Who is Forgiveness For? (A People Pleaser’s Guide)

This topic has been one that is often a focus in many of my sessions and also obviously on some occasions in my own life.  With so many of my clients often trending more towards the area of people pleasers, forgiveness is something along with anger that is often a word they know, but one they may not adequately express.  For so many of us, the lesson we are taught from an early age is that we SHOULD forgive people.  Often forgiveness is a good course of action, but certain conditions need to be met first.  The problem though is often we charge into forgiveness without any of those conditions being met and we wind up feeling some kind of way about it.  That could mean we resent the person, we still feel hurt, we feel anger, or any other emotion which is being brought up.  Ideally, forgiveness comes when someone expresses remorse and apologizes for their actions or behaviors.  This also comes with the caveat that they will change and work to address that so it does not happen again.  In a perfect world forgiveness would be easy and would allow everyone to move on and leave something in the past.  However, that is seldom the case.  In fact, for many people forgiveness is almost a reflexive response, usually citing something along the lines of “I love them so I can’t stay mad at them” or “they did not mean it”.  I have offered plenty of excuses for people in my lifetime and I see them from clients on an almost weekly basis.   What I see much less frequently is the offending party being truly accountable for their actions.

The problem with forgiveness for most of us is that we treat it as a thing we give to other people to make their lives better.  We feel that WE must set down our grievance because if we do not we will allow them to suffer and that they do not deserve that.  That is only true if we are desiring to maintain and continue to grow or heal relationship with someone AND that they have changed and are doing growth work to ensure they do not make the same mistakes again.  In those situations, we have to make the choice that boils down to “is this person truly apologetic and are they being accountable and working to address this PLUS do I want to continue to have a relationship with them?”  If the answer to both parts of that is yes, then forgiveness is something we should be exploring and working through on our end.  They have been accountable and are working to ensure they do not harm us that way again.  If we want to deepen our relationship (familial, friendship or partnership all apply) with that person we have to forgive that action and let them know we trust them enough we are willing to move forward in that space.  Of course, if they repeat that action again then we will have to revisit if we want to continue the relationship. 

However, where we often run aground when it comes to forgiveness is when the person is not actually apologizing nor being accountable and they are making no changes and doing nothing to grow nor remedy our pain.  Often, the reason we feel pain or discomfort when we forgive someone is because we know that nothing has changed and we recognize it feels like we are giving them license to do it again.  We see this a great deal in abusive relationships.  In scenarios where the hurt party takes accountability (think “if only I had not asked a question when they were upset they would not have lashed out at me” or “I should have not asked them to meet my need in that moment, they were too stressed and I should know better” or similar) we wind up never actually being okay with forgiving the person but feeling like we have no choice.  Sometimes the language that the person uses either implies it or they say it directly.  “If you don’t like it you can leave” or “That’s just who I am, you need to be okay with it”.  Because we were trained to forgive and because many of us were taught that our existence was to take care of and prioritize other people’s needs and experiences, we try to take up less and less emotional space and that means we try to force ourselves into forgiveness.  To normalize that experience, I spent over four years trying to forgive someone who belittled me and who tore me down consistently and would threaten to leave or tell me I needed to just accept that because that is who they were.  I tried repeatedly to do so and made myself as small as possible and it was never enough.  Yet, all the while I did that, I felt anger, resentment, sadness, and frustration as well as confusion.  That person never deserved my forgiveness because they never changed.  Hell, arguably if there was any change it was them doubling down on how horribly they treated me.

I often describe forgiveness as like a bank debt to my clients.  Often a debt gets carried over year to year, and when we think of something like a mortgage it may be sold from one place to another.  If we were tending a financial accounting for each person in our life, it would become truly exhausting carrying the debts for everyone who harms us, takes advantage of us or did us wrong or dirty in any way.  Often, we may accidentally forgive some of those, because as we grow up, we forget about the kid who was an asshole on the playground, or when we remember it is so inconsequential that we just shake our head, roll our eyes, and move on with paying bills.  But there are people who will harm us greatly who will create such pain in our lives that it becomes nearly impossible to shake them from our memory.  Often, my clients who are abuse survivors will struggle because the person’s memory is so deeply implanted on them that everywhere they go and every place they visit they are reminded and haunted by that person.  That is perfectly normal and part of our grieving process.  As time goes on, we start to become more annoyed and frustrated at that.  We start to wonder why someone who was such a piece of shit in our lives gets headspace or emotional bandwidth now.  THIS is when forgiveness kicks in as something we should pursue.  At this point in our emotional accounting, it is costing us far more to carry this debt on our books than we can ever anticipate recouping.  So, we sit with that debt, we examine it, see how far back it reaches, how large the number has grown, and we make the executive decision that we are going to forgive this debt.  But not only are we forgiving the debt, we are also closing this account and banning this person from doing business with us ever again.  We take the hit and write off the debt we have carried over year after year, faithfully and now that the account has a zero balance it is closed, and that person’s name and picture goes down as not able to do business with our organization ever again for a failure to pay debts.  Then, we are finally free and able to move without that added weight of someone else’s debt on our accounts.