23/11/2025
𝗙𝗢𝗥𝗚𝗜𝗩𝗘𝗡𝗘𝗦𝗦 🤍
A message from my higher self, and from the deepest parts of my own lived story.
Forgiveness is a word that has followed me for years — far more heavily than it ever should have.
Mostly because of the spiritual world’s obsession with “just forgive.”
Forgive because it’s “good for you”…
Forgive because it’s the “right thing to do”…
Forgive because “that’s how you heal.”
And for a long time, I believed it.
I tried.
I prayed.
I pushed myself toward a destination I simply couldn’t reach — no matter how much I wanted to.
Forgiveness kept slipping through my fingers.
Because here’s the truth no one tells you:
Forgiveness isn’t simple.
It isn’t soft.
It isn’t a graceful spiritual milestone you arrive at through force.
It can tear you open.
It can churn your insides.
It can drag you through the fire as you try to release the pain, the injustice, the resentment, the anger lodged so deeply in your heart and nervous system that you can barely breathe through it.
I heard all the usual phrases:
“Set yourself free.”
“Forgive them for you.”
“You’ll feel better when you forgive.”
But none of those people had lived what I had lived.
None had carried trauma stretched across years with no justice, no accountability, no repentance.
How do you offer forgiveness when the story has never been witnessed?
When the wound was never acknowledged?
When the one who caused the pain walks away untouched?
What I eventually learned is this:
Forgiveness is not an event. It’s a process.
And that process begins with simply being willing to open the door.
For me, it took far longer than I’d ever like to admit.
And truthfully… I still don’t know if I ever reached what I would call “true forgiveness” for the person involved.
How can you fully forgive when no accountability has ever existed?
But here is what finally set me free:
I stopped trying to force forgiveness for them.
And instead…
I released the story from my heart.
I chose to stop carrying the weight of injustice.
I chose to stop waiting for an apology that was never going to come.
I chose to stop holding my healing hostage until the universe delivered consequences on my behalf.
And in that release, something unexpected happened:
I forgave myself for not being able to reach the kind of forgiveness that spiritual culture told me I “should.”
I forgave myself for being human.
For being hurt.
For wanting accountability that never arrived.
For not being able to perform this spiritual ideal of forgiveness without the truth of the story ever being honoured.
So yes — forgiveness did find me.
But not in the way I expected.
Not in the tidy, enlightened way I was taught it should.
It arrived through self-compassion, not spiritual pressure.
Through releasing the burden, not excusing the behaviour.
Because some wounds are simply too deep, too raw, too unjust to offer your forgiveness in the absence of accountability.
And for that…
we owe ourselves kindness, gentleness, humanity, and our own forgiveness.
I hope my thoughts of forgiveness sheds just a little light or hope for someone else
Ceri x x
