Running a business has taught me things I never expected to learn about myself, and not the things you might think.
Yes, I’ve navigated the learning curve of marketing, profit and loss statements, and building a website from scratch. I once spent months dealing with a legal threat after using a photo without permission, and I settled in a way that still stings a little to think about. There has been no shortage of hard lessons.
But none of that is what has challenged me most. The hardest part has been the interpersonal one: being in close relationship with the people I work alongside, caring deeply about them, and then navigating the moments when something goes wrong.
I became a therapist because I wanted to support people. Having a group practice gives me the chance to do that in two directions at once: supporting my clients, and supporting the clinicians on my team. I want the people I work with to feel valued, cared for, and resourced to do excellent work while also taking care of themselves. When that’s happening, it is genuinely my favorite part of this work.
But when something breaks down with someone I care about, when there’s a rupture, a falling out, a parting that doesn’t feel okay, it hits differently than any business challenge ever has.
The first time an employee left in a way that felt awful, it knocked me sideways. This wasn’t just a professional relationship. We had celebrated birthdays together, been in each other’s homes, and pushed each other to grow. When she left the way she did, it felt deeply personal, like a betrayal, even if that word felt too big to say out loud.
And then came the part I recognized immediately as a therapist, even as I was living it: the rumination. I was replaying it at night before sleep, in the shower, while feeding my kids. I couldn’t stop turning it over, trying to understand what happened, trying to figure out who was wrong. Because the pain was so sharp, I needed someone to be wrong. And it was easier to make it me, because at least then I had some sense of control over what came next.
It took time before I could stop trying to solve it and simply sit with what was true: I was hurt and I was grieving. Not just the relationship, but the sense of safety I had felt in all my close relationships.
If you’ve ever been through something like that: a friendship that ended badly, a colleague who hurt you, a trusted person who let you down, then you know this feeling. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a business owner, an employee, a parent, or a friend. When we care about someone and feel hurt by them, the experience lands in the same place.
That’s what this article is about: what it actually takes to move through that kind of hurt and what forgiveness can offer, even when it feels impossibly far away.
What Does Forgiveness Actually Mean?
Most of us grow up with the idea that forgiveness is something the other person has to earn. That it comes after a real apology, or once enough time has passed, or when the pain finally dulls on its own. And honestly, that makes a lot of intuitive sense.
But it’s not quite how it works.
Forgiveness is not primarily about whether the other person has done enough to deserve it. It is about what happens within the person who has been hurt.
Psychologists define forgiveness as a conscious decision to loosen the grip of resentment, bitterness, or the desire for revenge after being hurt. And it doesn’t depend on whether the other person apologizes, takes responsibility, changes, or is even still alive. Forgiveness doesn’t require their participation at all.
Which means forgiveness is not a reward you hand to someone else. It’s an internal process that belongs entirely to you.
It’s also worth pulling forgiveness apart from reconciliation, because they often get conflated. Reconciliation means repairing a relationship, and that requires both people. Forgiveness doesn’t. You can forgive someone and still choose to keep your distance. You can forgive without ever reconnecting. Those choices don’t cancel out the forgiveness. For a lot of people, they’re actually what makes forgiveness possible in the first place.
Researchers also describe two layers of forgiveness:
Decisional forgiveness refers to the choice not to retaliate, not to organize your life around revenge, and not to keep feeding the injury through action. That’s something a person can decide to do even when the emotions are still raw. Emotional forgiveness is slower. It’s the gradual shift where the bitterness or fixation starts to soften and makes room for something else. Sometimes that’s neutrality. Sometimes it’s grief. Occasionally, it’s even compassion. This is where the research shows the strongest psychological and physical benefits tend to show up.
And just as important: what forgiveness is not. It’s not excusing what happened. It’s not minimizing it, or pretending it didn’t matter, or welcoming someone back into your life. Forgiveness actually starts from the opposite place, with the honest acknowledgment that something real happened, that it hurt, and that it cannot be changed.
What Can Unresolved Hurt Do To Your Health?
Carrying old wounds isn’t just emotionally painful. It has real, measurable effects on the body, which is something people don’t fully appreciate.
Research shows that holding onto resentment is associated with elevated blood pressure, increased heart rate, and chronic physiological stress. Basically, the body keeps responding to the hurt as if the threat is still present. The nervous system stays activated longer than it was designed to. And over time, that takes a toll.
This kind of ongoing activation takes a toll and acts like chronic stress in the body. Elevated cortisol levels, or “the stress hormone,” are a significant part of that picture. This is part of why researchers understand unforgiveness as more than an emotional experience. When bitterness, hostility, or chronic resentment linger, the nervous system can stay activated for longer than it was meant to. Over time, that kind of ongoing stress can affect the heart, immune functioning, focus, and overall health.
There are mental health consequences too. The habit of mentally replaying an injury, what we call rumination, has been linked to depression, anxiety, OCD, and PTSD. Sleep is affected: studies show that people who go to bed dwelling on unresolved hurt fall asleep later, sleep fewer hours, and wake more often from intrusive thoughts. They also show higher rates of poor health overall.
I think about this a lot in the context of my own experience. All those nights running through the same conversation, trying to find the moment where things went wrong. That wasn’t just emotionally exhausting. It was physiologically costly in ways I probably didn’t fully register at the time.
Unresolved hurt doesn’t only live in memory. It can become something the body quietly carries.
Why Might Forgiving Yourself Feel Harder Than Forgiving Someone Else?
For many people, forgiving someone else, while deeply difficult, still feels more possible than forgiving themselves.
Part of it is simple: there’s no distance from yourself. When someone else causes harm, you can leave, limit contact, put some space between yourself and the source of pain. When you’re the one who caused harm, or when you’re convinced you were, you carry it everywhere. There’s no getting away from it.
Self-forgiveness also asks for more than an internal shift. It can involve naming the harm caused, taking responsibility without defensiveness, making repair where possible, and living with the reality that the other person’s response is out of your hands. They may forgive you. They may not. They might never say anything at all. And you have to find a way to move forward regardless.
But even when someone has taken responsibility and tried to repair what they can, self-forgiveness may still feel out of reach. A big part of why comes down to the difference between guilt and shame.
Guilt, when it’s not overwhelming, can actually be useful. It helps you face what happened and move toward making things right. Shame works differently. Shame takes an action and turns it into a statement about who you are as a person. And that kind of self-condemnation tends to make change harder, not easier. When self-forgiveness starts to feel like you have to forgive your entire self rather than reckon with a specific thing you did, it becomes much harder to get there.
Researchers also note an important distinction between genuine self-forgiveness and what they call “pseudo self-forgiveness,” when a person reaches a quick sense of peace without fully grappling with what happened. Genuine self-forgiveness, grounded in accountability, remorse, and self-compassion, is what’s linked to real psychological wellbeing.
What Are The Real, Measurable Benefits of Choosing Forgiveness?
Forgiveness isn’t just philosophically meaningful. It has documented effects on mental and physical health.
People who are able to move toward forgiveness tend to report lower levels of depression, anxiety, and ongoing emotional distress. They also tend to describe more hope, more peace, and a greater sense of forward movement in their lives.
The benefits show up in the body, too. Research has linked forgiveness with better sleep, fewer stress-related physical symptoms, and healthier cardiovascular functioning. People who forgive more readily appear to recover from stress more quickly, rather than staying in a heightened state long after a difficult event. In daily life, that looks like fewer nights lying awake replaying the same event, less tension in the body, and perhaps more room to think clearly about other things.
And there are social effects as well. People who practice forgiveness more regularly tend to feel less lonely, less hopeless, more connected. That makes sense to me. Unresolved hurt quietly shrinks a person’s world; it makes it harder to trust, harder to open up, harder to believe that relationships are safe. Forgiveness can start to open that back up.
How Can You Begin Moving Toward Forgiveness?
There is no single path to forgiveness, and no timeline you are supposed to follow. But there are some things that tend to help people move through it.
Acknowledge what happened honestly.
Start by acknowledging what actually happened. Forgiveness doesn’t ask you to minimize the harm or spin it into something more palatable. It starts with being honest; something real happened, it hurt, and you didn’t deserve it. Trying to skip that step and “just let it go” usually backfires. People end up more stuck, not less.
Separate the person from the pain.
This one is hard, and it’s not about excusing what someone did. It’s about recognizing that people are capable of causing real harm without that harm being the whole story of who they are. Research consistently shows that empathy toward the person who hurt you (not approval of what they did, but seeing them as a full human being who caused harm) is the single most reliable facilitator of forgiveness. This doesn’t have to arrive naturally. It can be something you deliberately work toward. It can be messy, and it can take time, so it can help to be patient with yourself.
Let yourself grieve.
Beneath many grievances is grief. That can include grief for the relationship that was damaged, the trust that was broken, or the way things could have been. Giving yourself permission to feel that loss, rather than staying fixed in anger, can be an important part of moving through it.
Consider what forgiveness would give you.
Think about what forgiveness would actually give you. We tend to frame forgiveness as something we do for other people. But the research is clear: the benefits belong to the person who forgives. Better sleep. Less stress. More emotional freedom. More room to be present in your own life. It’s worth holding that in mind, not as pressure, but as a reason to keep going. And it doesn’t have to be complete to make a difference. Researchers have found that even partial progress toward forgiveness produces lasting reductions in depression.
Work through it with support.
Forgiveness, especially of serious harm, or of yourself…can be genuinely hard to do alone. Therapy gives you a space to process what happened, understand your own responses, and move at a pace that actually feels sustainable. If you’re carrying something that feels too heavy to work through on your own, that’s not weakness. It’s just honest.
If you’re carrying old hurt and wondering whether therapy might help, we hope you reach out. We would be honored to support you in this work.