How to Forgive Someone Who Hurt You Deeply: The Biblical Guide (With Prayer)

Table of Contents

A complete guide to understanding why we get offended, how to forgive someone who hurt you deeply, what forgiveness really means, and the three proven steps to release any hurt — no matter how deep

You have been hurt. Maybe it happened recently. Maybe it happened years ago and you thought you were over it — until something reminded you and the pain came rushing back as if it was yesterday. Maybe you have tried to forgive. You’ve said the words, you’ve prayed the prayer, and still the anger comes back. Still the resentment is there. Still that person’s face makes your stomach tighten.

If that is you, I want you to know something important: you are not failing at forgiveness. You may simply have never been shown how to do it properly.

In over fifteen years of helping Christian couples move from struggling marriages to thriving ones, I have seen one thing come up again and again as the root of the problem. It is not communication. It is not finances. It is not even incompatibility. It is unforgiveness — old hurt, piled up quietly, slowly poisoning everything around it.

This guide is the result of a three-day forgiveness training I ran for a group of Christians who were serious about getting free. What you are about to read is not a surface-level feel-good message. This is a deep, practical, biblically-grounded guide to understanding forgiveness the way God designed it — and walking through it step by step.

Take your time with this. Read it slowly. Do the work as you go. By the time you reach the end, you will have the tools to forgive anyone, including yourself.

Why Every Christian Needs to Learn How to Forgive

We often assume that as Christians, forgiveness comes naturally. After all, we serve a God of grace. We have been forgiven ourselves. So why is it so hard?

The truth is, forgiveness is one of those things that sounds simple in a sermon but becomes incredibly difficult when you are sitting across from the person who devastated you, or lying awake at night replaying what they did. Knowing that you should forgive and actually knowing how to forgive are two very different things.

And the cost of not learning how to forgive is enormous. The effects of unforgiveness touch every area of your life — spiritually, physically, emotionally, and relationally. Let us look at each one honestly.

1. It hinders your prayers

This is perhaps the most sobering consequence of unforgiveness, and Jesus makes it unmistakably clear. In Mark 11:25 He says:

“And when you stand praying, if you hold anything against anyone, forgive them, so that your Father in heaven may forgive you your sins.” — Mark 11:25

Notice where Jesus places this instruction — standing in prayer. He is saying that unforgiveness and effective prayer cannot coexist. When you approach God with a heart full of resentment toward another person, you are building a wall at the very point where you need an open door. Your prayers become hindered — not because God has moved, but because your posture has closed the channel.

Matthew 6:14-15 reinforces this even more directly, linking your willingness to forgive others to God’s willingness to forgive you. This is not a minor footnote. It sits at the very heart of the Lord’s Prayer. If your prayer life feels dry, flat, or like it is hitting the ceiling — unforgiveness is one of the first things worth examining.

2. It damages your physical health

This is not just spiritual truth — modern research confirms what Scripture has always taught. Carrying chronic bitterness and resentment puts your body under sustained stress. Studies have linked long-term unforgiveness to elevated cortisol levels, high blood pressure, weakened immune function, disrupted sleep, chronic fatigue, and even increased risk of heart disease.

Proverbs 14:30 puts it plainly:

“A heart at peace gives life to the body, but envy rots the bones.” — Proverbs 14:30

The word translated “rots” here is not gentle. It describes a slow, interior decay. That is exactly what chronic resentment does to the body — it does not announce itself loudly, but it quietly deteriorates your physical wellbeing from the inside out. God designed your body and your spirit to function together. What poisons one eventually affects the other.

3. It blocks God’s blessings in your life

When we hold unforgiveness, we essentially close ourselves off. We build walls to protect ourselves from being hurt again — and those same walls keep out the good things God wants to bring in. Opportunities, relationships, joy, peace — all of it flows more freely through an open, forgiving heart than through one that is locked down in self-protection.

Psalm 66:18 tells us:

“If I had cherished sin in my heart, the Lord would not have listened.” — Psalm 66:18

Unforgiveness cherished in the heart — held on to, rehearsed, nursed — becomes a barrier between us and the fullness of what God has for us. This is not punishment. It is simply the spiritual reality that a closed fist cannot receive a gift.

4. It damages your marriage and closest relationships

Small offenses that are never properly released pile up silently. Month after month, year after year, they accumulate until the weight becomes unbearable. This is why I have seen marriages that looked stable on the outside collapse the moment the children left home — two people who had been together for 25 years suddenly could not find a reason to stay. The unforgiveness had been doing its quiet, destructive work the entire time.

And it is not just marriage. The person who has not learned to forgive brings their wounds into every relationship — friendships, work relationships, church community. They are harder to be close to, quicker to pull back, and more likely to interpret neutral actions as threatening. Unforgiveness does not just affect the person who hurt you. It affects everyone around you.

5. It affects your parenting

Children are extraordinarily perceptive. They absorb the emotional atmosphere of the home long before they can name what they are feeling. A parent who is carrying unresolved bitterness — even if they never speak of it — passes that atmosphere on to their children. The anger that comes out in irritability, harshness, or emotional withdrawal shapes the way children see themselves, see relationships, and see God.

Unforgiveness is generational if it is not dealt with. What you do not heal, you hand down. But the reverse is equally true — when you do the work of forgiveness, you break the cycle. You give your children a different inheritance.

6. It gives the enemy a foothold

Paul writes in Ephesians 4:26-27:

“In your anger do not sin: Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, and do not give the devil a foothold.” — Ephesians 4:26-27

Unresolved anger and unforgiveness are an open invitation to the enemy. He does not need a large opening — just a foothold. And from that foothold, he works to deepen the bitterness, widen the division, and amplify every future offense until the wound feels impossible to heal. This is why Paul urges urgency. Do not let it sit. Do not let it settle. Deal with it quickly, before it becomes a stronghold.

7. It keeps you spiritually stagnant

A Christian who is carrying deep unforgiveness cannot grow the way God intends. The very grace that should be flowing through them — outward to others — gets dammed up by resentment. Their worship becomes hollow. Their witness loses its power. Their joy becomes performance.

Hebrews 12:15 warns of a root of bitterness that causes trouble and defiles many. You cannot bear the fruit of the Spirit — love, joy, peace, patience, kindness — from a root of bitterness. The two cannot occupy the same soil. Spiritual growth requires a heart that is open and free, and unforgiveness is the thing that keeps it closed.

THE BOTTOM LINE: Unforgiveness is not neutral. It is actively costing you — your health, your prayers, your relationships, your spiritual growth, and your joy. The good news is that every single one of these effects begins to reverse the moment you choose to forgive.

The good news is this: no matter how long you have been carrying it, no matter how deep the wound, forgiveness is possible. God does not ask you to do anything He will not also give you the power to do.

KEY TRUTH: Forgiveness is not optional for the Christian. Jesus links our willingness to forgive directly to how we receive God’s forgiveness. But more than a command, it is a gift — to you, first.

What Forgiveness Is NOT — Clearing Up the Confusion

Before we talk about how to forgive, we need to clear the ground. Many people have been trying to forgive in ways that simply do not work — and then blaming themselves for failing. Let us look at what forgiveness is not.

Forgiveness is not suppressing the pain

One of the most common things people do is try to bury the hurt. Push it down. Block it out. Pretend it didn’t happen or that it doesn’t matter. This does not work. You cannot forgive what you refuse to feel. The pain that is suppressed does not disappear — it goes underground and comes out sideways in anger, irritability, and a wall around your heart.

This is why the person you love most often gets the worst of your anger. The wound that started somewhere else is still inside you, and whoever gets close enough gets hurt by it. You are not a bad person. You are a person who was never shown how to process pain properly.

Forgiveness is not pretending it didn’t happen

God is not asking you to act like the thing that hurt you was not real. It was real. The betrayal was real. The wound was real. True forgiveness does not minimize what happened — it faces it honestly and then makes a decision about what to do with it.

Forgiveness is not the same as trust

This is one people often confuse. When you forgive someone, you are not automatically restoring them to the same level of access they had before. Trust is rebuilt slowly, through consistent behaviour over time. You can forgive someone completely and still, in wisdom, choose to maintain appropriate boundaries. These are two separate things.

Forgiveness is not waiting for the other person

Here is something that sets people free when they finally hear it: you do not need the other person present to forgive them. They do not have to apologize. They do not have to change. They do not even have to know you have forgiven them. Forgiveness happens in your heart, before God. The other person’s presence or cooperation is not required.

This means that even if the person who hurt you has walked out of your life, passed away, or refuses to acknowledge what they did — you can still get completely free. You do not need them to do anything. You just need to go through the process.

Forgiveness is not the same as forgive and forget

“Forgive and forget” sounds noble, but it is not what the Bible actually teaches — and chasing it sets people up to feel like they have failed. God does not ask you to erase your memory. He asks you to release your right to punish. You can remember what happened and still have completely forgiven the person. In fact, remembering wisely is sometimes part of walking in godly discernment. The goal is not a blank memory. The goal is a free heart.

Forgiveness is not a feeling

This might be the most important thing on this list. Forgiveness is not an emotion. It is a decision. You will not feel like forgiving. You may not feel warm toward the person when you start the process. That is completely fine. You make the decision by faith, and the feelings follow your obedience over time. Do not wait to feel ready. You will never feel ready.

What about forgiving someone who is not sorry?

This is one of the most common questions I hear, and it is a real one. What do you do when the person who hurt you has never apologized, refuses to admit they did anything wrong, or is no longer in your life? Do you still have to forgive?

Yes. And here is why: your forgiveness is not contingent on their repentance. It is a transaction between you and God, not between you and them. When you forgive someone who is not sorry, you are not saying their behaviour was acceptable. You are saying: I refuse to let their lack of remorse keep me in a prison of bitterness. I am choosing my freedom, regardless of what they choose.

This is one of the most liberating truths in the Bible. The person who hurt you does not have to do anything for you to get free. You can walk out of that cell today, with or without their cooperation.

DEFINITION: Forgiveness is a deliberate choice to release someone from the debt they owe you — trusting God to deal with the situation, with them, and with you. It is not easy. But it is possible.

biblical forgiveness - releasing someone who hurt you and walking in freedom

Why We Get Offended — The Root of the Problem

This is the part of forgiveness teaching that most people skip. And it is the most important part of understanding why forgiveness is so hard.

Before we can forgive, we need to understand offense — why it happens, where it comes from, and why some people seem to get hurt far more easily than others.

We are all driven by one need — Love

Here is something that changed the way I understand human behaviour entirely, and it is at the heart of why people hurt one another.

Every human being on this earth has one deep, fundamental need: to be loved. Not liked. Not admired. Loved — genuinely, unconditionally, completely. God wired us that way from the beginning, because He Himself is love, and we were made in His image.

But here is where the problem begins. Most people do not understand what love truly is. And because they do not understand it, they cannot find it in its pure form. So instead, they go after four things that feel like love — four expressions that love contains — but they pursue them separately, outside of love itself. Those four things are:

Praise — the need to be recognised, affirmed, and valued
Power — the need to feel in control of their own life and circumstances
Pleasure — the need to experience good things and enjoy life
Protection — the need to feel safe and secure from harm

Praise, Power, Pleasure and Protection are all genuinely present within love. When you are truly loved, you experience all four of them. The problem is that when people do not know how to access real love — the love of God poured into our hearts — they begin chasing these four things on their own. And in that chase, they step on each other. They use each other. They wound each other.

The person who betrayed you was most likely chasing one of these four things. They were not primarily thinking about you — they were trying to get something they felt they needed. Their pursuit of Praise, Power, Pleasure or Protection came at your expense. That is where the hurt came from.

This does not excuse what they did. But it completely changes how you see it. When you can look at the person who hurt you and say — they were chasing love in a way they did not understand — something shifts. The monster shrinks. A wounded human being appears in their place. And it becomes possible to release them.

THE ROOT INSIGHT: People hurt one another not because they are evil, but because they are searching for love in ways they do not fully understand. When you see that clearly, forgiveness becomes possible.

Offense is revealed, not created

Here is something that changed the way I understand forgiveness entirely. Think about this: if someone bumps into you in a crowd and you feel pain — that tells you something. It tells you there is already a wound there. If there was no wound, the bump would not hurt. You would just move on.

This is exactly how emotional offense works. When someone says or does something and we react with deep pain or anger that seems disproportionate to what happened — that is a signal. It is not the other person creating the wound in that moment. They are revealing a wound that was already there, from something that happened before.

This is why a small comment from your spouse can trigger a level of anger that surprises even you. It is not really about the comment. The comment touched something old. Something that was already hurting. And your system responded to the old wound, not just the new one.

INSIGHT: When someone offends you, ask yourself: “Why does this hurt so much?” The answer will almost always point you to something older than this situation — and that is where the real healing needs to happen.

We carry old wounds into every new relationship

Once a person has been deeply hurt and has not properly healed, they carry that wound into every space they enter. Every new relationship. Every new conversation. And because their inner system is on high alert to protect them from being hurt again, they see threats everywhere — even where none exist.

This is why some people seem to get offended by everything. It is not that the world is constantly attacking them. It is that they are hurting, and the pain interprets everything through that lens. When you are in pain, even the lightest touch feels like a wound.

The solution is not to harden yourself. The solution is to heal the old wounds so that when someone bumps into you, you do not bleed.

How to stop being so easily offended

If you find yourself getting offended frequently — by small things, by people’s tone, by things that others seem to brush off easily — this is important information. It is not a personality flaw. It is a wound indicator.

The way to stop being easily offended is not to toughen up or care less. It is to heal the old wounds that are making everything feel dangerous. As you do the forgiveness work in this guide — releasing old hurts one by one — you will find, over time, that your threshold for offense naturally rises. The things that used to sting will stop stinging. Not because you stop caring, but because the old wounds underneath them have healed.

Why it is especially difficult to forgive in marriage

Marriage is unique because you cannot avoid each other the way you can avoid other people. In other relationships, you can create distance when things get difficult. In marriage, you cannot do that indefinitely. So the unresolved offenses pile up, day after day, week after week. Little things get added to big things. And after months or years of piling, the weight becomes enormous.

This is why I have seen marriages that functioned for decades suddenly collapse. The couple did not fall out of love overnight. The weight of years of unresolved hurt finally became more than they could carry. The person who says “I don’t love you anymore” almost always means “I am too exhausted to keep carrying this pain.”

But here is the hope: it does not have to end that way. When you learn how to properly process and release offense, you stop the piling. And when you go back and release the old pile, you create space for love to breathe again.

The root of bitterness — and why it spreads

The Bible uses a specific and powerful image for what happens when we refuse to forgive. Hebrews 12:15 warns us:

“See to it that no one falls short of the grace of God and that no bitter root grows up to cause trouble and defile many.” — Hebrews 12:15

A root of bitterness is exactly what the name suggests. It starts underground, invisible to others — perhaps even to yourself. But it grows. And as it grows, it sends out shoots in every direction. It defiles your worship, your relationships, your parenting, your work. It does not stay contained. That is the nature of a root — it spreads through the whole ground.

This is why so many people find that their unresolved hurt from one person begins to colour every other relationship around them. One root of bitterness planted in the soil of an old wound eventually affects the entire garden of their life.

The role of judgment in unforgiveness

There is a deeper layer to offense that most teaching on forgiveness never touches. And this is something God showed me that transformed my own understanding.

When we are hurt and we do not forgive, we do not just carry pain. We carry judgment. We have decided in our hearts what the other person is — selfish, evil, uncaring, not good enough. And we hold them in that verdict.

Jesus also told one of His most sobering parables specifically about this — the parable of the unforgiving servant in Matthew 18:23-35. A king forgives his servant a debt so enormous it could never be repaid in a lifetime. That same servant then turns around and refuses to forgive a fellow servant who owes him a tiny fraction of what he himself was forgiven. When the king hears of it, he is furious and hands the unforgiving servant over to be tortured until the original debt is paid.

Jesus closes the parable with these words: ‘This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother or sister from your heart.’ It is not a comfortable ending. But it is an honest one. The servant’s problem was not that he couldn’t forgive — it was that he had never truly grasped the magnitude of what he himself had been forgiven. When you understand how much grace has been extended to you, withholding it from others becomes almost impossible.

The Bible is very clear on this. Romans 12:19 tells us:

“Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay,’ says the Lord.” — Romans 12:19

When we hold judgment on another person, we are essentially telling God: I do not trust you to deal with this person. I will handle this myself. I will sit on the throne of judgment over this situation. And when we do that, we are in a place of spiritual conflict with God — and we cannot win that conflict.

This is one of the reasons Jesus made such a strong statement in Matthew 6:

“For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.” — Matthew 6:14-15

It is not that God becomes cruel and withdraws His love when we don’t forgive. It is that when we are holding judgment — sitting on God’s throne — the channel through which His grace flows into our lives becomes blocked. Not because He is withholding it, but because our posture has closed us off to it.

And the truly humbling part is this: when we judge another person, we are often judging God at the same time. We are saying, “God, you allowed this. You didn’t protect me. You didn’t stop this from happening. You are not a good God.” Many people are carrying deep, unspoken offenses at God — and they don’t even realize it.

DEEPER TRUTH: The problem is rarely just with the person who hurt you. At the root, it is often a trust issue with God. When we truly trust that God is in control, is good, and is working in both our life and the lives of those who hurt us — forgiveness becomes possible.

My Personal Testimony: What God Taught Me About Forgiveness

I want to be honest with you. I did not come to this teaching through study alone. I came to it through pain — real, deep, life-altering pain. And I want to share that with you, because I need you to know that what I am teaching is not theory. It is something I have lived.

The night my mother was killed

I was 11 years old when armed robbers killed my mother.

I cannot fully describe what that does to a child. The world does not make sense after something like that. The person who was supposed to be there — the person who was the centre of your world — is suddenly, violently gone. And in the place where love used to live, something else moves in. Rage.

I remember the anger I felt. The burning desire for revenge. I made a promise to myself in those dark days — that I would grow up, find those men, and make them pay. I held on to that promise for years. And the pain that fuelled it poisoned everything around it. I could not sleep. I was plagued by nightmares. I carried that wound into every room I walked into, into every relationship I tried to build.

I was a prisoner. And the men who killed my mother were not the ones who had locked the door. I had. My own unforgiveness had become my cell.

But as I drew closer to God and began to seek His help, He started to do something in me that I did not expect. He did not just comfort me. He began to open my eyes.

God showed me something that changed everything: the person who shot my mother was very likely someone who was deeply hurt themselves. Someone who had grown up in pain, in lack, in violence — someone whose wounds had twisted them into a person capable of doing what they did. And then God asked me something that stopped me completely: if you had grown up in their exact circumstances, experienced what they experienced, been shaped by what shaped them — who might you have become?

I did not want to sit with that question. But I did. And in that moment of honest reckoning, something broke open in me.

My desire for revenge vanished. Not because what they did was okay. Not because my mother’s life did not matter. But because I finally saw the person who did it as a human being — a broken, wounded, deeply lost human being — rather than a monster I needed to destroy.

I found myself praying for their healing. Not their punishment. For their healing.

That is what real forgiveness looks like. It is when you release the other person into God’s hands. It is when you develop compassion for them and recognise that their hurtful actions so often come from their own deep pain. When you can see that clearly — when you can see the wound behind the wound — you can genuinely let go.

I share this not to impress you but to tell you: if God could bring me to a place of praying for the man who killed my mother, He can bring you through whatever it is you are carrying. Nothing is too far gone for His grace.

TAKE NOTE: Forgiveness is a release. When you truly forgive, you release all desire to punish the person who hurt you. You let go of the anger, the bitterness, the need for vengeance. You stop trying to be the judge, jury, and executioner — and you let God be God.

What God showed me in my marriage

Years later, God took me through a different kind of forgiveness lesson — one that was quieter, but just as important.

When my wife and I were in a difficult season in our marriage, I was trying everything I knew to make things work. I was praying. I was showing up. I was doing what I believed a good Christian husband should do. But something was not working, and I could not figure out what.

Then God showed me something I was not expecting. He showed me that I had been placing judgment on my wife. Not loudly. Not obviously. But in my heart, in the way I thought about her and responded to her, I had decided she was not capable of certain things. I had decided she could not make certain decisions on her own. I had decided she needed me to control the direction of things because I did not trust that she could do it without me.

I thought I was being a good husband. I was being a controlling one. Underneath that control was judgment. And underneath that judgment was a fear that God was not going to show up for our marriage if I let go.

When the Holy Spirit showed me this, it broke me. I went to God and said: Lord, forgive me for placing this judgment on my wife. I release her. I release my control. I trust You with her and with us. Help me become a husband who blesses her instead of one who tries to manage her.

Something shifted. Not just in me — in us. And that is when I began to truly understand the connection between forgiveness, judgment, and trust in God.

If this resonates with you, read prayer for your husband or prayer for your wife.

The stroke that changed how I understand transformation

Several years ago I had a stroke. And as anyone who has been through that knows, the recovery process is brutal, slow, and deeply humbling. I had to work with physiotherapists to relearn how to use my own body — limbs that had been mine for decades suddenly stopped responding to my brain’s signals.

My therapists would ask me to do the simplest things. Move this hand. Lift this arm. And I would send the signal from my brain — I would will it with everything in me — and nothing would happen. The limb would just sit there.

And they would say: keep trying. Just keep doing it. Don’t give up. It’s going to move. One day I was doing the exercise again, willing my hand to move, willing it, willing it — and then slowly, a little bit. A small tremble. And then a little more.

I sat there and I thought: this is exactly what forgiveness is like.

When you have spent years not forgiving, when the pattern of holding onto hurt has become hardwired into how you function, you cannot expect it to completely change because you heard one message or read one article. The habit of unforgiveness goes deep. The grooves are worn in. And healing requires practice — real, consistent, repeated practice — even when it doesn’t seem like anything is happening.

The forgiveness steps I am about to share with you are not a magic prayer you say once and forget. They are exercises. And just like my physio exercises, the doing of them — even when they feel like nothing is happening — is what produces the transformation.

REMEMBER: Forgiveness is not a feeling you wait for. It is a practice you commit to. You do the work, consistently, and the freedom comes. It always comes.

The Three Steps to Forgiveness

After years of working through this personally and walking others through it, I have distilled the process of forgiveness into three essential steps. These are not steps you do once and move on. They are a framework you come back to every time a wound surfaces — whether it is an old one or a new one.

Before you begin these steps, you need to have a specific person in mind. Not a general “everyone who has ever hurt me” — a specific person, a specific incident. The more specific you are, the more effective the process.

Also, you do not need that person present. This is entirely between you and God.

Step 1: Acknowledge the Offense and How It Made You Feel

The first step is the one most people skip — and it is the reason why their forgiveness does not last. You cannot release what you refuse to acknowledge.

This step requires you to be honest. Honest with yourself, and honest with God. You need to name what happened and then name how it made you feel.

Do not sanitize it. Do not make it sound more acceptable than it was. Do not say “they were a bit unkind” when what you really mean is “they betrayed me completely and I was devastated.” God already knows the truth. Dressing it up does not honour Him or help you.

Name the offense

Speak it out or write it down. Be specific. What did the person do? What did they say? When did it happen? The more clearly you can articulate the offense, the more effectively you can release it.

Name how it made you feel

This is where many people — especially men — struggle. We are not always trained to identify and name our emotions. But this step is critical because the feeling is where the wound lives.

Some feelings you may identify: betrayed, humiliated, used, rejected, unloved, invisible, unsafe, disrespected, abandoned, worthless, foolish. There is no wrong answer here. Whatever you felt — name it.

In one of my training sessions, a woman was working through forgiving her ex-boyfriend who had taken her money, lived off her provision, and never got a job as he had promised. She said: it made me feel like a fool. Used. Invalid. Unloved. Disrespected.

That is exactly what this step looks like. Not an explanation. Not a justification. Just the raw, honest truth of how it felt.

WHY THIS MATTERS: You cannot heal a wound you refuse to look at. Step 1 asks you to look — fully, honestly — at what happened and what it cost you emotionally. This is not wallowing. This is the beginning of healing.

Step 2: Find the Reason — Understand Why They Did It

This is the step that surprises people the most. And it is the one that has the greatest power to release you from resentment.

Once you have named the offense and how it made you feel, your next task is to ask: why did they do what they did?

Not their real reason — because you will never fully know that. But a plausible human reason. A reason that makes sense when you consider that this person, like every human being, was driven by those four core needs: love, pleasure, power, protection.

This is not about excusing what they did

Finding the reason is not the same as saying what they did was okay. It is not okay. You are not dismissing it. You are humanizing the person who hurt you — seeing them not as a monster, but as a broken human being, driven by their own wounds and their own needs, doing the best they could in their own mind — even when that best was not good at all.

The person who betrayed you was probably trying to protect themselves. The person who abused you was likely acting out of their own deep pain. The spouse who neglected you may have been so consumed by their own fear or shame that they had nothing left to give. None of this is excuse. All of it is reality.

Going back to the example

The woman with the ex-boyfriend — when she tried to find the reason, she kept trying to figure out his “real” reason. I stopped her and said: you cannot find his real reason. But you can find the human reason. This man, like all of us, wanted pleasure. He wanted comfort. He wanted to avoid the hard work. He wanted to enjoy the freedom of someone else solving his problems. He was not specifically trying to destroy her. He was trying to pursue his own comfort — and she happened to be the person whose comfort he was taking.

When she saw it that way — when she saw that he was not a special kind of evil, he was just a person choosing himself — something in her began to loosen.

What about when the reason seems inexcusable?

Sometimes there is no clean or comfortable reason. Sometimes people do genuinely terrible things. In those cases, the reason may simply be: this person was deeply broken. This person was acting out of a place of pain or darkness that had nothing to do with my worth. Their action said everything about their brokenness and nothing about my value.

That is still a reason. And it is still enough to release with.

WHY THIS MATTERS: Understanding why someone did what they did does not give them a pass. It gives YOU freedom. It disconnects the offense from your identity and places it where it belongs — on their brokenness, not your worth.

Step 3: Release Them — and Let God Be God

This is the step where forgiveness actually happens. The first two steps prepare the ground. This is where you plant the seed.

Releasing someone means cancelling the debt. It means saying — out loud, with your full intention — I am no longer holding this against you. I am not going to carry this anymore. I am placing you and this situation in God’s hands, and I am stepping off the throne of judgment.

Release the person

Speak to them directly — even if they are not in the room. Even if they are no longer alive. Even if they are unaware of what they did to you. This is not for their benefit. It is for yours.

Say something like: “[Name], When you did [Name what they did] I felt [call out the emotions]. I understand that you were doing what you thought was best for yourself. I am not your judge. I release you. I let you go. I cancel the debt. I forgive you.”

It does not have to be perfect. It does not have to feel warm. It just has to be sincere. God will honour the sincere decision of your will, even when your feelings have not caught up yet.

Release the judgment

This part is just as important as releasing the person. You also need to release any judgment you have placed on them — any verdict you have reached about their character, their worth, or their future.

Hand that judgment back to God. Say: “Lord, I have been sitting in judgment over this person. I have decided what kind of person they are and what they deserve. I repent of that. You are the judge. I step off that throne. I release this person into Your hands and trust You to deal with them.”

Release God

And for many people — this is the deepest release of all. If you have been carrying an offense at God — if somewhere in your heart you have been blaming Him for allowing what happened, or questioning whether He is truly good and truly in control — you need to release that too.

Go to God and say: “Lord, I have been holding this against You. I have been saying in my heart that You let me down. That You didn’t protect me. That You didn’t show up. I repent of that. I choose to trust You. I believe that You are good, that You love me, and that You are working in every situation — including this one — for my good.”

This is often where the deepest healing comes. Because when you release God from the judgment you have placed on Him, something fundamental shifts in your relationship with Him — and everything else begins to heal from that place.

“And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” — Romans 8:28

THE HEART OF IT: Forgiveness is ultimately an act of trust. You are saying: I trust God to be the judge. I trust God to work in this. I trust God with my pain. When you can get to that place, you are free.

What Happens After You Forgive — and What to Do When the Feelings Come Back

One of the most common questions I hear after people go through this process is: “I forgave, but the feelings came back. Does that mean it didn’t work?”

No. It does not mean it didn’t work.

Forgiveness is a decision. But healing is a process. And part of that process is that the memory will return. The feeling will surface again. And every time it does, you have a choice.

You can pick the thing back up — re-open the file, re-rehearse the offense, let the bitterness settle back in. Or you can say: “I have already forgiven this. I made that decision. I am not going back to it.” And you release it again.

Jesus said to forgive seventy times seven — not because He was giving us a number to count to, but because He was telling us that forgiveness is a lifestyle, not a moment. Every time the wound surfaces, you release it again. Every time the judgment tries to come back, you hand it back to God again. Over time, the intervals get longer. The feelings get less intense. And one day you realize the wound has actually healed.

Think of it like the physio after my stroke. One day the exercises felt impossible. Then they felt like effort. Then they became natural. I did not stop doing them the first time nothing happened. I kept doing them. And eventually, my limbs responded. The same is true of the heart.

Do not go digging

One important word of caution: do not try to excavate every hurt you have ever experienced all at once. Do not sit down and try to find every offense from every relationship across your entire life. You will be overwhelmed and you will not finish.

Instead, work with what the Holy Spirit brings to the surface. The things that come to mind easily are the ones ready to be healed. Start there. Work on those. As you heal those, more will surface. Let God guide the pace.

Make forgiveness a lifestyle

The goal of this process is not just to deal with the old pile of hurt. The goal is to develop such a consistent practice of forgiveness that new offenses do not stick. When someone hurts you, you feel it, you go through the steps, and you release it quickly — before it has a chance to take root.

The people who live in the greatest freedom are not the ones who never get hurt. They are the ones who have learned to process hurt so efficiently that it does not accumulate. They feel it, they face it, they release it, they move on. And they do that over and over again, with the grace of God, until it becomes the rhythm of their lives.

A Prayer to Walk You Through the Three Steps Right Now

If you are ready, use this prayer to begin the process. Have a specific person in mind. Walk through it slowly. Do not rush it.

Step 1 — Acknowledge:

“Lord, I thank you for giving me this opportunity to open up to you. [Name] hurt me when they [describe what happened]. It made me feel [name the feelings]. I am not going to minimise it or pretend it didn’t happen. It happened, and it hurt me. I bring that pain to You now.”

Step 2 — Find the Reason:

“Lord, help me to see this person as a human being who was driven by their own needs and their own wounds. I believe that what they did came from [name the plausible reason — fear, selfishness, pain, their own brokenness]. They were not trying to destroy me. They were doing what they thought was best for themselves, even if that hurt me deeply.”

Step 3 — Release:

“[Name], I see what you did and what it cost me. I understand why you did it, even if I do not agree with it. I am not your judge — God is. I cancel the debt you owe me. I release you. I forgive you.

Lord, I release any judgment I have placed on this person. I step off the throne. You are God, and You are the judge. I hand them to You and I trust You to deal with this situation in Your wisdom and in Your time. And Lord, if I have been holding anything against You — if I have blamed You for allowing this, or questioned Your goodness — I repent of that now. I choose to trust You. I believe You are good. I believe You love me. I believe You are working in all of this for my good. In Jesus’ name, Amen.”

Final Words: You Were Not Meant to Carry This

I want to say something to you directly as we close this guide.

You were not designed to carry bitterness. Your heart was not built to hold on to offense indefinitely. The weight you have been carrying — the anger, the resentment, the replaying of what happened over and over — that is not your inheritance as a child of God. It is a prison. And Jesus came to set prisoners free.

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners.” — Luke 4:18

Forgiveness is how you walk out of that prison. Not because what happened to you was acceptable. Not because the person deserves to be released. But because you deserve to be free. Because God is good and He is trustworthy. Because there is a life of joy and peace and deep love waiting for you on the other side of this.

I have seen what happens when people truly walk through this process. Marriages that were on the edge of collapse come back to life. People who had been angry for decades find themselves laughing again. Parents who were passing their wounds on to their children break the cycle and raise a different generation. It is one of the most beautiful things I have ever witnessed.

You can have that. It starts with a decision, and it continues with practice. If today you made one decision — to release one person from one offense — then today was a good day. Tomorrow, you release another. And you keep going.

God is with you in this. He is the one who poured His love into your heart. And that love — His love — is what makes all of this possible.

Keep going. You are closer to free than you think.

If this guide helped you, please share it with someone who is struggling to forgive. You may be the reason they finally get free.