Forgiveness gets misunderstood so often that a lot of people avoid the word entirely, either because they’ve been pressured to forgive too quickly or because they assume forgiving means something it doesn’t. So before talking about how to forgive someone, it’s worth being clear about what forgiveness actually is, because most of the confusion starts with a wrong definition.
What Forgiveness Is Not
Forgiveness is not excusing what happened, as if it wasn’t actually wrong. It’s not forgetting, as if your memory has an off switch you can flip. And it’s not automatically restoring the relationship to what it was before, as if nothing needs to change going forward. Those are all separate issues, and lumping them in with forgiveness is exactly what makes it feel impossible.
Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.
— Ephesians 4:32
Forgiveness, at its core, is releasing someone’s debt to you. It’s the decision to stop demanding they pay for what they did, even though they genuinely owe you something. That’s what makes it costly. You’re the one absorbing a debt that isn’t yours to absorb.
A Decision, Not Necessarily a Feeling
Because forgiveness is a decision about how you’ll treat the debt, it doesn’t require you to feel warm toward the person first. You can forgive someone, meaning you release the claim you had on them, before your emotions have caught up. In fact, the emotions often catch up after the decision, not before it. Waiting to feel ready before you forgive can mean waiting indefinitely, since the feeling rarely arrives on its own.
If you’ve been avoiding forgiveness because it felt like it required pretending something didn’t happen or fast-forwarding to full trust again, it’s worth revisiting with a clearer definition. Releasing the debt is its own thing, and it’s the first honest step, whatever comes after it.
Andrew Washkow 
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