When Forgiveness Becomes Another Demand

There is a sentence people often hear after they have been badly hurt:

You have to forgive.

It is usually said as though forgiveness were the final evidence that something has been properly worked through. If you are still angry, perhaps you are stuck. If you still want consequences, perhaps you have not healed. If you do not forgive, perhaps you are allowing the person who hurt you to continue controlling your life.

I have never been entirely comfortable with that. Not because I think forgiveness has no value, but because I am not sure it remains forgiveness once it becomes an obligation.

I recently listened to the Italian psychoanalyst Gabriella Tupini speaking about forgiveness. At one point, she breaks the Italian word perdono apart as a way of thinking about it: per-dono. Something given to another person without making them pay for it.

It is not an etymological argument. It is a way of thinking about what forgiveness asks of the person who gives it.

That stayed with me.

A gift that must be given is no longer quite a gift.

And yet forgiveness is very often spoken about in exactly those terms. You should forgive your parents because resentment is bad for you. You should forgive your partner because otherwise you remain tied to what happened. You should forgive because good people forgive, because mature people move on, because holding on to anger will eventually make you like the person who hurt you.

Sometimes these statements are offered with genuine concern. The person saying them may want the injured person to have a life that is no longer organised around what happened.

But concern can still become pressure.

Something shifts when forgiveness stops being one possible response and becomes evidence of whether somebody has recovered properly.

Religion can make that expectation even stronger.

Christianity places forgiveness close to the centre of its moral life. There is something radical and beautiful in the idea that we should not spend our lives reproducing the injury we received, or allow revenge to become the organising principle of who we become.

But there is another way that message can function in ordinary relationships.

One person causes the harm, and the other person is then asked to perform the virtue.

Someone lies, betrays, humiliates, abandons, exploits or abuses another person. Eventually they regret it. They apologise. Perhaps they confess. Perhaps they want another chance. Slowly, the moral attention can begin to move away from what they did and towards the response of the person who was harmed.

The question changes from What did you do, and what are you going to do about it? to Why can't you forgive?

Now the injured person's character is under examination too. Are they generous enough? Are they capable of letting go? Are they becoming bitter? Are they spiritually mature enough to move beyond what happened?

That shift interests me because it is possible to begin with compassion and end by placing another obligation on the person who was already harmed.

There is a sequence in Jewish thought that I find useful here.

In Maimonides' account of teshuvah, wrongdoing against another person is not resolved simply because somebody repents privately or observes Yom Kippur. If something was taken, it has to be returned. The person who caused the harm must make amends, approach the injured person and ask to be forgiven.

What matters to me in that sequence is the order. The wrongdoing comes first, followed by recognition, responsibility and some attempt at repair. Forgiveness enters only after the person who caused the harm has begun to do something about it.

The work begins with the offender.

Maimonides does not suggest that the injured person should remain permanently unreachable. Once the person who caused the harm has genuinely tried to repair it and has repeatedly asked for forgiveness, there is also an expectation that forgiveness should not be withheld out of cruelty.

So this is not a tradition in which forgiveness is unimportant. Quite the opposite. But forgiveness appears inside a moral sequence rather than replacing the sequence.

I find that psychologically important because forgiveness can otherwise become a way of closing an account that has not actually been settled.

The person who caused the harm feels remorse. They apologise. They want peace. Perhaps everybody around them wants peace too. Meanwhile, the injured person is still angry, and suddenly their anger begins to look like the remaining problem.

But perhaps the unfinished part of the story is somewhere else.

Perhaps the truth has still not been fully told. Perhaps nothing meaningful has been repaired. Perhaps responsibility has been acknowledged in language but avoided in practice. Perhaps the person asking for forgiveness mainly wants relief from what it feels like not to have been forgiven.

Christianity itself is also more complicated than the popular instruction to simply forgive.

Catholic teaching, for example, explicitly distinguishes forgiveness from reparation. The Catechism says that absolution removes sin but does not repair all the damage caused by it. Where another person has been harmed, there remains a duty to repair what can be repaired.

That distinction matters because forgiveness should not be asked to do the work of justice.

It cannot return money that was taken, restore years that were lost, make an unsafe person safe or rebuild trust simply because somebody has said they are sorry. It does not turn an apology into access, and it does not erase consequences.

There is another aspect of forgiveness that I think we talk about less.

Forgiving can place us in a morally attractive position.

We become the compassionate person, the mature person, the person who rose above what happened. The other person becomes the recipient of our generosity.

There can be something deeply human and generous in that. There can also be something more complicated.

Forgiveness can become part of how we want to see ourselves.

I do not think that makes forgiveness false. It simply means that our motives are rarely pure enough to be treated as obvious.

Sometimes we forgive because we are ready. Sometimes because we are tired. Sometimes because we want the relationship back. Sometimes because we cannot tolerate our own anger. Sometimes because everyone around us is uncomfortable with it. Sometimes because being the bigger person is easier than admitting that part of us still wants justice.

All of those possibilities deserve examination.

Psychological research gives us good reasons to take forgiveness seriously. Forgiveness-focused interventions have been associated with reductions in distress and improvements in psychological well-being.

That matters.

But something being potentially beneficial does not make it morally compulsory.

A person can recover without arriving at the emotional conclusion we prefer.

There may be experiences after which somebody never feels forgiveness. They may understand what happened and understand the history of the person who hurt them. They may stop wanting revenge. The anger may become smaller, the event may stop organising their daily life, and they may build something entirely different around themselves.

And they may still not forgive.

I am not sure why that has to be considered unfinished.

There is a persistent idea in spiritual and therapeutic language that if the wound no longer governs us, forgiveness should eventually appear.

I am not convinced.

Sometimes the opposite of hatred is not forgiveness. It is indifference.

A person may reach a point where they no longer need the other person to understand, apologise, suffer or become somebody different in order for their own life to continue. The person who hurt them simply stops occupying so much psychological space.

They become part of the history rather than the organising principle of the present.

There is something different about that.

Forgiveness still contains a relationship of sorts. One person gives something and the other receives it.

Indifference can end the transaction altogether.

For some people, forgiveness may be the most meaningful conclusion possible. For others it may be reconciliation, justice, distance, or simply the day when they realise that the person who hurt them has become largely irrelevant to the life they are now living.

I do not think we need one morally approved ending.

What matters to me is that the injured person is not required to offer one more thing to someone who has already taken something from them.

Forgiveness, if it comes, should remain theirs to give.

Otherwise, it is no longer much of a gift.

Sources

Gabriella Tupini, public commentary on forgiveness and her use of per-dono as a way of describing forgiveness as something freely given rather than commanded.

Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Teshuvah 2:9–10, on restitution, asking forgiveness and the injured person's eventual obligation not to remain indefinitely unappeased after sincere attempts at repair.

Catechism of the Catholic Church, §§1459 and 2487, on satisfaction and reparation remaining necessary even after absolution or forgiveness.

Wade, N. G., Hoyt, W. T., Kidwell, J. E. M. & Worthington, E. L. (2014). Efficacy of Psychotherapeutic Interventions to Promote Forgiveness: A Meta-Analysis. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 82(1), 154–170.