Do you actually have to forgive your parents to heal

Do you have to forgive your parents before you can heal? Susan Forward built much of her early career assuming the answer was yes, until her clients kept proving her wrong.

One of the clearest cases was Stephanie, twenty-seven, raised as a devout Christian after a childhood that included being raped by her stepfather at eleven, molested by several of her mother's boyfriends over the following years, running away at sixteen into prostitution, and nearly being beaten to death by a client before finding her way into a new life, a husband, and a church. By the time she joined one of Forward's incest-survivor groups, Stephanie insisted she had already made her peace. She had forgiven her stepfather. She had forgiven her mother. She didn't need to get angry to get better.

Forward pushed anyway, gently, for weeks. Stephanie did the exercises but wouldn't touch her own rage, even as she wept with fury on behalf of other people in the group, telling one woman, your father was a monster, I hate him, about someone else's father, never her own. Then one night the wall came down, and she screamed and accused her parents of destroying her childhood, years of buried anger arriving all at once. Afterward, calmer, she told Forward, I guess God wants me to get better more than He wants me to forgive.

That night was the turning point in her recovery, not the moment she had already claimed months earlier, when she told the group she had forgiven everyone.

Forward's argument is that forgiveness actually has two separate parts tangled together. One is giving up the wish for revenge, which is healthy and worth doing. The other is absolving someone of responsibility for what they did, and that part, rushed or forced, can function as denial wearing a halo. If you forgive before you've let yourself feel the anger and grief underneath, the responsibility for what happened doesn't disappear, it just moves. It goes from your parents onto you, and you end up hating yourself instead of being angry at them.

Forgiveness, if it comes, belongs at the end of this work, not the beginning, and Forward believes it should be earned, a parent acknowledging what happened, taking responsibility, showing willingness to make amends. Skipping straight to forgiveness to avoid the harder feelings underneath doesn't heal anything. It just buries the same pain somewhere new.

Start by asking yourself which kind of forgiveness you're actually being pushed toward, letting go of revenge, which is worth doing, or excusing what happened, which is not the same thing at all. If you feel obligated to forgive right now, give yourself explicit permission to set that decision aside until you've let yourself feel the anger and grief you've been skipping past. Pay attention to whether you can rage on someone else's behalf more easily than your own, the way one survivor found herself furious about another woman's father while staying numb about her own, and practice turning that same fire toward your own history. And if forgiveness ever does feel right, save it for a parent who has actually acknowledged what happened and taken responsibility for it, rather than handing it over simply to make the discomfort stop.