Years ago, someone hurt me badly.
We’ll call the person Person and the offense The Great Violation, because that’s about as specific as I need to get. 😂
I knew I needed to forgive Person. I was a Christian. I knew what Scripture said about forgiveness, and eventually I got to the point where I could honestly say, I forgive them.
Then Person showed up the next day.
Apparently my emotions had not gotten the memo.
I was furious. Not mildly irritated or a little uncomfortable. I mean red-faced-cartoon-character-with-steam-coming-out-of-the-ears angry.
And almost immediately, I started questioning what I’d done the day before. Hadn’t I just forgiven this person? If I’d really meant it, why was I still this angry?
If you’ve ever wondered why you’re still angry after forgiving someone, you probably know exactly what I mean.
I Thought Forgiveness Would Change My Feelings
Around that time, I was listening to a lot of Christian teaching on audio tapes.
Yes. Audio tapes.
I’ll give everyone under 35 a moment to Google that. 😂
I remember hearing Joyce Meyer teach about forgiveness, and something she said changed the way I thought about what was happening. I’m paraphrasing this from a very old memory, but the idea was that feeling angry again doesn’t necessarily mean you haven’t forgiven someone. Sometimes your feelings simply haven’t caught up with a decision you’ve already made.
That came back to me after Person left.
Instead of deciding my anger meant yesterday’s forgiveness hadn’t “worked,” I prayed something along the lines of, Lord, I forgave Person yesterday. I decided not to hold this against them anymore. Clearly my emotions haven’t caught up with that decision, so I need Your help. I still choose forgiveness, even though I don’t feel particularly forgiving right now.
That was a huge shift for me because I had been expecting forgiveness to do something it doesn’t always do immediately.
I had made a decision. My feelings were going to take a little longer.
If you’re somewhere in that gap right now—knowing you’ve forgiven someone but still dealing with the feelings that keep coming back—I included a section about this in my free Forgiveness Roadmap. It can help you work through what to do when the emotions don’t disappear just because you’ve decided to forgive.
Emotions Lag. And Sometimes They Lie.
I want to be careful here because I don’t mean that emotions are bad or that we should ignore them. They can tell us useful things. Anger may tell us we’ve been hurt. Fear can alert us to danger. Sadness can show us that something mattered deeply to us.
But emotions aren’t always reliable when it comes to interpreting what those things mean.
If I see someone I’ve forgiven and anger immediately rises up, that feeling may tell me, See? You haven’t really forgiven them.
But is that actually true?
Maybe seeing the person triggered the memory. Maybe the consequences of what happened are still affecting my life. Maybe I made a genuine decision to forgive and the hurt simply hasn’t healed yet.
Once I understood that, I stopped using my feelings as the test of whether or not I had forgiven someone.
The Bible Doesn’t Tell Us to Pretend We’re Not Angry
Something else has helped me here: the Bible doesn’t seem shocked that we get angry.
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 NIV
Notice that he doesn’t say, If you’re a good Christian, don’t ever feel angry.
He addresses what we do in our anger.
Feeling anger and feeding anger aren’t the same thing. I may not be able to control that first wave of emotion when I’m reminded of what happened, but I do have some choices about what happens next.
Do I rehearse the offense again? Do I mentally build my case? Do I let the anger turn into bitterness? Or do I bring what’s happening in me back to God and ask Him to help me keep walking in the forgiveness I’ve already chosen?
Forgiveness doesn’t require me to pretend I’m not angry. But it does change what I’m willing to do with that anger.
So What Do You Do When the Anger Comes Back?
For me, the first thing is remembering what I’ve already decided.
I don’t need to reopen the case every time the emotion returns. I can admit, Yep, I’m still really angry about that, without concluding that I’m back at square one with forgiveness.
Sometimes I pray about it again. Not because the first forgiveness didn’t count, but because I need God’s help with what’s happening in me now.
And sometimes I need to stop myself from rehearsing the offense.
This one is big for me because there is a difference between remembering what happened and intentionally replaying it until I’ve made myself angry all over again. I know when I’ve crossed that line. I’m no longer processing anything. I’m building the prosecution’s case.
Again.
I can spend twenty minutes mentally explaining why I was right, why they were wrong, what I should have said, what they should have said and what I hope they eventually realize.
Meanwhile, Person may be somewhere eating a sandwich without thinking about me at all.
I’m the one sitting there getting angry again.
Rehearsing the offense doesn’t change what happened, and it certainly doesn’t make the other person understand it better. Mostly, it keeps me emotionally tied to something I’ve already decided I don’t want to keep carrying.
Healing Has Its Own Timeline
I wish forgiveness worked like deleting a file.
Click. Gone.
That hasn’t been my experience.
There are things I’ve forgiven that took much longer to stop hurting. I’ve even had things I thought were completely settled surprise me years later when a memory or circumstance brought some of the old emotion back.
I don’t think that automatically means we’re back at the beginning. It may simply mean there’s still something there that needs healing.
So if you’ve forgiven someone and you’re frustrated because you still feel angry, hurt or sad when you think about what happened, don’t immediately assume you did forgiveness wrong.
Instead, it may be worth asking yourself:
Am I still choosing to hold this against them, or am I feeling the pain of something I’ve already chosen to forgive?
Because those are two very different things.
Forgiveness can be a decision you genuinely made while emotional healing is still catching up.
I know that was true for me.
And once I understood the difference, I stopped expecting my feelings to prove that I had forgiven.
Want Some Help Walking This Out?
Knowing you need to forgive someone and figuring out what that actually looks like can be two very different things.
I created the free Forgiveness Is for You Roadmap to help you work through what happened, make the decision to forgive and think through what comes next—including what to do when the feelings come back.