I used to work as a personal trainer, which would involve spending a lot of time with people, often discussing their lives in some depth – especially what was causing them stress or upset on the day. Sometimes we wouldn’t even do a training session, we would simply sit and talk.

This meant that I got to know some people pretty well. And, being the person I am, I can’t help but care. The natural rescuer in me likes to look after people. For some of my clients, I invested a fair amount of emotional energy. I would end up knowing all sorts of details about their life that very few others, if any, would know. I felt important to them.

But when those PT sessions ended, because they moved away, changed gyms or they had simply run the course, I would never hear from most of them again. And that often hurt. It felt like the time that we had spent together meant nothing to them. It felt like a rejection, like I didn’t matter, like I was dispensable.

And I would feel some resentment, too. How could people simply drop me out of their lives like that? Not even a follow up message now and again? I had given them my time and energy, but they weren’t showing any level of care in return. 

Now that I work as a coach, however, I understand that it was always a transactional relationship – they were using me as a confidential and kind ear in the moment, and they were paying for the time. I wasn’t their friend, or confidant, I was just there and they trusted me. It’s exactly as it should be. That’s actually the coaching business model!

It took me a long time to work it out and forgive though. Firstly, I had to realise that my expectations were unrealistic and unfair – clients are not friends, no matter how intimate it may feel.

I had to accept that the care was always going to be one sided; they had never agreed to care for me. Any expectations or hopes that I had around that were my mistake, and were inappropriate. It was silly to think that people paying for personal training sessions would want to be a friend. 

Finally, I realised that it wasn’t even about those clients. It was about a much deeper need for shared intimacy that I was seeking in the wrong place. Their ‘rejection’ and ‘dismissal’ was just me dumping my emotional baggage on to a perfectly normal and healthy goodbye.

And that’s the journey of forgiveness. It’s about spotting where we are hanging on to pain, discovering why it hurts, why we are choosing to relive it over and over and finally freeing ourselves from it. In my case, I wasn’t really forgiving anyone else (because they had done nothing wrong), it was a case of letting go of resentment and hurt that I felt, and learning more about myself.

Are you carrying resentment in your relationships? 

Here are a few examples:

Maybe your partner avoids discussing their feelings and you feel that it’s blocking your relationship from growing, so you resent what you see as a lack of commitment.

Perhaps a friend will always accept drinks from you, but never offers to reciprocate? You feel that they are taking advantage of you.

Perhaps your partner kissed someone else while drunk and keeps telling you that it didn’t mean anything. But, to you, it means everything.

Are you carrying resentment about how your mother ignores the fact that you are an adult and talks to you like a naughty child? Yet you don’t feel that you can address it without causing even more conflict, so you resent your powerlessness and you resent her for putting you in that position.

The more that we can work out what we are still carrying resentment around, the easier it is to work towards forgiveness and to potentially improve those relationships.

What Is Forgiveness?

Forgiveness can be a challenging concept to embrace in our relationships. It might feel like we are letting someone off the hook or compromising our own boundaries. However, holding onto resentment can harm our relationships and our overall well-being. So how do we find the balance?

Forgiveness is not about condoning or excusing someone’s hurtful actions, but rather about finding inner peace and releasing unhelpful emotions. It involves letting go of resentment and anger towards the person who has ‘caused us pain’. 

The Trap of Resentment

Resentment often emerges from unresolved conflicts, unmet expectations, or past hurts. It can poison our relationships by leading to passive-aggressive behaviour, withdrawal, or seeking revenge. Holding onto resentment can also lead to stress, anxiety, depression, and physical illness. 

Resentment often puts a relationship ‘on hold’. We can’t get closer to that person because there is now an invisible barrier between us.

Within an intimate relationship, that can be very damaging. We are around the person all the time, and through every moment of it, simmering in the background, is our resentment. And it always comes out as snide remarks, put downs, hurtful ‘jokes’, and point scoring.

Yes, they may have hurt us in the past, but now we are doing everything we can to dripfeed hurt back to them. We end up damaging the relationship just as much as they have.

What If I Don’t Want To Forgive?

Sometimes we feel social pressure to forgive. Articles like this one can make us think that we are bad people, or getting it wrong, if we don’t forgive someone. But there is no right or wrong here. 

It’s just an unfortunate trade off. We can keep the resentment and anger, but it will cost us something from the relationship, and it will cost us something in terms of our own peace of mind.

Keeping that anger can feel important sometimes. It can feel like a reminder that we won’t allow our boundaries to be breached again. Sometimes, that self protection is more important than rebuilding a relationship. 

When should we forgive?

The timing of forgiveness is interesting. Sometimes we feel a pressure to forgive and move on, but it doesn’t feel right.

And other times, we are still feeling resentment years after something, way beyond what we might think of as reasonable or healthy.

So where is the balance? Remember that forgiveness is for you, so you get to decide. You can forgive if, and when, you are ready. 

For me, forgiveness feels natural when something doesn’t feel ‘raw’ anymore. When life has moved on, and that anger doesn’t feel relevant to the present time… that’s when I most naturally want to let go of it. 

The resentment can feel like a passenger in our car who we forgot to let out several streets ago. They are still sitting there, in the back seat, occasionally reminding us that we should be feeling sad. And for a while we might enjoy the conversation, agreeing with them about how awful the person is who hurt us. But after a while, the conversation gets stale. We end up going over and over the same ground. That’s when it’s time to say goodbye and let them out of the car.

Emotional Baggage

An aspect of resentment that we often forget is that it is usually rooted in past experiences or events that have caused us pain, such as previous break ups, arguments, betrayals and bullying. 

We tend to think that each situation is isolated and unique, but if something notably hurts us it’s because there are layers and layers of previous hurt also being brought up. For example, someone cheating on you brings with it every previous experience of ‘betrayal’. We don’t just feel the one betrayal, we feel all of them.

We look out for new situations that remind us of these past hurts, and we react accordingly. They are familiar patterns of pain.

So when someone says something ‘hurtful’, you may be reacting not just to their words, but to your past experiences. We relive old, unforgiven and unresolved hurts over and over in new relationships.

Something that other people might dismiss easily can become locked into a hurt cycle for us. We latch on to it and poke, just like when we had a bruise as a child – we would keep pressing on it to see if it still hurts.

Distinguishing Healthy and Unhealthy Anger

Anger can be a really healthy thing. Anger is a natural human emotion that can signal boundary violations or the need to address an issue. Healthy anger is expressed assertively, constructively, and usually resolves quickly. 

Healthy anger is what we need to be able to tell a partner that they have hurt us and what we need from them. It’s what we need to hold a boundary and prevent someone from damaging us more.

Unhealthy anger, on the other hand, is aggressive, destructive, and long-lasting. It’s what happens when we don’t hold our boundaries. It’s what happens when we don’t express ourselves, so it leaks out of us as aggression, anxiety, depression, stress and illness.

Learning to express our anger in a healthy way can prevent it from evolving into resentment.

Forgiveness is about spotting when our healthy anger has transformed into unhealthy anger and no longer serves us.

The Process of Letting Go

Letting go of resentment is a gradual process that requires self-reflection and introspection. It begins with acknowledging and accepting our emotions, followed by actively choosing to release them. 

Forgiveness Journaling Exercise:

Try writing a letter (that you will never send) to the person who has hurt you. Tell them everything about how you feel, and why you think that you feel that. Focus on how it reminds you of previous hurt in your life. 

Writing it down acts as a release all on its own. It takes some of the pain from inside and externalises it. It also gives you time to reflect on what it is that you resent. What actually hurts? 

And by examining what it reminds you of, you can often discover the deeper pain behind it – the emotional leftovers from childhood, or an old break up, or some previous trauma.

Questioning Our Story

Our perception of events and the stories we tell ourselves can significantly influence our ability to forgive. 

Often, we create narratives that justify our resentment and anger, casting ourselves as victims and others as persecutors. We love to protect ourselves by feeling that the other person is 100% to blame. It’s much easier that way. We get to avoid taking responsibility for our own emotions.

However, our interpretation might not align with the truth or the other person’s perspective. If we asked the other person for their version, how different would it be? Where might they say that we are being unfair, or unreasonable, or overreacting? 

How much easier would it be to forgive if we realised that anger might not be all about the other person? Or that some of it is unfair? Or that it’s really about something else unresolved?

Forgiveness Journaling Exercise (part 2):

Pretend you are the other person who has received the letter that you wrote. Now write a letter back from them, explaining everything from your new perspective.  Say what your version of events was. How did you see things? What was unfair or unreasonable in the letter you received? What would you like to say back?

This can be tricky if you aren’t good at stepping into someone else’s shoes, but give it a go – it’s a really valuable exercise that allows us to see things from a very different perspective.

Forgiveness Does Not Mean Forgetting

Forgiveness does not mean forgetting or erasing the past.

We sometimes think that if we forgive something that it means that we are removing it from history, or that it no longer carries significance. 

That’s not a healthy version of forgiveness. Healthy forgiveness is about owning the fullness of what has happened, and still allowing ourselves to move on.

If we take the example of a partner kissing someone else while drunk, forgiveness might mean that we accept that the other person is fallible and imperfect. It might mean accepting that our relationship isn’t the perfect dream relationship that we had pictured. It might mean acknowledging that we were really hurt, but that we want to let go of that to allow the relationship to work in the future. 

It might also mean having a serious conversation about future boundaries. Maybe we will talk about changes in behaviour, what our expectations around each other are? Maybe we will be brave enough to question whether their behaviour was a signal of something that they are going through? Maybe they are unhappy in the relationship and this was their way of expressing it? Maybe they are unhappy in life and looking for ways to self-harm or get attention?

We may come out the other side of this conversation in a stronger relationship, if we can forgive and learn more about who we are, and what we need.

What it doesn’t mean is going back to how things were before and pretending it didn’t happen. We aren’t going to pretend that it was acceptable behaviour or that it didn’t cause damage.

Forgiveness Does Not Always Require Reconciliation

As a final note, forgiveness is a personal choice that does not always necessitate reconciliation with the person who hurt us. Sometimes we just need to walk away to be safe. 

Rebuilding trust and repairing relationships may not always be possible or healthy. 

Forgiveness can still be achieved without re-establishing the relationship, allowing us to move forward with our lives while maintaining healthy boundaries. Remember that forgiveness is about us more than them!