Thought I'm Wrestling With: Does True Forgiveness Mean Forgetting
Releasing what no longer serves — while remembering what still matters.
I was listening to a podcast the other day with Mark Manson as the guest. The host and Mark were talking about components of healthy and unhealthy relationships. Mark commented that people in unhealthy relationships tend to have this concept of a ‘scoreboard’ at play. If partner A does something for partner B, then partner B must reciprocate in order to keep the scoreboard level. Paradoxically, it’s not the offsetting score attempts that’s the problem—it’s the presence of a scoreboard in the first place.
This shows up in friendships, family ties, and romantic relationships alike. So often, we have this desire to prove to people how unbalanced the scoreboard is, and why we’re choosing a different path forward — tallying how many more points we have than the other person.
Say you want to break ties from a family member. It’s very enticing to list off A through Z all the reasons why you’re ‘in the right’ for deciding that course of action. Or a friendship seems to be growing apart, despite your consistent attempts to rekindle and nurture a connection that once was. Or a love you once cherished feels like a burden that continuously wears you down, instead of building you up.
We want to unroll the cartoon scroll of reasons we’re justified for the big decision we are making. There’s a rush of adrenaline and dopamine to being right.
But Mark points out that the validation we are seeking by highlighting a skewed scoreboard, should really be our realization that things have been unhealthy for a long time—that the foundation may have been off from the very beginning
I think it’s important to note here, unhealthy doesn’t have to be such a negative connotation. We are naturally loss-averse, we hate losing more than we like winning. To see something go away hurts us humans more than gaining that same thing. Losing friends, family, lovers is never easy—but there is a misperception that loss is always bad.
Loss is a part of life. It’s a part of maturity. It’s a constant reminder that our time is finite in this world.
Just remember: loss can leave a void — but it can also create space for something unexpected to grow.
Wildfires may look like devastation, but they often clear the way for stronger, more resilient life to emerge.
As Mark was talking about the concept of the scoreboard, I began investigating a statement I have routinely made— “I will forgive, but I won’t forget.”
My justification has always been that our brains are data collecting machines. It’s foolish of us to discard data that has important information on it. We must remember who has hurt us in order to avoid being hurt in the future. We’re biologically wired to be threat-conscious—to protect ourselves from future harm.
But the dilemma my brain is now facing is such—part of me feels that by refusing to forget a past offense, I may be keeping a relational scoreboard with that individual. In which case I’m tempted to ask myself is there something deeper that remains unaddressed that I’m neglecting.
Yet the other part of me feels that becoming a pacifist to the harm and injustices done against you will lead to others taking advantage of you, or exploiting your naturally good demeanor toward mankind for malevolent purposes.
Lewis Smedes in his book Forgive and Forget: Healing the Hurts We Don’t Deserve, teaches that the act of forgiving is not first about the other person — it’s about liberating yourself from the corrosive power of bitterness, resentment, and vengeance.
“To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.”
Smedes makes it clear though that forgiveness doesn’t mean wiping your memory clean—it’s not amnesia. Forgiveness is a moral choice to release someone from your personal condemnation, even if the memory remains. In other words, we can still store the data of the injustice on our hard drive, but we alter the impact it has on our coding.
“You will know that forgiveness has begun when you recall those who hurt you and feel the power to wish them well.”
Forgiveness is NOT saying what happened was okay. Forgiveness is NOT a full reconciliation. Forgiveness is NOT trusting that person again. It’s a way to release your anger without reentering vulnerability.
“Forgiveness is God’s invention for coming to terms with a world in which people are unfair to each other and hurt each other deeply.”
So if I was at dinner with Smedes tonight and I asked him “Am I really forgiving someone if I say I forgive, but keep the memory?” I think his answer would be yes, as long as that memory isn’t activating resentment or fueling personal revenge of some sort. You don’t want that data hijacking your direction — quietly rewriting your story while you think you’re in control.
Remembering serves you—for safety, wisdom, and boundaries. Forgiveness serves you too—by bringing peace, healing, and personal freedom.
Is there a way to keep the data but not keep the resentment?
As I was researching Smedes’ work some more, it dawned on me that Viktor Frankl’s powerful story, Man’s Search for Meaning would be another wonderful layer of insights to pull into this thought entanglement.
For context, Viktor Frankl was a Holocaust survivor and founder of logotherapy—a school of psychological thought rooted in the idea that the primary human drive is not pleasure or power, but meaning. In 1942, Frankl, his pregnant wife, parents, and brother were all deported to concentration camps. Only Frankl would survive the atrocities. Upon liberation he wrote Man’s Search for Meaning in nine short days.
The core beliefs of his message can be summed up in these three quotes:
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances.”
“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.”
“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
Though Frankl never explicitly talked about forgiving the Nazis or having compassion for the German people, he modeled how to find dignity, agency, and moral clarity in the face of dehumanization.
For Frankl, forgiveness was not so much about letting someone off the hook, but refusing to let your identity be anchored to the harms and injustices done against you. This very much echoes Smedes take on forgiveness as a way to set the prisoner free— the prisoner being you.
Throughout all his work, Frankl’s lack of bitterness towards those that took his whole world away from him proves that past pain doesn’t need to dictate your default programming. Don’t dwell in the identity of a victim. Instead, step into that space between stimulus and response and explore how you really want that event to define you.
C.S. Lewis in multiple pieces of his work highlights the difficulty in forgiveness. He openly admits that forgiveness was one of the hardest commands Jesus gave because it asks so much of the heart.
Lewis draws a line in the sand though between excusing and forgiving. Excusing is turning a blind eye or convincing yourself that whatever happened wasn’t really that bad. Forgiveness is looking at the harm squarely, acknowledging it for its impact on you, but choosing to not hold it over the perpetrator’s head forever.
Lewis also believes forgiveness and justice can coexist. You can forgive someone in your heart, but still carry out a punishment for their action. The distinction being that the punishment is not retaliatory in nature or done in spite, but to oppose the action in question.
He makes an important note that forgiveness is not a feeling, but a discipline that has to be practiced constantly. One day we may feel no resentment towards a past wrongdoing, and the next totally infuriated. Lewis says that doesn’t mean you haven’t forgiven the initial harm, but rather you are still in the process of healing.
So maybe I shouldn’t view the past wrongdoings, or my rightdoings as a scoreboard comparison, but as saline drip in an I.V. bag that is helping to heal some part of my soul. If I haven’t ‘forgotten’ it yet, it just means I have more space to interpret and learn from it. Some I.V. bags will be bigger than others.
What does the King of Kings have to say?
As I read the bible for the first time last year, the battleground of nuance seemed to erupt and complicate so many of the core Christian life lessons—forgiveness being one of them.
On one hand Jesus explains that it’s the sin that must be named, not the sinner. In John 8:3-11 Jesus says:
“Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.”
And then to the woman:
“Neither do I condemn you. Go, and sin no more.”
In Proverbs 21:3 it says:
“To do righteousness and justice is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice.”
The takeaway being forgiveness doesn’t mean enabling evil—it means releasing the desire to retaliate. That’s God’s job.
And in Luke 23:34, when Jesus is being crucified, Jesus says:
“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
He shows that there is a separation between their value as people and the wrongdoing they commit.
And in Matthew 5:44 Jesus says:
“Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”
Jesus consistently called His followers to a radical standard of forgiveness. Not by denying sin — but by refusing to let sin define the person. Whether it was a crucifixion squad, an adulterous woman, or a corrupt tax collector, Jesus always saw the soul beneath the stain. He never excused sin — but He never weaponized it either.
But Jesus wasn’t a pacifist.
Jesus Himself flipped tables. He publicly called out the religious manipulators for their hypocrisy, legalism, and abuse of spiritual power.
In Matthew 10:34 Jesus says:
“Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.”
The word sword here is a metaphor for ‘truth’. Truth would divide families, cultures and hearts. It wasn’t a utopian glue to bring about universal happiness.
As you can see, it’s a tough subject to navigate. All the individuals I referenced above (maybe not Jesus) really struggled with forgiveness. Not because they didn’t understand it — but because, like a muscle, it needs to be flexed regularly or it starts to atrophy.
Maybe the presence of a scoreboard is my psyche’s metaphor for vengeance — or at least retribution. And when that voice in my head reminds me of the score, maybe it’s just an invitation to revisit forgiveness.
Maybe the scoreboard isn’t there to measure others — but to reveal the kind of person I want to be, regardless of how the numbers add up.
Does the world even care about my scoreboard? Or is it just me?
Either way, I hope the path I take leads to peace. And if it doesn’t… well, I’ll have to forgive myself too.