How to Forgive Someone (Without Excusing What They Did)
Forgiveness is not a debt you owe, a verdict that the harm was acceptable, or a door you must reopen – it is something you may choose, in your own form and your own time, for your own sake.
Take the free Freedom Assessment →Most people searching for how to forgive someone are not short of advice. They are short of permission: to still be angry, to not be ready, to forgive and keep their distance, or to find that “forgiveness” is not the right word at all.
Mariyah Acka’a’s Who Told You That? The Beliefs That Keep You Small, and the Choices That Set You Free gives forgiveness a whole chapter – Chapter 24, “Forgiveness and Gratitude” – and, just before it, an Interlude called “Making Peace With What Was”, for the work that often has to come first.
If what you are carrying involves abuse, trauma or a relationship that is not safe, please don’t do this alone. A counsellor or therapist can offer what no article can, and you will find support lines on our safeguarding page. Your safety comes before any question of forgiveness.
What forgiveness is not
The book starts by clearing away what forgiveness gets confused with. It is not reconciliation: “You can forgive someone completely without ever resuming the relationship.” And then, simply: “Forgiveness requires only one.”
“It is not absolution; it does not declare that what happened was acceptable. It is not forgetting.”
Nor is it weakness. In the book’s words, forgiveness is “an active, intentional, often difficult choice to stop allowing the past to write the terms of your present”.
For anyone who has forgiven but still has to deal with the person, Chapter 21 separates four things that are routinely collapsed into one: forgiveness (internal, one-sided), civility (conduct), reconciliation (“requires two people, both willing. You do not control it and you are not failing if it never happens”) and restored regard, which “is not owed”.
Do you have to forgive?
No. The book is unambiguous on this. When it describes the space that can open after long, honest work, it says:
“In that space, forgiveness becomes possible, if it is the right word for what you are carrying. Not mandatory, not immediate. Not owed to anyone.”
Mariyah writes that friends and family “repeatedly asked me to forgive” over the years. The Interlude lists what making peace is not, and “forgiving before you are ready” is on that list, alongside pretending it was okay and performing a resolution for people who are more comfortable when you stop talking about it. On anger, it is direct: “Your anger was justified. It may still be.”
Forgiveness is also not the only way to set something down, or a condition of healing. The Interlude describes making peace as work that can come before forgiveness, after it, or in its place. The workbook says it plainly: “Forgiveness may still come later, in Chapter 24, or not at all. Either way, you can set the weight down.” For some relationships, the book offers the word sankora – “right in the heart, wrong in the reading” – with a firm caution: some people act from cruelty, and you are under no obligation to invent a loving motive. (More on this in grieving the life you expected.)
How to forgive someone: a practice, not a moment
In Chapter 24, Mariyah tells the story of forgiving her former husband after a long marriage ended. For a long time she did not want to forgive; her anger felt like protection. What came, years later, came slowly and on her own terms – and it began with herself: “the one who had trusted, who had dared to love and dared to try.” Only then: “I forgave him. I would not, however, forget.” She did not return to the relationship. Forgiveness, she writes, became “not a door opened towards me, but a door I opened back towards myself.”
The book is honest that forgiveness is often “a practice, uneven, non-linear, occasionally interrupted by days when you are right back in the anger you thought you had left behind. That is not failure.”
It also describes four faces forgiveness can take – reconciliation (when available and chosen by both), making peace with the situation, a boundary, and self-restoration. Of the boundary, it says: “You can wish someone well – genuinely, without bitterness – from behind a door that remains closed.” And: “None of these, in my opinion, is more spiritually advanced than the others.”
If they are not sorry. When you forgive someone who has never asked, and may never ask, you are not declaring the harm equal to your own integrity. What you release is “the demand that the universe resolve that difference on a timeline you must personally witness”. As Mariyah writes of her own experience: “I didn’t need to witness retribution to have peace.”
A first step. Tool 24 in the Choose Forward workbook, The Open Door, is a three-week protocol: naming precisely what you are carrying, then a letter you never send, ending with one sentence: “I am setting this down, not because what happened was acceptable, but because carrying it is no longer the price I am willing to pay.” If that sentence is not true for you, the workbook invites you to write your own.
Gratitude after hurt. The third week turns to gratitude – but not the “everything happens for a reason” kind. The workbook calls it “the gratitude of what survived”: “It does not require you to be glad it happened. It requires you to notice what is still standing.” Mariyah describes her own gratitude the same way: “Not without complexity, not without still wishing some of it had been different.”
How to forgive yourself
The book calls self-forgiveness “the harder direction”, and begins with a distinction that can lift real weight. There are two shapes. One is forgiving yourself for harm you actually caused. The other is making peace with an earlier self who did nothing wrong – who trusted, loved, tried. “That self does not need a pardon, because there was no offence. What needs releasing is the verdict you passed on them afterwards.”
If you did cause harm, the steps are “not complicated, but they are not easy”: name what you did honestly, understand the conditions under which it happened, make amends where you genuinely can, decide what you will do differently, and do it. Then extend to yourself the compassion you would offer someone you love. The book cites research by Juliana Breines and Serena Chen finding that responding to a mistake with self-compassion rather than self-criticism increased people’s motivation to make amends and to improve.
Where to go deeper
- Read Chapter 24, “Forgiveness and Gratitude”, and the Interlude, “Making Peace With What Was”, in Who Told You That? – or read Chapter 1 free to begin at the beginning.
- Work through Tool 24 – The Open Door in the Choose Forward workbook. If forgiveness is not true for you yet, start with the workbook’s Interlude, including “Making Peace With Yourself” for blame you carry for things done to you.
- The Forgiveness Path is a private, guided activity (20–40 minutes) in the Play Suite on the games page. It will not tell you to forgive; it helps you see what you are carrying, what it costs, and what release on your own terms might look like.
- Hold Both is always free – a short practice for holding two true things at once, like love and the wound.
- Take the free Freedom Assessment to see where old beliefs land hardest.
Forgiveness, if it comes, is yours to define. So is the pace. And so is the choice not to.
Which belief is keeping you small?
The Freedom Assessment takes five minutes and shows which of four belief patterns is most active in your life – and where it is showing up most.
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