Forgiveness
Letting Go of Suffering Is Good for Your Health
The power of forgiveness.
Updated September 30, 2025 Reviewed by Abigail Fagan
Key points
- Forgiveness provides a pathway to the heart of meaning.
- It is important to learn from suffering, especially that which is uncontrollable.
- Life doesn't just happen to us. Rather, we happen to life and we make it meaningful.
Considering everything going on in the world right now, including the political/social/cultural discord and polarization that, for better or worse, have been taking center stage, it is a good time to talk about a topic that usually gets ignored when the “blame game” is in full swing. I’m talking about forgiveness.
Indeed, getting to forgiveness is perhaps the most challenging thing that we can do to go beyond ourselves when we are so fixated on our problems, our needs, our expectations, and our demands. Let’s face it: When things are spinning out of control—and especially out of our control—it is at least comforting and cathartic, even if it doesn’t really resolve anything, to be able to point the blame on others for the situation at hand.
Of course, getting to forgiveness under such circumstances is much easier said than done. But it can be done! And, importantly, our capacity to forgive provides us with a pathway to true freedom and self-empowerment that, at the same time, is a platform for healing what ails us and for confronting what challenges us.
Forgiveness means “letting go” of our suffering. In effect, it has much more to do with our own well-being than that of the person or persons we forgive. When we hold on to our suffering—our resentment, hurt, anger—we are inside ourselves with self-pity. It becomes a veil through which we see ourselves and others; it becomes something we have to feed, keep alive, and justify. If we don’t, we think we allow the other person or people to be “right” in their unjust (perceived or actual) treatment of us.
But forgiveness can be one of the most powerful things we do. Like any muscle, however, it must be exercised to work well. To be sure, forgiveness can be very complicated. Sometimes we think that it equates forgetting, diminishing, or condoning the misdeed, but it really doesn’t. It has much more to do with freeing ourselves from its hold. Our ability to live our lives with love, understanding, and generosity is impeded when we don’t forgive.
It doesn’t mean that we have to love and be generous to the woman who was disloyal to us at work or the man who belittled our ideas at a staff meeting. Neither does it mean that we have to love and be generous to those politicians and government officials who dropped the ball by not managing the public’s business with integrity, transparency, and accountability, or to those corporate executives who dangerously let their desire for making money trump the search for meaning at the public’s and customers’ expense.
No, this is not it. But what it does mean is that we forgive them and liberate ourselves from further captivity. Love and generosity, as well as understanding, will return in their own time and on their own terms (the same holds for things that happen to us in our personal lives and relationships).
“You do not have to suffer to learn. But, if you don’t learn from suffering, over which you have no control, then your life becomes truly meaningless.” —Viktor E. Frankl, MD, PhD1
When we feel like, think like, and act like life just happens to us, it becomes especially difficult to forgive those who have trespassed against us. However, when we search out and discover the authentic meaning of our existence and our experiences, we discover that life doesn’t just happen to us. We happen to life; and we make it meaningful.2 Against this meaning-focused backdrop, forgiveness has much more to do with freeing ourselves, letting go, and moving on.
As I’ve mentioned, the capacity of human beings to forgive provides a pathway to true freedom and self-empowerment that can also serve as a platform for healing. Embracing all of life with enthusiasm by exercising the freedom to choose one’s attitude allows the human spirit to work its wonders, especially during difficult, challenging times.3 Forgiveness allows us to embrace the fullness of life—the “full catastrophe” of living—and move on rather than remain stuck (i.e., be “prisoners of our thoughts”) in the past or present.4 Importantly, forgiveness and the shift in attitude that comes with it are actually good for our own bodies, our health (spiritual, mental, and physical), and our overall state of well-being.
When we go beyond ourselves—whether to forgiveness, unselfishness, thoughtfulness, generosity, and understanding toward others—we enter the spiritual realm of meaning. By giving beyond ourselves, we make our own lives richer. This is a truth long understood at the heart of all meaningful spiritual traditions. It’s a mystery that can only be experienced. When we do experience it, we are in the heart of meaning.
References
1. Frankl, V.E. (1992). Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy, 4th edition. Boston: Beacon Press, p. 117.
2. Pattakos, A. and Dundon, E. (2017). Prisoners of Our Thoughts: Viktor Frankl's Principles for Discovering Meaning in Life and Work, 3rd ed. Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
3. See, Pattakos, A. and Dundon, E. (2015). The OPA! Way: Finding Joy & Meaning in Everyday Life & Work. Dallas: BenBella Books, especially Part 4, Chapters 9, 10, and 11.
4. Kabat-Zinn, J. (1990). Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness. New York: Dell Publishing.
