How to Forgive Someone Who Hurt You

You are standing at the sink, or waiting at a red light, and it plays again without warning. The words they said. The look on their face. The moment you realised that someone you trusted, a parent, a partner, a friend, had done something you could not have imagined them doing. You have told yourself to let it go a hundred times. People have told you to move on. And still it comes back, with your heart beating faster and the old argument starting up in your head.

Perhaps you want to forgive. You may even feel you ought to, and feel guilty that you can't. Or perhaps part of you refuses, because forgiving would feel like saying it was fine, and it was not fine. Both of these are honest. Being hurt by someone close to you is one of the deepest pains a person can carry, and there is nothing weak or unspiritual about finding it hard to forgive.

So let us go slowly. Before asking how to forgive, it helps to see clearly what forgiveness is, what it is not, and why holding on costs you so much more than it costs them.

What forgiveness is not

Forgiveness is not excusing. It does not say the wrong was small, or that you overreacted, or that they had a right to do it. A wrong stays a wrong. Forgiveness is not forgetting either. You may remember what happened for the rest of your life, and that memory can become wisdom rather than a wound.

Above all, forgiveness is not the same as reconciling. You can forgive someone and still not let them back into your home, your bed or your confidence. If a person is unsafe, if they keep hurting you, staying away is not a failure of forgiveness. It is care for the life you have been given. The Grail Message is clear that real love is not soft-headed. In the lecture 'Salvation! Redemption!', Abd-ru-shin writes:

There is something else that frees you. Forgiveness cannot be demanded of you, not by the person who hurt you, not by family, not by anyone. The Grail Message puts it plainly, in the lecture 'The crucifixion of the Son of God and the Lord's Supper':

Notice those last words: quite freely. Forgiveness that is forced or performed to keep the peace is not yet forgiveness. It has to grow from within you. That takes the pressure off. You do not have to pretend today. You only have to be willing to begin.

Why holding on keeps you bound

When someone hurts us, it can feel as if resentment is a kind of protection, a wall that keeps them from doing it again. But look at what it actually does. Every time you replay the scene, you live it again. Every time you rehearse what you should have said, the other person is back in the room. Months or years later, they may have moved on, while you are still carrying them.

The Grail Message explains this through what it calls the Law of Reciprocal Action: what we send out returns to us. This is true not only of deeds but of thoughts and inner feelings. Our thoughts are not private daydreams that vanish. They go out and come back. In the lecture 'Awake!', Abd-ru-shin writes:

This is why bitterness grows. A thought of hatred, held and fed, returns heavier than it left, and draws more of its own kind to it. The Grail Message also speaks of threads of fate, woven by our own thinking, volition and actions, that tie us to what we have willed. Resentment spins such threads between you and the very person you most want to be free of. Elsewhere it says, simply, “Slander can again only produce slander, hate only hate, and murder only murder.”

None of this means you are to blame for being hurt. The wrong done to you belongs to the one who did it, and it will return to them by the same Law, without your help. What belongs to you is what you do with it now. The Buddha saw the same trap. He named the thoughts we turn over at night, “He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me,” and said that in those who harbour such thoughts, hatred will never cease. It is the turning over and over of the injury that keeps it alive.

Forgiveness frees the one who forgives

If resentment binds, forgiveness is the release. It does not set the other person free from the consequences of what they did. It sets you free from carrying them. You stop sending out the threads. Slowly, the knot that held you to that moment begins to loosen.

The great teachings meet here, each in its own way. The Buddha, who knew how hatred feeds on itself, gave this as one of his first sayings in the Dhammapada:

Love here does not mean warm feelings toward someone who wounded you. It means refusing to add more hatred to the world, including the world inside your own chest. Jesus asked even more. When Peter wanted to know where the limit lay, he received an answer that has startled people for two thousand years:

Seventy times seven is not a rule about letting people hurt you again and again. Read gently, it may be a picture of how forgiveness often works from the inside. You forgive, and the next morning the anger is back. So you forgive again. And again. Each time, the hold grows a little weaker. That is not failure. That is what forgiving looks like in a real human heart.

Jesus also tied our own forgiveness to the forgiveness we give: “Forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors.” The Grail Message explains why, in the lecture 'The Lord's Prayer':

This is not a threat. It is how the Laws of Creation, through which the Will of God works, are made. A heart clenched tight against another person cannot open fully to receive. When we let go of what is owed to us, we make room for what we ourselves need.

When the feeling won't come

You may agree with all of this and still feel nothing soften. That is very common. The feeling of forgiveness usually comes last, not first. What comes first is the decision, the quiet inner turning that the Grail Message calls volition: what you truly want, deep down, beneath the anger. You cannot command a feeling, but you can choose a direction.

So begin there. You might say, in your own words, I am not able to forgive yet, but I want to be free of this. That is enough to start. The Grail Message reminds us that we are not prisoners of our circumstances in the way we think. In the lecture 'The inner voice', Abd-ru-shin writes:

That can sound hard at first. But it holds a great hope. If we fasten the chains ourselves, then we can also, slowly, undo them. Each time the old scene starts to replay, you can gently turn your thoughts elsewhere, not by force, but by giving them something better to hold: a walk, a task done with care, a prayer, a kind act for someone else. The Grail Message warns that brooding pulls us down, and adds, “But a brisk cheerfulness tears apart the spell of brooding.”

Prayer can help where willpower runs out. You can bring the hurt honestly before God, without dressing it up, and ask for the strength to let it go. Jesus prayed for those who wronged Him: “Father, forgive them, for they don't know what they are doing.” You need not reach that height today. You can simply ask to be shown the next small step.

And if the hurt was severe, talking with someone you trust, or with a counsellor, is wise. Untangling a deep wound with help is not a lack of faith. It is often how the freedom you are reaching for finally arrives.

The person you are becoming

Forgiveness does not change the past. It changes who you are as you walk forward from it. The person who has forgiven is not someone who was never hurt. It is someone who was hurt, and chose not to let that hurt decide the rest of their life.

You will probably not finish this in a night. That is all right. Every time you choose release over rehearsal, something in you grows lighter. One day you may notice that you thought of them, and your heart did not race, and the old argument did not start. That is the quiet sign that you are free. It is closer than it feels tonight.