Four Blocks to Releasing Resentment and Offering Forgiveness

In previous posts I’ve written about the tendency for people who are compulsive or obsessive to hold on to things, including time, money, opinions, affection, and compliments. Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud suggested that compulsives hold on to other stuff as well, but we’ll let go of that for now.

Another way this manifests in compulsives is that they withhold forgiveness. Offering forgiveness requires both letting go the bad stuff (anger, resentment and bitterness), and being generous with the good stuff (understanding, compassion). Whether forgiveness is done for the forgivee or the forgiver, something is released.

When it is not released, it’s partly because we feel the need for control, perfection and safety. And partly because we come pre-packaged with certain psychic hardware that discourages us from forgiving.

Whatever the motivation for holding on to the resentment, it usually hurts the holder more than the offender. And as I’ll show in this post, not forgiving may be part of a larger mindset which blocks not just connection with that one person, but also blocks having a more fulfilling life.

As the Buddha said, “Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.”

Yet we persist. Why?

We’ll get into that, but I want to add a caveat first. In this post I’m referring to the personal and psychological aspects of forgiveness, not political or sociological aspects. While there might be overlap, it would be unrealistic to try to take on the political and sociological aspects here as well.

Four Blocks to Forgiving

Here are four main obstacles to forgiving:

1. 1. The belief that justice must be inflexibly served

2. 2. The belief that if you did forgive, the other person would not learn their lesson

3. 3. The belief that you need to protect yourself from the offender or others like them

4. 4. The fear that forgiving would open you up to disturbing feelings

Rarely is there just one motivation for withholding forgiveness. The first two obstacles, the beliefs about justice and teaching a lesson, are sometimes used to justify our felt need to protect ourselves when their is really little need for protection. They may also be used to avoid a feeling that seems dangerous but is really just uncomfortable.

For instance, I might tell myself that I should not forgive a customer service representative for making it so difficult to get a refund on a lampshade which arrived looking like it had had a humiliating defeat in a mixed martial arts competition. Even though it’s not her fault, I want to convey my point by being difficult myself. As if that would make the situation better.

What really makes it hard for me to forgive her is that I don’t want to accept that the world is like this, that things are messy and unfair, and that I can’t control them. I imagine, completely unrealistically, that if I am demanding with the customer service representative, that will send a message to the higher ups that their policies are screwed up and that then they’ll make everything copasetic for me so I don’t have to come to terms with the injustices of the world.

Yeah, right.

I’d like to think I’m doing community service by withholding forgiveness from her, but I’m really just trying to shield myself from the disturbing reality that in some ways the world is broken, and living in it takes a lot of inconvenient, annoying, and sometimes painful workarounds. I want to avoid the feelings this brings up. But we’d all be better off if I accepted that, loosened up, and made this woman’s day a little nicer, rather than demoralizing her with my demands.

But to do that, I have to remove some blocks.

Let’s go through these blocks in more detail so that we can become more conscious of the motivations behind our decisions about when to forgive. With consciouness comes choice.

1.    Justice Must Be Served

Withholding forgiveness can feel like the right thing to do.

We evolved and adapted in environments of close-knit tribes of 75-100 people. We learned to punish people who took advantage of community support by taking more than their share of roasted venison, being lazy, or not participating in battle. Righteous indignation became one way of discouraging people from behaving badly. You shun them until they make amends.

It would not have worked to start with forgiveness.

Eventually we put a big letter “A” on them to punish them for not following the rules (in this case for committing adultery).

Even babies understand this. In a study done at Yale and published in the journal Nature, 6-month old children were observed to be willing to share their Cheerios with a nice puppet, but not with a mean puppet.

So, deeply embedded in the back of our mind is the principle that wrong-doing must be punished for the tribe to survive. No forgiveness allowed. And withholding, shunning, holding a grudge or telling them their mother wears army boots is one way of punishing them.

But things have changed. The old ways don’t work anymore. What our grudge is often about now, in 2025, is our difficulty in accepting that some things—many things–are out of our control.

Here’s another stinky fringe benefit of not forgiving: In the very strange realm known as human emotion, getting hurt can leave us feeling that we must be the good one and the offender must be the bad one. In this case, holding back forgiveness has the effect not only of hurting the other person in return, but also of serving us that bitter-sweet morsel of having been wronged and therefore being right.

There are much more effective ways of feeling good about ourselves.

You might be blocked from forgiveness by the principle of the thing. If morality and conscientiousness are important to you, it may feel that you would be betraying your values by forgiving.

And, you may fear that others would see you as betraying cultural norms if you forgive the scoundrel for their transgression. If morality and perfection are important aspects of your identity, you may feel you need to protect your image as moral and perfect, and you decide not to forgive for fear of it looking bad.

But would anyone really hold it against you if you forgave that neighbor whose dog got out and pooped on your lawn once 7 years ago? Or, if you forgave your brother for taking time away from the family and the family business so he could get to know himself?  Or if you forgave your niece for taking one more piece of cake than was her fair share?

Besides, so what if they did hold it against you?

2.    A Misguided Teaching Tool

A corollary of the first block to forgiveness is that punishing offenders isn’t enough. You also need to teach them a lesson. And, so the logic goes, they won’t learn their lesson if you forgive them.

Most of us yearn to belong to our tribe, and we don’t feel like we belong if we’re not forgiven. So we withhold forgiveness in order to withhold belonging, ostensibly so they atone, ask for forgiveness, and promise not to hog the coconuts next time.

These days we act as if driving right up behind the car in front of us would teach them a lesson about the right way to drive, as if anyone is going to learn anything from road rage. Riding someone’s butt might have been effective in a tribe of 75, but not in a city of 8 million. They could care less.

Withholding forgiveness is more likely to solidify whatever rationalization the offender used to break the law. “Yeah, see what I mean? They really are assholes! I shouldn’t give a damn what they think.”

But those who are overly conscientiousness may feel guilty about not teaching others their well-deserved lesson.

Be aware that withholding forgiveness so that you can ostensibly serve justice and teach lessons may actually be excuses for passive aggressive behavior—which can feel oh so sweet. Maybe so, for a minute. But as we’ll see, that stuff turns real nasty soon after.

3.    Self-Protection

Offering forgiveness requires that we let go of our anger. But anger feels strong. And it may feel that if you let go of anger you let go of protection. It may feel that the anger serves as a deterrent to anyone hurting you.

Maintaining anger may give a false sense of control, denying that bad things could or should happen. But anger can be heavy and make it hard to get where you want to go.

Immediate feelings of anger are human, and anger can energize us to stand up for ourselves and loved ones. But hanging on to anger and dragging it around works against us. In fact, then we are the one being dragged around.

It’s important to ask ourselves, “What am I protecting?”  Because sometimes it’s more about protecting our pride. And that may lead us to abandon the things that are really more important, such as well-being.

If you really are concerned about your well-being, forgiveness is the ticket. We now have research which indicates that forgiveness is good for our health. The educator and reseracher, Robert Enright, has done studies which show that our mental and physical health both improve when we can let go of anger and offer forgiveness.

4. The Need to Avoid a Disturbing Feeling

The blocks that we put between ourselves and forgiveness also conveniently block us from certain feelings we’d rather not have. Not forgiving may temporarily distract us from feelings like not having control, the world not being as good (or bad!) as we would like it to be, or we ourselves not being as good as we would like to have thought.

Let me tell you a story about this.

Sam Gets Blocked and Unblocked

Sam liked to think of himself as a really good basketball player. And he was a good player. He just wasn’t a really good player. But he needed to think of himself this way. His family situation had left him strapped for self-esteem. His father, though a decent, successful and hard-working attorney, wasn’t around much, and when he was around, he was either cold or challenging.

He did not fill Sam’s tank with confidence. Instead he emptied it. Sam tried to compensate with basketball. He couldn’t win legal cases as his father did, but he could sink three-pointers fairly often.

It happened that Sam’s uncle, Desmond, was the coach of his high school basketball team. Uncle and nephew were part of a very tightly knit family. Picnics, dinners, parties, and holiday celebrations happened as often and regularly as credit card bills arrive. If you weren’t at the party, it was noticed and judged. Being part of the family was not free.

When the basketball season was about to begin, his uncle cut him from the team.

Sam was furious.

He couldn’t forgive his uncle, and everyone saw it. He avoided family get-togethers, and when he couldn’t avoid them, his resentment was obvious. Most people understood that Desmond hadn’t had a choice in the matter; Sam just wasn’t as good a player as he liked to think, and everyone would have known it was nepotism if he had made the team.

For Sam it was a matter of pride. He had built his identity on his capabilities as a basketball player, and not making the team questioned that identity. To forgive Desmond would have felt like admitting he wasn’t a great player.

His efforts to prop up his sagging self-esteem by carrying a grudge hurt him more than Desmond. It blocked him from success—personally and professionally. He became isolated and depressed, and, without doing it consciously, cultivated a mindset which said, “The world is unfair. I’m not going to play the game. Instead, I’ll let everyone know how messed up this all is by dropping out and hanging on to my anger.”

Sam carried the grudge for years. And that grudge blocked him from greater things. He struggled, and since he assumed the world was against him, he didn’t invest in a fulfilling life. He just got by.

When Desmond got sick, his mother told him it was time to give it up and bury the hatchet. In a rare moment of generosity, Sam figured, why not give the old man some relief?

But once he got to Desmond ’s house, got over his resentment, and got up the nerve to ring his bell, it was Sam that was relieved. Holding on to the idea that he was a really good player and had deserved to be on the team had caused him more grief than anyone else.

He comforted himself with the recognition that we can’t all be Michael Jordans. And he acknowledged, at least to himself, that it must have been really painful for Desmond to cut him from the team. That had taken integrity. And he had to respect him for that.

While the side effects of holding back forgiveness aren’t always so dramatic, it’s not unusual for them to encapsulate, solidify and express a world view, an attitude that blocks us from a more fulfilling life. Exercising forgiveness can be a way of exorcising demons that hold us back, and allowing us to move forward with an attitude that encompasses a larger world and all its disappointments.

Unsolicited Forgiveness

But what if the offending person is unrepentant? Why should I forgive them? And wouldn’t that block them from getting their act together? Won’t that encourage them in their wicked ways by communicating that they can get away with whatever they want?

These are all good questions, and we should not allow ourselves to be walked over. People who are too focused on pleasing others should be particularly careful about this.

But forgiving is not the same as being walked over. And forgiveness does not have to be earned. Forgiving can be more for you than for them.   Is withholding forgiveness really teaching them anything? Is it preventing them from hurting others? I doubt it. We usually don’t have as much control as we like to think.

How to Offer Forgiveness

Here are six suggestions about how to remove blocks to forgiveness.

Ask yourself:

1. Has withholding forgiveness blocked you from anything meaningful? Does withholding forgiveness get you where you want to go?

2. Where does withholding forgiveness sit on your list of five most important things? Is it higher than your well-being?

3. Would forgiveness be a dereliction of duty to community principles?

4. Will you be less safe if you do forgive?

5. What purpose has withholding forgiveness served for you?

6. What’s the story you’ve added to the situation? What have you assumed about why the offender did what they did? Might there be another explanation?

Once you understand the function and effect of withholding forgiveness, you can make clearer decisions about what to do. Whether you communicate that forgiveness is less important than changing your attitude toward them. And hopefully that won’t block you from where you want to go.

I’m going to close this post with one final bit of advice from the 14th century Sufi mystic poet, Hafiz, (rendered by Daniel Ladinsky). Here he described what happens when we invest in feelings of fleeting sweetness, the kind that often come with withholding forgiveness:

This is from the poem “Cast All Your Votes for Dancing,” and is published in the book  I Heard God Laughing: Poems of Hope and Joy, published by Penguin in 2006.

Learn to recognize the counterfeit coins

That may buy you just a moment of pleasure,

But then drag you for days

Like a broken man

Behind a farting camel.