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Contextual approach · Forgiveness
You cannot bring yourself to forgive, and people keep telling you to move on. But what would you have to give up to get there? Behind the anger there is sometimes a child who needs to be acknowledged, a debt to be named or a bond to be preserved.
“You have to forgive to set yourself free.” The phrase is everywhere: in families, in self-help books, and sometimes even in our consulting rooms. It usually comes from a kind intention, that of helping someone suffer less. Yet it can bring about a strange shift. Someone has been hurt, betrayed or mistreated, and suddenly the problem becomes their inability to forgive.
The original suffering is then compounded by a new failing: not managing to get better in the way they are asked to.
I argue for another way of approaching the question. Forgiveness can be a path without being a precondition for healing. Before turning it into a goal, I prefer to look at what the person is protecting by withholding it. From a systemic perspective, what seems to keep someone stuck may also be sustaining an essential loyalty.
Research encourages us to look at the context in which forgiveness takes place. In 2010, Laura Luchies and colleagues studied what they call the doormat effect. Their work shows that the consequences of forgiveness for self-respect and self-concept clarity depend, among other things, on the signals given by the other person: do they make amends? Do they show that the relationship can once again become a space where one will be respected and safe?
In the absence of such signals, forgiving can undermine one’s relationship with oneself. When they are present, the results point the other way. This does not mean that all forgiveness without an apology is necessarily harmful. It is a reminder that forgiveness cannot be assessed independently of what is happening in the relationship. Luchies et al., 2010.
A longitudinal study by James McNulty, published in 2011 and conducted with newly married couples, also links a greater tendency to forgive with aggressive behaviour persisting over time. This association does not prove that forgiveness causes violence. It does suggest that we should not credit forgiveness, on its own, with the power to change a partner’s behaviour. McNulty, 2011.
In therapy, this caution shapes our stance. If forgiveness becomes the expected answer, how will the person still be able to say that they do not want it? They may end up saying the words that satisfy us, without their experience having changed. Repair requires being able to hear what remains unjust, including when hearing it is uncomfortable.
I offer three lines of interpretation here. They do not describe every situation and they are not diagnoses. They make it possible to explore a question that is often left aside: what would the person feel they were giving up if they forgave? This is precisely what makes work on invisible loyalties so valuable.
Imagine a man whose father was violent during his childhood. The father is now old and frail. Everyone around him points to the passage of time: he ought to turn the page, look after this old man, stop holding it against him.
For the son, however, turning the page may mean abandoning the child he once was for a second time. As long as he holds on to his anger, someone is still keeping a record of what happened. Someone is still asserting that this child deserved something else.
In such a configuration, talking too soon about letting go risks asking him to give up the last witness to his story. Work can begin once that story is acknowledged, by the therapist, by someone close or by another trustworthy witness. The memory of the injustice then no longer needs to rest entirely on anger.
Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy’s contextual approach is concerned with justice in relationships: what each person has given, received and endured, and what remains unacknowledged. The metaphor of the ledger helps us understand why an old story can remain so present.
An unacknowledged wrong leaves a debt outstanding. Being asked to forgive can be heard as an invitation to settle the account without even having named what was owed. What is being defended here is sometimes the right to say: this happened, it mattered, it deserves to be acknowledged.
This debt can also shift. A partner is asked to make up for what a parent failed to give. A child becomes responsible for filling the adult’s gaps. The notion of destructive entitlement sheds light on this sense of being owed compensation, which ends up being claimed from someone who did not cause the wrong. Acknowledging the injustice makes it possible to work on this transmission, without making those who come after pay the debts of those who came before.
Finally, forgiving someone can sometimes feel like betraying someone else. Growing closer to one’s father might be experienced as abandoning one’s mother. Easing one’s bond with a parent might mean leaving one’s sister alone with her anger.
Forgiveness then comes to mean switching sides. The work consists in finding out how to stay connected to one person while allowing one’s relationship with the other to evolve. A person can honour what their mother went through without having to organise their whole life around resentment towards their father.
To whom, or to what, am I being loyal when I cannot forgive?
In contextual theory, forgiveness generally retains the idea of a wrong that one chooses to forgive. Exoneration involves an adult reappraisal of the other person’s history, particularly of what the parent went through as a child. Their behaviour can then be placed within a broader story than that of the wrong alone.
This distinction offers a clinical landmark, but it should not become a rigid boundary. A study published by Jaap van der Meiden in 2025 does not find, in the experiences examined, the clear-cut separation proposed by the theory. It highlights elements common to both processes, including the acknowledgement of injustice and the reappraisal of the other’s history. Van der Meiden, 2025.
Understanding a parent’s past therefore does not require minimising what they did. And forgiving does not automatically determine the relationship to come. Reconciliation means being able to rebuild a sufficiently safe bond. It involves the people concerned, their actions and their limits. This is what I explore in relation to rebuilding trust after infidelity.
A freedom worth preserving
One can understand a story while keeping one’s distance. One can wish to forgive without getting back in touch. One can also choose not to forgive. These possibilities need to remain open so that the path belongs to the person.
A difficulty sometimes remains: the person has died, cannot be reached, or one no longer wishes to see them. The outward relationship has ended, but something carries on inwardly. Words are still addressed to someone. A gesture is still left hanging.
In this context, a ritual can give shape to a change that has become possible. Writing a letter one chooses not to send, preparing a gesture at a graveside, leaving an object or speaking words in front of a witness are different ways of marking this transition. Their meaning is built together with the person. It cannot be deduced from a recipe.
In 2014, Michael Norton and Francesca Gino studied rituals surrounding different kinds of loss. In their experiments, participants reported less grief after certain ritual activities, with a regained sense of control playing a part. These findings shed light on a psychological avenue; they do not show that a single ritual is enough to resolve grief or to bring about forgiveness. Norton and Gino, 2014.
What interests me in performative rituals is this capacity to give substance to a relational transformation. Choosing a moment, a gesture and possibly a witness helps to clarify what one wishes to acknowledge, keep or let go. The ritual supports work already under way, at the person’s own pace.
The first therapeutic movement often consists in doing justice to what has been lived through. Naming the wrong. Acknowledging what it has cost. Understanding the loyalties that have taken shape around it. As this work progresses, the person can sometimes loosen their grip on their anger without feeling they are disowning their own story.
Forgiveness may come. It may also not come, even as life opens up again. The measure of change lies in regained freedom, in relationships that stop carrying the debts of other relationships, in the possibility of choosing one’s place.
If you blame yourself for not managing it, you can start with this question: what would need to be acknowledged so that I no longer have to defend it in this way? It opens up work that the injunction to forgive sometimes tends to close down.
References
Luchies, L. B., Finkel, E. J., McNulty, J. K., & Kumashiro, M. (2010). The doormat effect: When forgiving erodes self-respect and self-concept clarity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98(5), 734–749. doi:10.1037/a0017838.
McNulty, J. K. (2011). The dark side of forgiveness: The tendency to forgive predicts continued psychological and physical aggression in marriage. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37(6), 770–783. doi:10.1177/0146167211407077.
Van der Meiden, J. (2025). Is the exoneration-forgiveness distinction in contextual therapy evident in practice, and what can we learn from it? Family Process, 64(1), e70019. doi:10.1111/famp.70019.
Norton, M. I., & Gino, F. (2014). Rituals alleviate grieving for loved ones, lovers, and lotteries. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(1), 266–272. doi:10.1037/a0031772.
I develop this reading of forgiveness, loyalties and rituals in the video below.
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