How to Forgive Your Parents: Leïla, 39, Four Months Later

You start with what is within reach: stop replaying the scene in your head, and welcome the anger when it rises instead of silencing it. The feeling of forgiveness cannot be ordered about. It shows up later, sometimes after months, sometimes never entirely. That is not a failure.

Research separates two things the word forgiveness blurs together. Worthington and colleagues (2007) call decisional forgiveness the intention to stop seeking revenge or avoiding the other person: it fits in one sentence and can be settled on a Tuesday evening. Emotional forgiveness is something else, the slow replacement of resentment by indifference or compassion. That is the one people try to obtain through gritted teeth, and it is precisely the one that refuses to comply.

What follows is not a protocol. It is a case: Leïla, 39, an administrator at a health insurer in Rennes, who spent the winter of 2026 wanting to forgive her mother and felt nothing move until she dropped the goal.

The trigger was nothing dramatic. A Christmas lunch, a remark from her mother about her weight in front of her children, and the very clear sense of being eleven years old again. Leïla drove home without speaking.

In the following weeks she got into the habit of running through the list, always the same one, on the 7.42 train: the sentences, the silences, the times her mother had chosen her brother. She knew that list by heart, and she reread it anyway, four mornings out of five. Thirty-five minutes of commute, a good twenty of them spent inside a scene from 1997.

She knew it was bad for her. That kind of knowing never suffices.

In January she finally put a word on it, on a colleague's advice: she needed to forgive. The phrase sounded right. She took it as an objective, with the method she used for her case files, meaning a deadline and steps.

She bought two books. She wrote a letter she did not send, which felt good for three days. She tried the sentence in the mirror, « I forgive you, Mum », and felt ridiculous by the second attempt.

Above all, she tried to stop thinking about it. That is the part that went worst. Every time the lunch scene came back, she told herself she had decided to move on, therefore she should not be thinking about it, therefore she was doing it wrong. After a month she resented her mother and resented herself, which made two problems instead of one.

Contrary to what you often read, the mistake was not a lack of sincerity. She was sincere. The mistake was treating an emotion like a decision, and counting the days. Working on forgiveness towards someone who has hurt you (in French) rarely begins with the will to forgive; it begins with looking at what is still stuck.

Campbell-Sills and colleagues (2006) compared two instructions given to people with anxiety or mood disorders while they watched a distressing film: suppress your emotions, or accept them. Both groups reported roughly the same distress during the film, but the suppression group kept a higher heart rate and reported more negative emotion afterwards. Silencing has a cost, and it invoices late.

No, and the question deserves to come before any technique, because a good share of the suffering of people who « cannot manage it » comes from the injunction itself.

What damages you, in an old family grudge, is the time spent replaying it. You can feel considerably better without ever saying the word forgiveness, simply by no longer running the scene four mornings out of five. That is the angle we took elsewhere, on how to loosen a grudge without going through forgiveness.

Leïla took a while to allow herself that. She felt that giving up the word amounted to giving up her mother.

The opposite happened. The day the objective fell away, what remained was a far more modest practice, with no deadline and no mark at the end of the week.

The instruction she gave herself fits in one image, borrowed from a guided session: the river. You sit, you breathe normally, and every thought that arrives is treated as an object floating past: you watch it go, you do not fish it out, and you do not push it either. The Christmas lunch is allowed to come. It is also allowed to leave without having been resolved.

Two minutes, on the train, in place of the list. Not ten, because ten she would not have done.

The first days were frankly unpleasant. Having stopped pushing the feeling down, she first felt the anger more sharply than before, which is an expected stage rather than a mistake: it is the same movement described in our guide on welcoming your emotions instead of enduring them (in French). Around the third week, she noticed something else. Some mornings the scene came, stayed fifteen seconds, and left before Vitré.

She decided nothing that day. She simply noticed that the train had become a train.

Four months after the Christmas lunch, Leïla was speaking to her mother on the phone about twice a month, as before. Her mother never mentioned the remark, and never apologised. Nothing that depended on her moved at all.

What changed fits into three observations Leïla noted herself: the morning commute no longer serves that purpose, a remark on the phone no longer costs her the whole evening, and she has stopped asking herself whether she has forgiven. The question no longer arises in those terms.

Is that forgiveness? She says she does not know, and that it does not matter to her.

Bad days remain, usually when she is tired or when her eleven-year-old daughter reminds her of something. Bad days are not relapses. They are the normal shape of this work, rather like the ritual of a compassion sentence addressed to oneself (in French), which does not settle in a straight line either. For anyone whose story goes back further than adolescence, this path often crosses the return towards the child they once were (in French).

This approach does not suit everyone, and that has to be said plainly.

When the relationship is still harmful today, the question is not how to soften your feelings but how to protect yourself. McNulty (2011) followed newlyweds through their first four years of marriage: among the spouses most inclined to forgive, a partner's psychological or physical aggression stayed stable, where it declined among those less inclined to forgive. The study covers spouses, not parents, and no law can be drawn from it. It does at least remind us that forgiveness granted too quickly can remove the consequences that would otherwise discourage a repeat.

Two other situations call for support rather than an exercise: histories of abuse or violence in childhood, and moments when simply letting memories arrive triggers flashbacks or panic attacks. There, letting things pass is not enough, and a psychologist trained in trauma will do work that two minutes of breathing will not.

For everyone else there is no closing line, only a reversal of order: you do not forgive in order to stop ruminating, you stop ruminating and see, months later, what is left of the resentment.