Us 4 S’more: How Has Your Understanding of Forgiveness Changed Over Time?
Sticky questions, personal answers: The Religious Trauma Network’s team mashup.
How has your understanding of forgiveness changed over time?
Rebekah Drumsta
My understanding of forgiveness was forged in the fires of Christian fundamentalism. I learned it as a two-step spiritual transaction: ask for it, give it. Both parts were non-negotiable. We were handed scripts—exact words to say, exact phrases to perform. Not forgiving meant bitterness. Bitterness meant sickness. Sickness meant spiritual failure (or suffering meant to make you holy.)
Forgiveness was a “have to,” not a process. Not a choice. A mandate. If you forgave publicly, you were praised. If you hesitated, you were shamed. I memorized Corrie ten Boom’s line in high school—“I forgive you, my brother, with all of my heart”—and it was presented as the pinnacle of spiritual proof.
The Power Dynamic I Didn’t See
That version of forgiveness created a quiet, insidious power dynamic. Once an offender asked for forgiveness, they held a kind of moral leverage. The offended became responsible for restoring the relationship—or be labeled bitter, rebellious, or spiritually compromised.
It didn’t matter what the offense was: a harsh word, betrayal, sexual abuse, neglect. The demand was immediate, total, public. Those pressures landed heaviest on women and children. We were already disempowered in many spheres; this doctrine became another way to control us.
Meeting My Wounds, Naming the Truth
As I began to heal, I finally saw my wounds as wounds. Moral injuries. Traumas. Neglect. Pain I’d carried in my body for years—pain I had “forgiven” before I even understood it.
I wasn’t allowed to name what I’d lived through. Mental health language, autonomy, healthy relationship models—none of that existed in the world I came from. Once I exited those systems and met myself for the first time, I had to learn how to process what had been hidden, minimized, or called “normal.”
Years later, after the death of a family member, someone asked me why I wasn’t angry. My answer surprised me: “Because I understand why. I understand what shaped them and why they treated me the way they did.” That clarity was not an excuse for harm. It was reclaiming my voice and my boundaries.
What Forgiveness Became for Me
Forgiveness stopped being a requirement and became a choice. It stopped being performance for acceptance.
Now I believe forgiveness must be:
Personal — unique to each survivor’s needs and timeline.
Voluntary — never coerced, never demanded.
Safer-first — not a shortcut for accountability.
A byproduct — of resilience, restored autonomy, and capacity.
Pushing someone to forgive can inflict further harm. Dictating what forgiveness should look like is violence, framed as piety. The real question to offer is not “Have you forgiven?” but “What do you need to heal?”
A Clearer Compass for Healing
Safety. Autonomy. Healing. These are the things that move people forward.
Forgiveness is not the starting line. It’s the result of inner work—of being held, of being believed, of having the space to grieve and rebuild. Healing is sacred. Forgiveness, well it’s up to you.
David Ruybalid
Over the years, my understanding of forgiveness has changed dramatically. I used to think forgiveness was supposed to be a single moment, a quick decision to “get over it” because that’s what God commands and what Jesus modeled. But life, pain, and healing have taught me that it’s not that simple.
I grew up in Christian fundamentalism. Every summer I attended a camp called The Wilds of the Rockies. Each night there was a sermon followed by an altar call while the piano played I Surrender All on repeat. The speaker would urge, often manipulate, students to come forward to get saved, confess sin, or recommit their lives to Jesus. What I didn’t realize then was how emotionally charged those moments were. Many of us were dysregulated from fear-based preaching about sin, hell, and judgment. So, we went forward, not because we had some deep conviction, but because our nervous systems were in overdrive.
When campers went forward, they were sent upstairs to meet with a “counselor,” usually a young adult in college with no training in trauma or counseling, just a booklet of Bible verses for different “sins.” If a kid was being abused, struggling with grief, or carrying deep pain, the first question they’d often hear was, “So what sin do you need to confess?” or “What is your part?”
I’ll never forget the summer after my freshman year of high school, right after my parents’ divorce was final. I was heartbroken and angry, normal emotions for a kid processing grief. But that week, the speaker preached about “the sin of bitterness” and how we needed to “pull out the root” of it. I didn’t realize then that my anger wasn’t sin; it was a normal and necessary part of grieving. But in that high-pressure, emotionally charged environment, I felt convinced that my anger was sinful and that I needed to repent.
I went forward during the altar call, met with a counselor, and was told I was sinning against God for feeling angry. So I prayed for God to remove the “bitterness” from my heart and said that I forgave. Back at church, I shared my “victory” in testimony time and everyone applauded. But in reality, I had only buried my grief deeper and had to return to it later.
Looking back, I see how forgiveness in those circles was often treated as a forced, instant reaction, a way to pretend things were fine as a way to spiritually bypass. Today, I understand forgiveness as a process, not a performance. It’s an act of agency, not obligation. Choosing to forgive doesn’t mean everything is okay. It means I’m choosing to engage in the slow, honest work of healing. Forgiveness takes time, truth, and tenderness. And that’s okay.
Luke Renner
As someone who has been harmed by others, I used to think about forgiveness exclusively from the perspective of the forgiver, the one who was hurt, the one with the power to grant or withhold forgiveness.
Unexpectedly, while undergoing my own healing from trauma, that perspective expanded. As I began to understand the deep and far-reaching impact of trauma in my life, I also had to face the uncomfortable truth that, despite my tendency to see myself only as a victim, I was also capable (and guilty) of hurting others. If the saying “hurt people hurt people” is true, it couldn’t exclude me. That realization helped me begin to understand forgiveness more deeply from the other side, from the position of the person who needs to be forgiven.
This forced me to face the music. Just as I would insist that no one can demand forgiveness from me, I had to learn that the forgiveness of others toward me is also never guaranteed. While I might want forgiveness for the harm that I had done, no one actually owed it to me. While we’re at it, I think it’s also worth pointing out that even when forgiveness is offered, it can change or be withdrawn over time. Much to my surprise, that too has happened to me.
When it comes to forgiveness, there are no guarantees or warranties. Forgiveness lives or dies by how well we maintain it through the way we show up every day.
As a person in need of forgiveness, these realizations forced me to confront my thinking, beginning with apologizing. For starters, “I’m sorry” is backward-facing. For some, saying “I’m sorry” may be difficult to truly mean but, compared to the hard work of actually healing and changing, it’s easy to say. A good apology names the harm, then claims the necessary responsibility for it, but definitely doesn’t undo the hurt. While apologizing for the past is often an important element of healing and restoration, when it comes to someone granting forgiveness, what often factors in more than a sincere and thoughtful apology is how the offender actively lives life after that apology.
A therapist once introduced me to the idea of living amends, and it changed everything. Living amends means showing your apology through consistent action, day after day, by refusing to repeat or participate in the harm you once caused. It’s not a one-time confession like an apology but a long-term commitment to prove, through your behavior, that you’ve changed. While an apology looks backward, living amends look forward. They are the daily act of leaning into and living out your apology. If you truly meant it when you said you were sorry, you must show that through your ongoing commitment to change.
Practically speaking, this means I have had to change. For example, I used rage out when I would get triggered, raising my voice and terrifying my family. Through living amends, I have had to learn to stay calm, even when I feel justifiably frustrated about something or triggered. It has meant catching myself before an old pattern takes hold. Over time, that becomes both an affirmation of my apology and a new form of it, one that doesn’t rely on words but instead proves that I can be safe, reliable, and trustworthy.
From this perspective, forgiveness isn’t a transaction that ends with an apology. It’s a lifelong exchange between truth and effort. It isn’t permanent. Whether granting or receiving it, forgiveness must be sustained through how we live. While words will fade, it is action, lived out daily in the form of living amends, that can keep forgiveness alive.
Janyne McConnaughey
The question this month was challenging. The question was, “How has my understanding of forgiveness changed?” This seemed like an overwhelmingly unanswerable question. I have published four books and hundreds of pages of online content. The topic of forgiveness is a common theme in my writing. What was so simple to me before healing became increasingly complex as I began to fully understand the extent of my abuse.
Most of my life, I would have said that I was a very forgiving person. It was worn like a spiritual badge. Only when I began to heal my story of childhood abuse and religious trauma did it become clear that what I believed was forgiveness was, in reality, a form of psychological and spiritual dissociation that enabled me to serve in the church without any recognition of how deeply I had been abused and harmed. I did not consciously remember most of the abuse and often accepted the responsibility for the abuse that I did remember. There was no need to forgive someone else for what I believed was my own fault.
There is no doubt that my understanding of forgiveness changed as I healed. I wondered if it also evolved from my initial healing during therapy. In my first book, Brave: Healing Childhood Trauma, I said the following.
“Living above the pain is not all that effective. Clinging to scripture and the grace of God, while helpful, does not reach into the depths of trauma, which may include PTSD symptoms of anxiety, debilitating self-hatred, and shame. The abused spend a lifetime carrying the shame of their abusers as their own. In many cases, forgiveness (considered a spiritual necessity for healing) is only an illusion accomplished by repressing or suppressing pain. Pressure to forgive abusers circumvents the necessary process required for true healing.”
In a recent Substack post, approximately eight years later, I said the following:
“The acceptance of a survivor within faith communities almost always hinges on repentance and willingness to forgive. Everyone who attends a church has heard a sermon on forgiveness. It is part of The Lord’s Prayer; its importance in the scriptures cannot be denied. While I would never tell a survivor they must forgive their abusers, I do not deny that it might be helpful if they could set that burden down. My greatest issue is that it was always spoken of as if what we needed to forgive was at the level of someone calling us ugly—not the deep relational betrayal of sexual abuse. The assumption was that if we were truly seeking God, we could manage to forgive.
There may be a rare survivor who can speak forgiveness into reality and heal their wounded soul, but more often, the pressure to do this only drives the pain deeper. This shuts down the grieving process that is essential to healing. There is pressure to be done with grieving of all types, but the pressure to move on is particularly damaging to survivors who often internalize that they are to blame for the abuse. In this scenario, pain turns inward and becomes self-loathing. Church teachings on original sin reinforce self-loathing.”
What evolved was a deeper understanding of forgiveness as a process, one that allows grief and anger. In other posts, I discussed how Jesus said that one should forgive 70 times 7 times. It seems to me that this indicates how arduous the process of forgiving actually is. In our rush for ourselves and others to forgive, we deny the deep healing that trauma requires. In addition, forgiveness is incorrectly connected with reconciliation, which denies us the necessary processes for learning to set boundaries—for our own protection and healing.
Has my understanding changed? Absolutely, from when my young adult self felt so compelled to forgive that she took on the shame that was never hers to hold. If I could go back and help her, I would say, “Forgiving is not the priority here. You have been wronged, and your priority is healing. One day, you will be able to set this burden down, and that will feel like forgiving. Until then, grieve all that was taken from you.”
I wish someone had helped me understand this before I was in my 60s. This is why I continue to show up and answer questions!
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This article is not intended to treat or diagnose any condition. The authors are not licensed therapists or clinicians. Any advice or opinions given on this site are strictly individual observation and insights based on personal experiences and study. It should in no way take the place of professional assistance.