When Forgiveness Becomes Another Form of Harm

In 2009, Chris Brown pleaded guilty to felony assault after beating Rihanna on the eve of the Grammy Awards. She filed a restraining order. Three years later, she took him back. By 2013, they split for the final time. Forgiveness did not save her from the cycle. It extended it.

The behavior did not stop with Rihanna. In 2017, his then ex-girlfriend, actress Karrueche Tran, obtained a five-year restraining order against him after alleging he had threatened her with violence. A 2024 documentary featured a woman who alleged Brown drugged and sexually assaulted her at a 2020 yacht party. In May 2025, he was arrested and charged in the UK with grievous bodily harm related to an alleged 2023 London nightclub assault. The charges are ongoing.

Forgiveness did not rehabilitate him. It just gave him more time.

Rihanna's story is extreme, but the dynamic is not rare. Forgiveness has been repackaged as a moral requirement, and the people who decline to offer it get treated as the real issue. Spiritual communities especially love to frame a grudge as a character flaw, as if carrying justified anger about genuine harm says more about the victim than the person who caused it.

The science does not fully support the forgiveness gospel that keeps getting preached. A substantial body of psychological and spiritual research shows measurable benefits to forgiving, and that part is real. A separate layer of research rarely gets cited, possibly because it complicates the narrative. Studies show that forgiveness increases the likelihood of negative behavior, including physical and verbal aggression, in distressed couples and produces harm over time. A longitudinal study of newlywed couples found a positive association between spouses' tendencies to express forgiveness and their partners' reports of continued psychological and physical aggression, suggesting that forgiveness removes the unwanted consequences, such as anger, criticism, and rejection, that would otherwise discourage an offender from repeating the behavior. The forgiveness itself becomes part of the cycle.

A 2004 study of 121 women residing in domestic violence shelters found that women who forgave their abusive partners were more likely to return to those relationships, increasing the likelihood of continued victimization. Nobody promoting forgiveness as a universal good tends to lead with that finding.

People are told to forgive regardless of whether the harm was a single lapse or a documented pattern, as if the act of forgiving carries the same weight in both situations. A significant number of people extend forgiveness because they feel shamed into it, without having genuinely processed anything. The message in certain communities is blunt: refusing to forgive signals something is wrong with you, that you carry darkness, that you are spiritually behind. Trauma survivors who are repeatedly told they need to forgive their abusers, particularly when that pressure comes from communities or family systems invested in minimizing what happened, experience the pressure to forgive as a continuation of the original violation. Pressure like that does not produce healing. It produces performance.

Psychologists separate forgiveness from reconciliation. Forgiveness happens inside a person. Reconciliation happens between people, and only when both parties commit to the process. Conflating the two puts survivors in an impossible position, where forgiving someone gets interpreted as an obligation to restore the relationship, re-establish contact, or extend trust that was never repaired. At times, reconciliation should not occur, perhaps because the relationship is toxic or unsafe. Forgiveness and reconciliation are separate decisions, and treating them as the same thing serves the offender far more than the person who got hurt.

Research and clinical experience both document people who healed completely without ever forgiving. For some of them, extending forgiveness felt like one more concession to someone who had already taken enough. A 2025 review in *Social and Personality Psychology Compass* argues that negative emotions tied to unforgiveness carry functional value, empowering survivors to hold onto a sense of autonomy and moral agency in the face of mistreatment. In cases involving serious trauma, abuse, or relational harm, the injury does not stay confined to the past. It changes how a person processes trust, how they enter new relationships, and how they read other people's intentions. Those changes become permanent features of who they are. Calling the offense forgivable on a timeline designed to make other people comfortable dismisses how significant the damage was.

Merriam-Webster defines forgiveness as the act of ceasing to feel resentment. A lot of people who say they have forgiven someone still carry resentment. They have learned to call it something else, or to perform the absence of it in spaces where honesty feels socially expensive. Actual cessation of resentment is rarer than the cultural conversation around forgiveness suggests.

Some people arrive at genuine indifference. The person who hurt them no longer occupies space in their emotional life. They processed what happened and moved forward without ever attaching the word forgiveness to any part of the process. That outcome is valid. Healing does not require a ceremony.

Forgiveness works for some people. For others, it is the wrong framework for what happened to them, and insisting otherwise centers the comfort of everyone except the person who got hurt.

@Santitos

@salinasmariasantos

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