We’ve all been there: we feel slighted by an incident at work or someone says something hurtful at a family gathering. Then we replay the moment in our heads, over and over – and resentment builds up.  But here’s what most of us don’t realize: holding on to that anger isn’t punishing them. It’s punishing you.

The science is clear: forgiveness is one of the most powerful tools we have for healing both our minds and our bodies. Forgiveness is associated with lower stress, lower risk of heart attack, improved cholesterol levels, and better sleep.  (Want the scientific studies? Check here and here.)

Meet our Expert

MaryBeth Goodman is an LPC with 30 years of experience as a therapist, a military/veteran spouse, and the director of the Steven A. Cohen Military Family Clinic at AKBH.

In a presentation for the Cohen Clinic’s Winter Mental Health Lunch & Learn series, MaryBeth talked about the importance of forgiveness for our own mental health.

She says forgiveness isn’t about letting someone off the hook, “or pretending the hurt didn’t happen. It’s about freeing yourself from carrying that burden every single day.”

What Forgiveness Actually Means (And What It Doesn’t)

Let’s clear up some common misconceptions right away. Forgiveness is a conscious choice to release revenge, resentment, and harsh judgment toward someone who caused hurt. It comes in two forms:

Decisional forgiveness is the cognitive decision to change how you respond to someone who wronged you.

Emotional forgiveness goes deeper—it’s about replacing negative emotions like bitterness and resentment with more neutral or even positive feelings.

Forgiveness does NOT require:

• Minimizing that the hurt happened
• Condoning the harmful behavior
• Forgetting what occurred
• Reconciling or restoring the relationship
• Waiting for the other person to apologize or change

Goodman says it’s crucial to understand that forgiveness is egocentric. “You do it for your own psychological health, not for anyone else. You can forgive even if the other person never apologizes, never asks for forgiveness, or never does anything differently. It’s about YOUR emotional wellbeing.”

Understanding Resentment’s Hold

Let me share a story that illustrates how resentment works. Imagine you’re at a holiday dinner, and someone makes a dismissive comment about the dish you brought. It seems small, but something about their tone triggers you. Maybe it reminds you of years of feeling undervalued or criticized.

What happens next is what neuroscientists call the cycle of resentment:

1. Triggering event – The comment is made
2. Interpretation – Your brain tries to make sense of it based on past experiences
3. Emotional escalation – Your amygdala takes over, flooding you with anger or fear
4. Rumination – You replay the event over and over, even imagining conversations that never happened
5. Withdrawal – You pull away, avoid that person, maybe even dread future gatherings
6. Reinforcement – Each time you ruminate, you strengthen the neural pathways that maintain the resentment

The problem? Every time you replay that moment, you’re literally rewiring your brain to hold onto the pain.

Your Brain on Resentment

When you hold onto resentment, specific things happen in your brain:

• Your amygdala (the threat detection center) stays activated, keeping you in a state of perceived danger
• Your prefrontal cortex (responsible for rational thinking and regulation) struggles to do its job
• Your anterior cingulate cortex constantly monitors for conflict

In other words, your brain treats unresolved resentment like an ongoing threat. You’re stuck in fight-or-flight mode even when the person who hurt you isn’t around. You become “a little irrational”—and it’s exhausting.

The physical toll is real too. Chronic resentment elevates your heart rate, increases cortisol production (the stress hormone), and has been linked to worse outcomes for diabetes, heart disease, chronic pain, sleep problems, and more.

The Healing Power of Forgiveness

Now here’s the good news: forgiveness literally changes your brain.

When you engage in genuine forgiveness:

• Your prefrontal cortex shifts from reactive to intentional thought
• Prefrontal cortex activity increases while amygdala activation decreases
• Your heart rate lowers
• Cortisol production drops

Research has documented remarkable benefits of forgiveness, including:

Physical health improvements

• Better heart health
• Improved sleep quality
• Reduced vulnerability to chronic pain
• Lower stress levels and less fatigue
• Better management of conditions like diabetes

Mental health benefits

• Improved overall well-being and life satisfaction
• Reduced negative emotions
• Lower rates of self-harm and suicidal ideation
• Decreased disordered eating behaviors
• Less vulnerability to substance use

The Four Stages of Forgiveness

Forgiveness researchers Robert Enright and Richard Fitzgibbons identified four stages in the forgiveness process. Understanding these can help you navigate your own journey.

Stage 1: Uncovering

This stage is about understanding what you’re actually forgiving and what it’s costing you. Ask yourself:

• Is this holding me back?
• What am I carrying?
• What’s the cost? (Are there situations you avoid? Physical tension when you see their name? Relationships affected?)

Be honest about how the hurt has changed you, preoccupied your thoughts, or stolen your energy.

Stage 2: Decision

Before you can commit to forgiveness, you need to assess whether you’re safe. If there’s an active threat—if the person is still harming you—it’s too soon for forgiveness. Safety comes first.

Once you’re safe, you can make a conscious decision: Are you ready to do the work of forgiveness for your own benefit?

Stage 3: Work

This is the challenging middle ground. It involves:

• Acknowledging the hurt fully
• Deciding whether you need support (therapy, a trusted friend) or can work through it alone
• Practicing cognitive reframing
• Developing empathy (without condoning the behavior)

Cognitive reframing is particularly powerful. Here’s how it works:

The standard pathway is: Situation → Automatic Thoughts → Emotion

To reframe, you challenge those automatic thoughts. Using the holiday dish: “What if this comment had nothing to do with me? What if it was about their own insecurity, and I just happened to be in their path?”

This doesn’t mean what they did was right. It doesn’t mean you weren’t hurt. But it means you don’t have to carry that hurt and feel it every single day. When you reframe, your neural pathways literally fire differently, producing less cortisol and creating new, healthier patterns.

Stage 4: Deepening

This final stage involves:

• Making a daily commitment to remember you’ve forgiven
• Refusing to beat yourself up or relive the hurt
• Changing your thought pattern every time you encounter the trigger
• Finding meaning in the suffering by recognizing it as part of universal human experience

Forgiveness vs. Reconciliation: A Critical Distinction

Here’s something many people misunderstand: forgiveness does not mean reconciliation.

Forgiveness is you saying, “I won’t carry this rock of pain anymore. I’m offering forgiveness so I don’t have to carry it.” That’s a decision you make alone, for yourself.

Reconciliation is a separate process that requires:

• Accountability from both people
• A genuine desire from both sides to repair the relationship
• Appropriate boundaries to support safety and trust

Sometimes reconciliation simply isn’t possible—and that’s okay. The other person may not be ready to take accountability. They may not want to repair things. They may even be unsafe. Healthy people can forgive without reconciling.

If you do pursue reconciliation, you’ll need clear boundaries. Goodman defines a boundary as “where I end and you begin.”

“But Won’t Forgiveness Make Me Weak?”

This is perhaps the most common objection to forgiveness, and it deserves a direct response, Goodman says.

The way Goodman sees it, staying angry and making yourself a victim makes you weaker than choosing to forgive and not letting the past have that power over you.

Think about it: When you refuse to forgive, you’re giving that person and that event control over your emotional state, your relationships, your physical health, and your peace of mind. They may have moved on completely while you’re still suffering.

Forgiveness is an act of strength. It’s you taking back control of your own wellbeing.

Practical Steps: How to Begin

If you’re ready to start working toward forgiveness, here are concrete steps:

Step 1: Identify what you’re forgiving. What exactly was the hurt? How has it affected you?

Step 2: Assess your safety. Are you currently safe from this person? If not, focus on safety first.

Step 3: Acknowledge the pain. Decide if you want to work through this alone or with support. Consider journaling, talking with a trusted friend, or working with a therapist.

Step 4: Make a commitment. Every day, remind yourself that you’ve chosen to forgive. Don’t beat yourself up if you have setbacks—forgiveness is a process, not a one-time event.

Step 5: Practice new thought patterns. When you encounter the trigger or think about the event, consciously choose a different thought. This takes practice, but it rewires your brain over time.

A Special Word About the Holidays

The holidays can be especially fraught with triggers. Old family dynamics, unresolved tensions, and forced proximity can bring up all sorts of resentments. Goodman recommends mentally preparing. Before your next gathering, ask yourself:

• What situations or topics are triggering for me?
• What causes me to isolate or become angry?
• Is there a past hurt I’m still carrying into these celebrations?

“Think about forgiveness as a way to keep yourself from exploding. You’re allowed to not carry anger every single day—even if the hurt was real, even if you were genuinely wronged.”

If you can re-frame even one triggering situation, you might transform your entire holiday experience, Goodman says.

When to Seek Support

Forgiveness work can bring up difficult emotions. If you find yourself becoming overwhelmed or distressed, that’s a sign you might benefit from professional support. Therapy can be incredibly helpful in working through forgiveness, especially when:

• The hurt involves trauma
• Multiple relationships are affected
• You’ve tried on your own but feel stuck
• The situation involves complex family dynamics

There’s no shame in needing help. In fact, recognizing when you need support is itself an act of wisdom and self-care.

The Freedom Forgiveness Offers

Stephen Hayes, one of the founders of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, offers this powerful metaphor: “Unforgiveness is like being on a giant hook. Next to you on the hook is the person who has hurt you. The hook is extremely painful. Wherever you go, so does the hook and so does the offender. The only way you can get off the hook is if you allow the offender off first.”

The cost of staying on that hook? Perhaps a lifetime of unhappiness.

But forgiveness offers another path. It doesn’t erase what happened. It doesn’t make everything okay. What it does is free you from having to carry that pain into every moment of your future.

Your brain has a remarkable capacity for healing and change. Neural pathways that have kept you stuck in resentment can be rewired. The chronic stress response can be calmed. The emotional burden can be lifted.

Forgiveness is the gift you give yourself—the gift of freedom, peace, and the chance to fully inhabit your own life again.

Resources

If you’re interested in learning more about forgiveness or working through your own forgiveness process:

• The VA offers a comprehensive forgiveness toolkit with worksheets and exercises
• Therapeutic journaling can be a powerful starting point
• Books like “Forgiveness Is a Choice” by Robert Enright or “Forgive for Good” by Fred Luskin offer structured approaches
• A qualified therapist can help you work through forgiveness.  The Cohen Military Family Clinic and Alaska Behavioral Health’s adult outpatient team both offer therapy using evidence-based practices.

Information in this post and our website is provided for informational/educational purposes only, is not a substitute for professional healthcare, and does not establish any kind of patient-client relationship by your use of this site. In providing this content, including treatment resources, we are in no way representing or warranting that this information is appropriate or effective for your individual needs. If you are struggling with mental or physical health, please contact a qualified healthcare professional or reach out to the national mental health hotline at 988.