Moving On Doesn’t Always Require Forgiveness

I read a lot of articles relating to psychology. It makes sense; I’m a writer. It’s helpful to know not only how the mind works but how we spot certain character traits and how certain behaviors can make us feel. Most of those articles are research, and I don’t take them too seriously. But sometimes I read an article out of personal curiosity. I figure you can never have too many tips about how to be happy.

Lately I’ve noticed a reoccurring theme. (I write a lot of blog posts about reoccurring themes I spot in the wild.) Lots of articles talk about letting go and moving on in order to move through life as a happier person. They then go on to insist that letting go requires forgiveness. Or even that the two are one in the same.

It’s a sentiment that consistently makes me cringe. I’ve spent my whole life being told to ‘be the bigger person,’ to be more intelligent or more responsible than the people I interact with. And I suppose when you’re talking to a child that doesn’t yet understand the nuances and complexities of the emotions they’re going to encounter during their lives, these short-hands can occasionally prove useful. But I’ve come to believe this is actually dangerous advice, no matter how well-meaning the spirit in which it is given.

Letting go and moving on are important. I can even agree that they lead to a greater chance of happiness. But forgiveness is complicated.

What Does it Mean to Let Go

What does it mean when someone says ‘let go’ or ‘move on?’ It seems like an obvious thing, but I think it’s important to define.

When an event (or a person) has hurt you, that has an immediate and sometimes dramatic effect on your life. If you are, like me, a person who develops deep attachments, that pain can make it difficult to engage with your day-to-day life. Not only is it distracting and draining, that pain can have a direct effect on the decisions you make – both big and small.

Letting go is the act of putting that pain out of your life and making certain it can no longer affect you. That might mean resolving your feelings about what happened. Or might mean making a conscious decision not to think about or interact with an event or person. Moving on puts that pain beyond your reach so that it can no longer challenge or distract you.

The key here is that letting go removes the agency of that pain – or its source – to have power over you, allowing you to go about your life and make important decisions without feeling burdened by the past.

Letting go and moving on are deeply personal actions. No one can tell you how to do it or even make you feel that it is necessary. In my experience, both involve a lot of soul searching. And often moving on involves untangling a great deal of pain before you feel back on even ground. But every time I have done it, it has always been worth it.

Most articles indicate that the path to letting go and moving on is forgiveness. But that’s not true; letting go and eliminating a particular pain’s agency from your life doesn’t require forgiveness.

What Does It Mean to Forgive

Let me also define forgiveness. Forgiveness means absolving someone of a wrongdoing. And forgiveness is an important part of any relationship. But forgiveness must also be earned. It shouldn’t drop out of the ether if a person hasn’t put any thought or care into what they did. Forgiveness requires work.

If someone doesn’t put in the work, you shouldn’t be expected to forgive them.

Being the bigger person sounds great. Like a noble sacrifice we make to swallow pain and not allow it to affect us. But this is like swallowing poison repeatedly and expecting that to dull its affects.

What happens when you forgive people repeatedly and unconditionally in order to ‘be the bigger person?’ They walk all over you. Like a door mat. Without consequences, people repeat the same actions over and over. Why should they stop if nothing bad happens?

If this part of my post sounds a little bitter, it’s because I’ve spent a lot of my life as a lot of people’s door mats. I wasted a lot of pain and anguish on people it later turned out didn’t care about me or my feelings. They just wanted me around because I was useful or convenient. And it hurt when I realized I had wasted a lot of years on one-sided relationships.

Carrying pain around with you is harmful. I’m not suggesting carrying a grudge. I’m not suggesting allowing the pain, anger and frustration caused by realizing a person’s lack of regard to continuously rule your life. The point of letting go is to get away from all of that and get the pain out of your life. But you can’t banish that kind of pain by inviting more in. If you forgive those actions, you open yourself to experiencing them again.

Only You Hold the Power

Sometimes, it’s important to remember pain instead of forgetting it. It teaches us not to make the same mistakes again.

Much like letting go, forgiveness is a deeply personal act. Only you can decide when it feels right to create reconciliation. I think most of the articles I read mean to suggest that forgiveness absolves you from the pain you suffered. But I think that’s only true if the person on the other end has given equal effort to dilemma. This is even true when the person you’re trying to forgive is yourself. Forgiving yourself for missteps is important. You can’t beat yourself up forever. But you can only truly feel forgiven once you accept that you deserve it. And we often don’t feel worthy of even our own forgiveness until we take a positive action toward change.

I write a lot of personal things on this blog. Sometimes it’s difficult to claw through the depths of my soul and make admissions on the page. But the more I learn to look back at my past experiences without beating myself over the head with them, the more I realize that it’s important to have these conversations. Even good advice given in the spirit of helping people can prove to be toxic.

Don’t hold on to the things that have hurt you. Don’t allow them to keep causing you pain. But don’t feel obligated to forgive everyone who has hurt you either. Especially not just to ‘be the bigger person’. It isn’t petty to prevent a person from continuing to cause you pain. Everyone acknowledges that boundaries are important, and unlimited forgiveness isn’t a reasonable boundary.

You can move on without those people and the pain they cause without giving them the agency to cause you more harm.