Have you ever struggled to forgive someone? Has the idea of forgiving someone ever felt more painful than healing, as though you were betraying yourself to forgive someone else?

Let’s talk about that. 

First, I want to make sure we’re on the same page regarding what forgiveness is in the context of this post. I recognize that various viewpoints exist regarding what forgiveness is, and each with its own interpretation of what forgiveness entails.

Here, we are not considering any of the moral arguments or religious-related definitions; instead, here we will use Merriam-Webster’s definition of forgiveness – “to cease to feel resentment against (an offender).” It is the idea that to forgive someone is to release the negative emotions one has against someone else.

Forgiveness in this sense is generally encouraged throughout the world, and it’s shown to have numerable health benefits. Releasing negative emotions can reduce your stress and anxiety, improve your mental health and focus, and can lead to enhanced relationships with others. Forgiveness often leads to a deep sense of freedom and peace.

“Forgiving isn’t something you do for someone else. It’s something you do for yourself. It’s saying ‘You’re not important enough to have a stranglehold on me.’ It’s saying, ‘You don’t get to trap me in the past. I am worthy of a future’.”

Jodi Picoult

However – healthy though forgiveness may be – there are often many different barriers to forgiveness, and at times it can feel like self-betrayal to forgive someone else. One reason for that is sometimes we rely on our pain to validate our experience.

And, you know what?

Pain isn’t always a bad thing.

Pain is your protector.

From a physical injury standpoint, pain is a messenger that contributes to keeping us safe. When we touch a hot stove, we feel pain, and that pain tells us to pull our hand away quickly before we burn ourselves further.

When it comes to painful emotions, those too can indicate something that’s negatively impactful; for example, we might get angry when our boundaries are crossed, or we might feel betrayed when someone we trusted is shown to be dishonest. 

Pain tells us something is not quite right, and when we feel pain we search for the source of our hurt.

When wronged, we search for validation.

I’ll first give the light example of someone eating your favorite cupcake. Your one and only cupcake. On your birthday, no less.

You see that someone has eaten your one and only cupcake, and you feel the shock. You’re first confused, then distraught. Anger begins to climb, and you commence the search for the wrongdoer.

In this case, you might seek revenge, to drag a confession from the offenders lips that they regret the pain and unresolved dessert cravings that they’ve left you with.

Or, after expressing your anger, you might seek an apology if they’re someone you can trust or someone with whom you want to continue having any kind of relationship.

Whether it’s searching for revenge or an apology, both are examples of attempts to receive validation for your experience from the offender.

But what if you don’t get that validation? 

When we cannot validate our experience, we cannot release our pain.

To add to that, when your experience is invalidated, emotional pain tends to worsen and grow.

Now, you may be thinking that you don’t need that much validation for a stolen cupcake, but what if the situation were different? What if instead we were speaking about someone who cheated on you, or betrayed you in business? 

These can be incredibly painful events, and often require much work to heal from. During this process, we may fall into the trap of thinking that if we can convince the other person that they’ve wronged us, and if we get this validation from our offender, then it might relieve us of our pain, which is the only thing presently validating our negative experience.

But, in these cases, it may be that our experience and pain won’t be acknowledged at all, either by the offender or anyone else; instead, we may be hit with statements such as, “They have a point,” “Well, maybe you weren’t meeting their needs,” or ” Have you considered what you could have done to prevent it?”. In other cases, it may be that we are faced with silence, with no one willing to back us up.

Relying solely on external validation for healing is problematic because it means we are putting our emotional health in the hands of a second party; It also may lead to thinking that if we can’t convince this other person that what they did was wrong – if they can’t validate our experience – then we can’t let go of our pain because it’s the only thing left validating our experience.

Pain as a tool for validation turns forgiveness into self-invalidation.

Relying on our pain to validate our experience can wreak havoc in our life and in our relationships; In addition, it makes forgiveness impossible. We come to the following belief cascade:

• My pain validates my experience.
• Forgiveness is a release of pain.
• Without my pain, I can no longer validate my experience.
• Forgiveness will lead to the invalidation of my experience.

This kind of belief system and use of pain to validate our experience will lead to difficulties with healing and forgiveness; We might struggle to stand calmly in the room with our offender because that might send the message to everyone that what happened to us wasn’t wrong, or that it didn’t matter, leading to even more invalidation, and potentially a feeling of self abandonment. 

Suddenly forgiveness is no longer a tool for healing, but instead a tool for inflicting even more abuse.

Learn how to self-validate.

The argument here is not that all external validation is bad when it comes to healing; in fact, it can be incredibly helpful to find people who resonate with your experience and who can empathize with you. For this reason, I do encourage you to find people who make you feel seen in your suffering.

However, it’s important to acknowledge that your immediate environment may not provide the validation you’re searching for, and relying solely on external validation in this case will lead to further suffering. In contrast, self-validation will give you agency and freedom to pursue your own healing, and approach forgiveness when you are ready.

So, how can you self-validate and pursue forgiveness?

Practice self-compassion.

Your experience matters.

You’re allowed to feel hurt. You’re allowed to feel angry, betrayed, bewildered, or any other emotion that arises. Remember, emotions are always valid, it’s the thoughts behind them that we must observer to truly understand what our path to healing will look like.

Take time to self reflect, and allow yourself to accept that you feel the way you feel, and you don’t have to prove to anyone that you should or shouldn’t feel any other way. Your experience doesn’t have to make sense to anyone else in order for it to be valid.

Focus on personal growth.

It’s not to say that every painful event you experience has a purpose and is for the sake of your own personal growth; rather, it can be helpful to make meaning out of your suffering so that your painful experience can serve a purpose and allow you to grow.

Identifying the ways in which you’ve grown can help build resilience, allowing you to bounce back from setbacks and challenges stronger than before. By developing resilience, you validate your ability to overcome adversity and navigate difficult emotions associated with forgiveness.

Create new habits or boundaries.

Instead of relying on your pain to be the evidence of injury, instead choose to change your behavior in a way that honors you.

Too often when we talk about moving on or forgiving someone, this is confused with repairing a relationship, or going back to what once was.

Forgiveness is not forgetting, letting someone off the hook, or a lack of boundaries, nor does it require the repair of relationships. Forgiveness is a release of emotion and an honoring of your own boundaries – and that might come with new rules with regard to how you interact with the other person such that you reduce the chance of being hurt again.

These new habits or boundaries might include spatial or physically boundaries, or limits on conversation – maybe no verbal contact is allowed. In these cases, you show up in the world as your best self, and let your actions and boundaries speak for your experience, rather than your pain.

The importance of pursuing empathy. 

Once you’ve taken the time to self-validate, pursuing empathy can greatly facilitate healing and forgiveness. Note, empathy is not condoning the actions of the person who hurt you.

Empathy allows you to understand the potential whys behind the hurtful behavior, regardless of whether or not you agree with them, or believe that you deserved to be hurt.

Empathy allows you to see how people can make mistakes, and that sometimes the actions of others have nothing to do with you, and everything to with themselves and their journey in life. Reaching this understanding can lesson pain, or the need to prove that your experience is valid, because in the end, it’s not about you. It’s about the other person.