On Forgiveness: Why Cruelty is Never Justified

Your partner forgets to call you back when he promised he would—for the third time this week. Instantly, you feel a surge in your chest. You want to shout, scream, or maybe do the exact opposite: completely shut down and withdraw.

Or maybe your friend shows up 45 minutes late to dinner. You’re sitting there at the table alone, watching the clock tick, feeling smaller and more invisible by the minute.

When people treat us poorly, our instinct is to hit back, match their energy, or ice them out. But over time, I’ve realized that retaliation doesn’t fix the ache. Instead, two specific shifts in perspective completely changed how I handle these moments, allowing me to hold my boundaries without losing my peace.

The 5 Steps to Untangling the Pain

Before you react, lash out, or shut down, you have to untangle their mess from your worth. When someone lets you down or hurts you, take a breath and walk yourself through these five actual steps:

• 1. What’s coming up for you?

  This is very important. Actually let yourself feel everything. What is coming up right now? It doesn’t have to be rational or make sense. Don’t try to reject your own feelings just because you think they shouldn’t be there. Instead, actually listen to everything your thoughts are saying. Just sit there and be with them. Let yourself be seen by you.

• 2. How is their behavior connected to their own story?

  Look at them with curiosity. How could their past experiences, their old habits, or the learned ways they grew up have made them act this way in this moment? How might they see the world differently, and how could that contribute to how they act?

• 3. How is their behavior disconnected from your story? How could this feeling be connected to a social norm, assumption, or established rule you thought applied to everyone, even if you think it's morally wrong? How could your expectations be from your upbringing experience as well, your habits, or your understanding about life?

• 4. How might they truly not understand how this affects you? How might they be clueless?

  Think about the gap between you two. How could it be that this pain is happening entirely inside your internal world, and they simply don’t have the same understanding of how it actually feels in your body right now?

• 5. How would you like to be seen?

  How will you let this person know your internal world? How can you communicate what’s happening for you so they can see you, understand you better, and truly know what it looks like inside your mind and heart?

Take the friend who was 45 minutes late. It’s easy to assume they don’t respect your time because they don’t care about you. But when you walk through these steps, you realize people are often just locked inside their own heads. They genuinely might not grasp the emotional weight of their actions inside your body.

When you see this, you realize that the best way forward is always to communicate what you need with love. And yes, that is entirely possible. You can actually say “no” with a smile on your face. You can be deeply understanding of someone else’s flaws while still showing up, fiercely, for yourself. It doesn’t have to be one or the other. It really doesn’t.

Your Body is Paying the Bill for Your Anger

Here is the hardest truth to swallow about holding onto a grudge: When you refuse to forgive, your own body pays the bill.

Every single time you replay how unfair it was, every time you stew over how badly they hurt you, you are the one feeling the physical pain. You are the one flooding your system with cortisol. You feel the anger burning inside, your nervous system gets totally disregulated, and you slide right back into a stressed out fight-or-flight response.

Living in that constant state of stress eventually breaks you down. It causes physical disease, leaves you utterly exhausted, and drags you into depression.

In the end, you are the one carrying the heavy, toxic luggage. The destruction happens inside of you. But it doesn’t stop there. Emotions are highly contagious. Whatever distress you are harboring, you naturally spread it to the people around you—your friends, your partner, and especially your kids. That is exactly how generational trauma gets passed down from one lifetime to the next.

Let the Cycle End With You

Forgiveness isn’t about letting someone off the hook for bad behavior, and it definitely doesn’t mean letting them walk all over you. You can forgive someone while firmly locking the door to protect your boundaries.

By choosing to let go, you are simply deciding to send love and healing to the people who treated you poorly because you recognize how broken they must be to act that way.

Look at the pain you’ve experienced and see it as an injustice that ends today. Look at it and say, “Never again.” Decide right now that the cycle of hurt stops with you.

When you clear out the resentment, you stop the poison from spreading—and instead, you become a fountain of love for everyone else around you.