiveness journey. A simple tool I developed, the Forgiveness Reconciliation Inventory, looks at each of these steps in more depth.

1. Talk to someone. You can talk to a friend, mentor, counselor, grandma—someone you trust. Talking makes the unmentionable mentionable. It can reduce pain and help you gain perspective on the person or event that left you hurt.
2. Examine if reconciliation is beneficial. Sometimes there are benefits to reconciliation. Broken relationships can be healed, and even strengthened. This is especially more likely when the offender expresses remorse and changes behavior—something the victim has no control over.
3. In some cases, however, there are no benefits, or the benefits are outweighed by the offender’s lack of remorse and change. In this case, you might have to come to terms with processing an emotional—or even tangible—debt that will not be repaid.
4. Consider your feelings toward the offender, the benefits and consequences of reconciliation, and whether they’ve shown any remorse and change. If you want to forgive them, determine whether it will be interpersonal—talking to them and trying to renegotiate the relationship—or intrapersonal—in which you reconcile your feelings and expectations within yourself.

Either way, forgiveness comes when we relinquish feelings of ill will toward another.

Richard Balkin is a distinguished professor of counselor education at the University of Mississippi.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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