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Forgiveness: Begin with the Self

Overview

In CPTSD recovery, forgiveness is frequently misunderstood as something that must be extended to abusers quickly and completely. Walker argues the opposite: genuine forgiveness cannot be willed or decided into existence — it is a feeling that emerges naturally, if at all, only after deep grieving work has been done. The most urgent forgiveness task in recovery is not forgiving parents but building compassion for the self.

Quick Reference

  • Self-forgiveness comes first: the capacity to forgive others grows directly out of compassion for oneself

  • Premature forgiveness mimics denial — it suppresses unprocessed anger and grief, stalling recovery

  • Forgiveness is a feeling, not a decision: it cannot be willed, forced, or made permanent by intention alone

  • Some abuse is simply not forgivable — sociopathy, conscious cruelty, and parental incest may fall into this category

  • Real forgiveness, when it arrives, is a byproduct of effective grieving, not its precondition

  • Feeling occasional compassion for parents is only safe and meaningful after the survivor has grieved their own losses substantially

The Problem with Premature Forgiveness

1. Forced Forgiveness Replicates the Original Wound

Pressure to forgive before fully processing what happened is widespread in both religious and recovery communities. Survivors who comply are often told their pain should now be resolved — but the trauma has not gone anywhere. It has simply been covered over again.

  • Premature forgiveness functions like the defenses of denial and repression: it pushes unprocessed hurt and anger out of conscious awareness rather than releasing them
  • Survivors who follow the advice to "just forgive" often find their recovery grinds to a halt, and then face an additional layer of shame for feeling "unforgiving"
  • The inner critic seizes on this shame and uses it as further ammunition against the self

2. What Premature Forgiveness Costs the Survivor

Rushing to forgive before anger has been fully expressed has specific, concrete consequences for recovery.

  • It prevents the survivor from validating the inner child's right to be angry about genuine abandonment and mistreatment
  • It blocks reconnection with healthy, instinctual self-protectiveness — the capacity to recognize and respond to present-day unfairness using anger as appropriate
  • It cuts off the angering work that is central to releasing shame, fear, and depression from the body's stored trauma

3. Some Abuse Is Not Forgivable

Walker holds that not all harm can or should be forgiven, and that the pressure to universally forgive is itself a form of harmful advice.

  • Abuse involving sociopathy, deliberate cruelty, scapegoating, and parental incest may be beyond the reach of forgiveness — and that is legitimate
  • Accepting this is not a failure of the survivor; it is honest recognition of the severity of what occurred

What Real Forgiveness Actually Is

1. A Feeling, Not a Choice

Genuine forgiveness is felt in the body — an actual expansion of the heart — rather than arrived at through reasoning or willpower.

  • Like all feelings, it is ephemeral: it comes and goes and cannot be made permanent through intention or belief
  • No emotional state, including forgiveness, can be sustained indefinitely; human feeling is dynamic and largely outside the control of the will
  • The most useful attitude is one that remains open to the possibility of forgiveness arising on the other side of grieving, without requiring or forcing it

2. Forgiveness Grows Out of Grieving

The pathway to real forgiveness — if it comes at all — runs directly through the grieving process.

  • When survivors have worked through enough of their childhood losses, they may occasionally find themselves considering the conditions that shaped their parents' behavior
  • Parents often replicated the parenting they received, and were frequently supported in that dysfunction by the norms of their era — these are genuine mitigating circumstances, but they can only be honestly weighed after one's own grief has been substantially honored
  • This process sometimes opens into compassion for parents as people who were themselves quite damaged; compassion at this depth can, on occasion, become forgiveness
  • Even then, unless that compassion is rooted in compassion for the self first, the exercise remains an empty mental operation

3. Self-Forgiveness as the Foundation

The capacity to extend forgiveness to others is proportional to the compassion one has learned to hold for oneself.

  • Shame and self-hate do not originate with the survivor — they were installed by early caregivers and cultural messages
  • Turning toward the wounded, vulnerable parts of the self with love rather than contempt is both the primary task and the precondition for any other forgiveness to feel real
  • As grieving matures and the emotional range becomes more flexible, feelings of love and forgiveness naturally return more reliably — not as permanent states, but as accessible ones

Forgiveness in Practice

1. The Healthy Cognitive Position

Rather than committing to either "I must forgive" or "I will never forgive," the most workable orientation is one of open possibility.

  • Allow that forgiveness might emerge after sufficient grieving — without demanding it or scheduling it
  • Do not invoke forgiveness as a way to avoid unresolved pain
  • Trust that fully venting angry feelings about the past makes feelings of forgiveness more accessible over time, not less

2. Compassion Comes Before Forgiveness

Compassion and forgiveness are not the same thing, but forgiveness, when it occurs, almost always arises within an experience of compassion.

  • Compassion for parents' own suffering and limited circumstances is an intermediate step, not the destination
  • Compassion for the self — for the child who was harmed and the adult still carrying that harm — is the non-negotiable starting point

3. Forgiveness as a Value Rather Than a State

As emotional flexibility develops, forgiveness can become something a person chooses as a value even when the feeling itself is temporarily absent.

  • With trusted intimates, a survivor can develop the knowledge that after sufficient honest communication and emotional release, appreciative and loving feelings will return — even if they cannot be invoked in the moment
  • The poem "It Comes and Goes" by Carol Ruth Knox captures this well: the art of loving is not whether love is present in any given moment, but trusting that when it leaves, it will return

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