How to Forgive Someone Who Hurt You Deeply
Before You Read
Who is the person you have the hardest time forgiving and when you think about them right now, what do you feel in your body?
Have you ever confused forgiving someone with saying what they did was okay? How has that confusion affected your ability to move toward forgiveness?
What has holding this unforgiveness actually cost you in your peace, your relationships, your relationship with God?
Let’s be honest about something before we go any further.
Forgiveness is one of the most talked about topics in Christianity and one of the most consistently misunderstood. It gets preached often, simplified frequently, and practiced rarely because the version of forgiveness most people have been taught is either so easy it requires nothing or so demanding it seems impossible.
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The easy version says: just let it go. Choose to forgive. It’s a decision. Make it and move on. This version ignores the depth of real wounds and produces a performed forgiveness that sits on top of unprocessed pain leaving the wound intact underneath while the person tries to believe they’ve dealt with it.
The impossible version says: forgiveness means you have to feel warmly toward the person who hurt you. That you have to restore the relationship to what it was. That you have to trust them again. That you have to be okay with what they did. That you have to pretend it didn’t happen. This version is so far from what most people can honestly do that they give up before they start and live under the guilt of an unforgiveness they’ve decided is permanent because the alternative seems to require too much.
Both versions are wrong. And both of them are causing real harm to real people who are carrying real wounds and genuinely want to be free.
This is about what forgiveness actually is and the specific, honest, sometimes slow and nonlinear process of actually getting there.
What Forgiveness Is Not
Before we talk about what forgiveness is, we need to clear the ground by talking about what it isn’t because the misunderstandings are doing more damage than the honest wounds.
Forgiveness is not saying what happened was okay. This is the most common and most damaging confusion. If what the person did was genuinely wrong if it was abuse, betrayal, cruelty, injustice forgiveness does not reclassify it. The wrong is still wrong. Forgiveness does not require you to pretend otherwise.
Forgiveness is not forgetting. The phrase forgive and forget has no basis in Scripture and does not reflect how human memory works. You cannot choose to stop remembering something significant. And the attempt to perform forgetting on top of genuine memory produces a dishonesty that makes real healing impossible. Forgiveness does not require amnesia. It requires the decision to stop letting the memory run your present.
Forgiveness is not the same as trust. Trust is earned through consistent behavior over time. Forgiveness is given regardless of whether the person has earned it. You can forgive someone completely and still not trust them and in many situations, not trusting them is the wise and healthy response. Forgiveness releases the debt. It does not restore access.
Forgiveness is not reconciliation. Reconciliation requires two people both willing, both honest, both committed to the work of rebuilding what was broken. Forgiveness requires only one. You can forgive someone who is not sorry. You can forgive someone who is no longer in your life. You can forgive someone who has died. Reconciliation may or may not follow forgiveness. But forgiveness does not require it.
Forgiveness is not a feeling. This is critical. You cannot wait until you feel like forgiving before you begin the process because the feeling almost never comes before the decision. Forgiveness begins as a decision that is made repeatedly, in the absence of the feeling, until eventually the feeling follows. Sometimes. In time. But the decision comes first.
What Forgiveness Actually Is
Forgiveness is the decision to release the debt.
When someone wrongs you significantly, they create an obligation they owe you something. An apology. An explanation. Acknowledgment of what they did. Restoration of what they took. And when they don’t pay when they walk away without settling what they owe, or when they can’t pay, or when they don’t even know they owe you are left holding the account.
Unforgiveness is the choice to keep holding the account. To maintain the record of what is owed. To stay in the position of creditor waiting for payment that may never come, carrying the weight of an open account that is costing you more than whatever you’re waiting to collect.
Forgiveness is the decision to close the account. Not because the debt wasn’t real. Not because what they owe doesn’t matter. But because you are handing the account to God the just judge who sees everything, misses nothing, and will settle every account in His own time and His own way and releasing yourself from the burden of carrying it.
This is what Paul means in Colossians 3:13 when he says forgive as the Lord forgave you. God did not forgive you because you deserved it. He did not forgive you because the debt was small. He forgave you a real, specific, costly debt because love chose to absorb the cost rather than require the payment. And the experience of having been forgiven that much is the ground from which our forgiveness of others is supposed to grow.
The person who has truly reckoned with how much they have been forgiven is the person who finds forgiveness of others most accessible not because the other person’s offense doesn’t matter but because they have been on the receiving end of something so undeserved that it reframes everything.
The Sermon: The Weight You Were Never Meant to Carry
In Matthew 18, Jesus told a parable about a king who settled accounts with his servants. One servant owed an amount so astronomically large ten thousand talents that it was essentially unpayable. A lifetime of labor would not have covered it. And the king forgave it. All of it. The entire impossible debt released.
That servant went out and found a fellow servant who owed him a hundred denarii a significant but manageable amount. And he grabbed him by the throat and demanded payment. When the man couldn’t pay, he had him thrown in prison.
The king heard what happened and called the first servant back. And he said: “You wicked servant. I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not also have had compassion on your fellow servant, even as I had pity on you?”
The servant was handed over to the jailers.
The parable is uncomfortable because it implies something we don’t always want to sit with: the forgiveness we have received is so vastly larger than any forgiveness we are being asked to extend that the comparison should reframe everything. The person who wronged you owes you really, genuinely owes you. And what they owe you is a hundred denarii against a debt of ten thousand talents that you yourself have been released from.
This is not minimizing what was done to you. It is putting it in the context of the larger accounting the one in which you are not only a creditor but a debtor who has been extraordinarily, undeservedly, completely forgiven.
The unforgiveness you are carrying is not just hurting you spiritually. It is a weight you were never designed to carry a debt collection that belongs to God, not to you. And every day you carry it is a day you are burdened by something that was always meant to be in His hands.
The Message
Here is the most practical thing I can say about forgiveness:
It is a process, not an event. And it almost always has to be chosen more than once.
The person who thinks they have forgiven and then finds the anger rising again when they see the person’s name or hear a song that reminds them or encounter the wound in an unexpected moment that person has not failed at forgiveness. They have encountered the nonlinear reality of it. Forgiveness is not a single decision that resolves everything permanently. It is a decision that has to be renewed sometimes daily, sometimes multiple times a day until the weight finally lifts.
And the weight does lift. Not immediately. Not on a schedule. But for the people who keep making the decision who keep handing the account to God even when the anger comes back, who keep choosing to release what they keep wanting to pick back up something shifts. Slowly. Genuinely. The grip loosens. The wound loses its power to run the present. The person who hurt you becomes someone who wronged you rather than the defining fact of your interior life.
That is freedom. It does not come quickly. But it comes.
The Practical Process What Forgiveness Actually Looks Like Step by Step
Step one: Name the wound honestly. Before you can forgive, you have to know specifically what you are forgiving. Not in general specifically. What did they do? What did it cost you? What did it take from you that you didn’t give them permission to take? Name it. Write it down if you need to. The vague forgiveness of a vague wound does not produce real freedom.
Step two: Feel what you actually feel. The anger, the grief, the betrayal, the sense of injustice these are real and they need to be acknowledged before they can be released. The attempt to skip to forgiveness before you’ve felt what the wound actually produced is not spiritual maturity. It is suppression. Feel it. Bring it to God. Let it be what it is before you try to release it.
Step three: Make the decision. Not because you feel like it. Not because the person deserves it. Because you are choosing to hand the account to God. Say it out loud if you have to. Write it down. I am choosing to forgive [name] for [specific thing]. I am releasing this debt to God. It is no longer mine to collect.
Step four: Repeat the decision. When the anger comes back and it will make the decision again. Not because the first decision didn’t count but because forgiveness for deep wounds is not a one-time event. It is a practice. Every time you feel the weight rising, make the choice again. Hand it back to God. Release it again.
Step five: Pray for them. This is the step that feels most impossible and produces the most transformation. Jesus said to pray for those who persecute you not because they deserve it but because prayer changes the person who prays. It is nearly impossible to genuinely pray for someone’s wellbeing and simultaneously maintain white-knuckled resentment toward them. The prayer does something in you that the decision alone cannot fully accomplish.
Step six: Watch for the fruit. Over time in weeks or months or sometimes years watch for the signs that the forgiveness is taking root. The wound that used to run your present losing some of its grip. The person’s name coming up without the same immediate physical response. The ability to think about what happened without being overtaken by it. These are not signs that the wound wasn’t real. They are signs that the weight is genuinely lifting.
Closing Journal Prompts
Name the specific wound and the specific person. Write it down the full, unminimized version of what they did and what it cost you.
What has carrying this unforgiveness actually cost you in your peace, your relationships, your spiritual life? Be honest about the price.
What is the specific fear or resistance that makes forgiveness feel impossible or wrong in this situation? Write about that resistance without judgment.
Write out the forgiveness decision in your own words as specific and as honest as you can make it. Then write a prayer for the person who hurt you. Even one sentence. Even if it’s hard.
Today’s Prayer:Lord, I want to be free of this. I want to stop carrying a debt that is costing me more than anything I’ll ever collect. But I need to be honest first I am angry. What was done to me was wrong. It cost me real things. And the part of me that wants justice, that wants them to pay, that wants to hold the account until something settles that part is real and I am not going to pretend it isn’t. So here it is. All of it. The wound and the anger and the justice I am still waiting for. I am handing it to You not because I feel like it, not because they deserve it, but because I trust that You are the just judge and that the account is safer in Your hands than mine. I choose to forgive. Help me keep choosing it until the weight lifts. And do in me what I cannot do in myself make the decision real, make the release complete, and give me the freedom that only comes from letting go of what I was never meant to carry. Amen.
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