Forgiveness is a recurrent theme in therapy: should I forgive my spouse, parent, friend? Most of us want to connect, to understand and feel understood, and it’s normal to spend quite a bit of time thinking about relationships. But what do we do when someone meaningful violates our expectations, crosses a boundary, or disappoints us in some important manner? If we’re not going to end the relationship, it’s common to consider forgiveness. Holding on to these hurts continues the pain and drains our energy and empathy.

Forgiveness has at least 2 parts, though most clients only ask about the first:

1. Should I try and find a way to reconcile with this person and try to continue our relationship, in some form

2. Should I find a way to let go of the suffering these actions have caused me

Support clients in processing their emotions around “letting go,” and while they should be cautious about reconciliation, only they can make that decision. Validate that there is often a lot of fear and uncertainty involved in choosing to end an important relationship.

Brene Brown said that before forgiveness can happen, a person has to go through a grieving process. For example, “it’s (emotionally) safer for me to hold on to this anger at my dad than it is to grieve what I needed but didn’t get from him while growing up, things that he was unable or unwilling to do.” Brene goes more in depth on this in episode 1012 of Mark Maron’s podcast.

A metaphor clients may appreciate is to imagine the person who hurt you dropped a red hot coal into your hand. Yes it’s painful and will scar—forgiveness doesn’t mean denying that. Key parts of forgiveness are dropping the coal yourself and working to heal the wound. Eventually you may be able to empathize more with the person who gave you the coal and ask yourself—who gave it to them?

It can be helpful to ask clients what forgiveness means to them and what function they think it serves. Oftentimes I find people are vague on these points, to their surprise. We talk it through and I mention some of the following if relevant. The words forgiveness, healing, and acceptance can have definitions that are very similar, depending on the context:

• Forgiveness: giving up on the hope for a better past

• Healing: coming to terms with things as they are (Jon Kabat Zinn)

• Acceptance: acknowledging things as they are. We’re not saying that acceptance means you’re happy that things turned out this way, we’re just letting go of wishing it had gone differently

Simply listening and witnessing clients’ suffering can go a long way, even more so if your client is also feeling some guilt, regret, or sadness about the situation or fractured relationship.

Interventions for letting go, that apply to various contexts:

• Increase your client’s compassion. We tend to judge other people based on behavior but ourselves only on intention. So, we’re good at giving ourselves a break for the same kinds of behavior we are so hard on others for. When we sincerely reflect on our own behavior we often can find moments where we’ve hurt others too. Put simply, when I’m frustrated with someone I like to ask myself “can I honestly say I’ve never done anything similar to this?”, and when I examine my relationships, the answer is often yes. This helps my mind soften, and I can begin engaging more with compassion, curiosity, and patience. It can help to ask someone close to you for feedback if you’re not finding anything yourself. Alternatively, if you’re hard on yourself and rarely/never practice self-compassion, you likely apply similar treatment to others. One solution to this can be finding ways to practice self-compassion (e.g., meditation, affirmations, etc).

• Write a letter (hand write or type) to the person without sending it. You could send one, but write a private letter first, saying everything you need to say. Pour your heart out: how you felt about the situation or at different times (feelings wheel), what you thought at the time vs now, what you wish had been different, and so on. This part of the forgiveness is an internal experience, and this letter is to aid in personal processing. You’ve got to “feel it to heal it.”

• Lots of people struggle more with forgiveness the ‘closer’ they are to that person, particularly with family members, which I regularly challenge. I ask things like “how would you feel if it was a friend who treated you this way? What if it was a coworker? A stranger?” I do this to help the client gain more perspective for decision making. It’s somehow controversial to lots of people, but I don’t appreciate blindly allowing family to treat others however they want. I think we are allowed to set healthy boundaries with family members while still maintaining relationships.

• Stranger in a coffee shop. Similar to the above, imagine you were standing in line at a coffee shop and the person next to you started talking to you. It’s a really surreal moment where they tell you that if you two become friends here are all the ways they’re going to treat you—briefly listing the highlights of the behaviors we’re considering forgiving. Then I ask the client if they’d want to pursue a friendship with this stranger, if that was how it was going to go. Would you want to invite someone and that behavior into your life? Why would you/wouldn’t you?

• Guided meditations. There are many excellent guided meditations on YouTube for forgiveness, e.g., by Jack Kornfield.

• Spirituality. If your client follows some spiritual practice that often provides an avenue for understanding and acting upon forgiveness.

• Depending on the specifics of the situation, grief work and related interventions can help your client process letting go of a relationship.

• There are many books you could recommend, such as the classic writing on forgiveness by Enright and Fitzgibbons, though be sure you check any recommendations for having a religious basis before suggesting them. Also, Esther Perel has great books on infidelity and what forgiveness and moving forward can look like there.

An important consideration is: what if the person your client had the issue with is dead now? Or at least completely refuses contact? I often bring this up with clients to highlight the internal nature of forgiveness. Regardless, when this is actually the case I lean toward interventions such as compassion and letter writing, then possibly the grief ones.

Reconciliation?

As far as reconciling with the person who needs forgiving, that’s a difficult and personal choice for your client to make. If they’re asking for help, I think my role is to assist in exploring the dynamic, why it happened, how likely it might be to occur again, how they’d feel, and what they may do. If clients intend to reconcile, I say “ok, but let’s make sure you’re doing that with your eyes wide open.”

I try to help clients take an honest personal inventory of why they want the relationship to continue, what boundaries they’ve put in place and how they’ll enforce them. As a side note, most boundaries we set are merely polite requests: please don’t say things like that to me, don’t act like that in my house, don’t call me outside of work hours etc. We need to know how to decide when to set boundaries where the other person no longer gets a choice, e.g., they can’t act appropriately at my house so they no longer get to come to my house, so we meet in public only, or only phone calls etc.

Positive outcomes are indicated by the other person taking responsibility for their unhealthy behaviour and making consistent efforts to grow, such as not repeating the behaviour, offering a clear explanation and sincere apology, possibly seeking counselling, educating themselves thoroughly on the issue, and showing patience while you take time to decide and work toward forgiveness.

In certain situations, I may lose perspective and feel frustrated with clients for deciding to attempt a reconciliation. At those times I need to remind myself about my role as a therapist and check for countertransference. Often, we all have to learn things the hard way, and who am I to short-cut someone else’s learning?

Self-forgiveness

Most of the above interventions can be adapted toward self-forgiveness. A main one is to increase their self-compassion. Particularly for guilt they’ve been carrying for years, have them reflect on who they were at that time, what they believed and felt. I try to help clients see they were doing their best, even if it didn’t look impressive or was just plain ugly. Every behavior is an attempt to meet a need, and often when we lash out at others we’re in turmoil ourselves and it’s an attempt at self-protection. Clients often can recognize this and increase their empathy for their younger self. Classic questions are “what would you say if your friend told you they did [the same thing as you] x years ago and they still felt guilty?” Or use the same question but about a younger sibling or the client’s child.

Conclusion

Forgiveness is tough. Personally, I need to extract lessons from the situation before I can fully let it go, in addition to the emotional processing. My mind can get ‘stuck’ worrying the thing will happen again because I haven’t changed anything to prevent it, so the more I can learn about what happened, why, and how to prevent it, the more I can relax and move on. Good luck out there.

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