Unbinding the Shame: Forgiveness Without Spiritual Bypassing

I’ve seen a quote circulate for years — some version of “Holding resentment is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.” Along with it, memes like the one I’ve included here.

When I first saw it this time, my instinct was to share it to my stories. But, I paused. I could feel how activating it might be — because it used to activate me. And, I realized it deserved more than a repost. It deserved nuance. Context. Space.

It deserved room for the people who aren’t there, yet.

For the people who are still angry.

For the people who feel ashamed for not being able to forgive — or for needing time.

What struck me most wasn’t the message itself, but how often forgiveness is misunderstood as passivity. As if letting go means laying down, excusing harm, or disengaging from truth. As if presence means inaction. As if releasing resentment means surrendering agency.

That confusion is everywhere.

We mistake constant inner agitation for accountability. We confuse reactivity with responsibility. We assume that if we stop fighting internally, we must be letting someone “get away with something.”

But that isn’t care.

And it isn’t justice.

It’s the nervous system stuck on high alert.

I wanted to talk about forgiveness honestly — not as a demand, not as spiritual bypassing, but as something earned internally, on one’s own timeline. Something embodied. Something chosen.

Because forgiveness, when it’s real, is not softness.

It’s readiness.

It’s agency.

It’s sovereignty.

I wanted to offer something that might help others reach a place where they can share their truth without guilt or spiritual pressure — their story, their journey toward forgiveness, on their own time.

For a long time, the very idea of forgiveness made me angry.

It felt dismissive. Like another way of telling people to “just let it go” without honoring what they survived. Forgiveness felt like a demand — something spiritual people were supposed to offer whether they were ready or not. My ego fought hard against it, because forgiving felt like condoning. Like excusing. Like betraying myself.

But that wasn’t forgiveness.

What I didn’t understand yet was that resentment wasn’t protecting me anymore — it was binding me. It lived in my body: in the tension I carried, in the way my nervous system stayed on guard long after the danger had passed, in the stories I replayed not because I wanted to, but because my body was still bracing.

Letting go didn’t happen because the people who hurt me suddenly deserved it.

It happened because I deserved peace.

Seeing the Lineage

I was able to forgive my parents — not because the wounds weren’t real, but because I could finally see the lineage they came from. They, too, were shaped by environments that didn’t teach emotional regulation, safety, or how to love without fear. They were products of their own trauma, conditioning, and survival strategies.

As I healed, I began to notice something both uncomfortable and clarifying: I carried similar wounds. They showed up differently, but they were there. Seeing that didn’t erase my pain — it gave it context. And eventually, compassion.

Forgiveness didn’t mean pretending the harm didn’t matter.

It meant understanding where it came from — and choosing not to pass it forward.

Forgiving Without Reconciliation

I’ve also forgiven the men who sexually violated me.

That sentence carries weight, and I want to be clear: forgiveness did not mean forgetting. It did not mean excusing. And it did not mean reconciliation.

It meant releasing their hold on my body and nervous system.

Recently, I came face to face with one of them—the earliest memory. Decades had passed. As I prepared for my grandmother’s funeral, I knew I would see many people from my youth, people I hadn’t seen in years. My intuition told me I would see this one particular cousin—more specifically, a first cousin once removed. Years earlier, he had found me and added me on Facebook. I debated giving him access to me. But this, too, was part of the healing journey.

So now, in 2025, there we stood—in the same room—at my grandmother’s funeral.

I saw him down the line as others hugged me and offered condolences. He didn’t see me glance at him; he had turned at that exact moment. A part of me tensed and wanted to run. But the version of me I’ve become wanted to integrate everything I’ve learned about forgiveness over the last few years. This felt like the ultimate test.

Up to this point, I had worked through forgiveness with others who had violated me. I had seen them. I had been around them. But this one—I had never been face to face with.

There he was.

I towered over him now. 😆 He hadn’t grown—literally or figuratively. The moment was awkward. He fidgeted, unsure whether to hug me or offer a handshake. I gave him a half hug and a kiss on the cheek, as is customary in my Mexican family. He gave his condolences. I accepted them graciously.

No one else knew.

Only he and I—and the brother who intervened and saved me—carried that truth. I’ve seen his brother over the years. He’s never mentioned it, but I’m sure he remembers. He was older than both of us. They were teenagers. I was a child. I don’t know the exact age, but I was under nine years old.

And I felt everything.

His fear.

His awkwardness.

His awareness.

He wouldn’t have acted that way if it weren’t real. For years, I wondered if it had been a dream. But why would a child invent that? Why would a child dream something like that?

And for the first time, I did not shrink.

I didn’t leave my body.

I didn’t retreat inward.

I didn’t make myself small to survive the moment.

I stood my ground.

In that moment, I realized something profound: the power had shifted long ago. Forgiveness didn’t free him. It freed me from carrying his shame, his fear, his unresolved darkness inside my body.

What happened was real.

The harm was real.

And my healing is real too.

Forgiveness, for me, was not softness.

It was sovereignty.

The Hardest Forgiveness

But the hardest forgiveness wasn’t for them.

It was for myself.

I hated myself for a long time. I hated my body. I hated my appearance. I even hated being smart — which sounds absurd until you understand that intelligence made me visible, and visibility made me a target. I learned early that shrinking felt safer than shining.

I spoke to myself cruelly. I punished my body. I gained weight because food became comfort when safety didn’t exist. I used alcohol — something I’ve spoken openly about — to quiet what I didn’t yet know how to hold. I surrounded myself with people who didn’t have my best interests at heart.

I also had to forgive myself for those choices. I gravitated toward needy, narcissistic dynamics — not because I was broken, but because my nervous system recognized familiarity. Over-giving felt like love. Being needed felt safer than being seen.

Those weren’t moral failures.

They were adaptations.

I didn’t heal by being harder on myself.

I healed by becoming kinder — and more honest.

These habits and behaviors were survival instincts. They were how I coped with what I couldn’t yet process or name. I suffered in silence. I didn’t want to burden others. I didn’t want to get in trouble. I didn’t want to hurt anyone. I could feel my parents’ stress, even when no one talked about it.

I didn’t understand my abilities until my thirties. But I always knew I was different. I had psychic dreams I didn’t know how to interpret. I knew things I couldn’t explain. I sensed outcomes before they happened. And without language or validation, I felt crazy — like a weirdo, like something was wrong with me.

So I stayed quiet.

As a child, I would say, “I knew that was going to happen,” and I remember being met with dismissal or ridicule. “You always say that,” they’d reply. “If you knew, why didn’t you stop it?” Or, “You don’t know everything.”

Each comment taught me the same lesson: don’t trust yourself. Don’t speak. Don’t stand out.

Forgiving myself meant recognizing that silence wasn’t weakness.

It was protection — until it no longer needed to be.

Between Worlds

There was also an identity wound I carried quietly for years.

I was embarrassed by things that should have never carried shame. My mom packing bean burritos instead of sandwiches. Speaking Spanish. Being different. I learned early that I was never “American enough,” and somehow never “Mexican enough” either.

I got teased for my Spanish — too accented in one room, not fluent enough in another. I learned to code-switch. To monitor myself. To belong conditionally.

So I turned that confusion inward.

I criticized my body.

I silenced my voice.

I rejected my roots.

Looking back now, I don’t feel anger toward that version of me. I feel grief. And tenderness. Because that wasn’t self-hatred — it was a child trying desperately to belong in a world that didn’t know how to hold complexity.

Forgiving myself for that was sacred work.

I didn’t fail myself.

I survived systems that weren’t built for nuance, culture, or softness.

When the Body Speaks

For a long time, I thought I was managing just fine.

But my body told a different story.

The anger I hadn’t released.

The pain I kept compartmentalized.

The grudges I clung to because they once felt protective —

they began to manifest physically.

Chronic tension. Fatigue. A nervous system that never fully powered down. What I labeled as stress, burnout, or “just life” was my body carrying emotions my mind hadn’t yet made space for.

Working in healthcare, I’ve seen this pattern over and over — people arriving with symptoms that don’t quite make sense on paper. Pain without a clear cause. Inflammation, exhaustion, anxiety living in the body long after the event has passed. The body remembers what the mind tries to outrun.

Mine was no different.

Holding resentment didn’t make me stronger.

It made me sick.

Choosing a Different Ending

I reached a point where I had to be honest with myself about the direction I was heading.

I did not want my body to become the place where everything I refused to feel finally exploded. I didn’t want a heart attack, a stroke, heart failure, chronic lung disease, or cancer to be the moment my body forced me to listen.

I had seen enough to know how often long-term stress, emotional suppression, addiction, and self-abandonment quietly pave the way for serious illness — not as punishment, but as accumulation. Years of the nervous system never exhaling. Years of living in fight-or-flight. Years of bracing.

I don’t believe emotions cause disease in some simplistic way. But I could no longer deny that living in constant tension was taking a toll.

I didn’t want my healing to come only after diagnosis.

So I chose intervention instead of inevitability.

Forgiveness wasn’t about being noble.

It was about prevention.

About longevity.

About choosing to give my body a different future than the one it was bracing for.

Integrity, Agency, and the Lessons That Matter

We often get so wrapped up in wanting to teach them a lesson—seeking accountability, remorse, acknowledgment, or punishment—that we forget where our real power actually lives. We forget that everyone’s penance is ultimately served by the Most High. It is not our role as humans to judge or condemn. Their karma is theirs to complete, in their own time.

Every darkness comes to light. Nothing stays hidden. And while their reckoning may not look the way we think it should, it will come—in some form, on some day. Perhaps in how they leave this Earth, or in the quiet suffering they carry in another area of life.

We don’t know the darkness they were carrying when they did what they did to us. We don’t know the pain that shaped their choices. Their pain became our pain.

Most often, the lesson we’re trying to force onto someone else is the very one we’re being asked to learn ourselves.

We cannot control whether someone reflects, apologizes, or changes. We cannot control whether they ever fully understand the impact of what they’ve done. Waiting for that moment only keeps us tethered to them longer than the harm itself ever did.

What we can control is ourselves.

Our responses.

Our boundaries.

Our integrity.

Who we choose to be in the aftermath.

I had to practice what I preached—regardless of who it was or what they had done. Because prolonged anger and hatred don’t define the other person. They shape us. They harden parts of us we may not want to lose.

When I struggled, I asked myself who I wanted to emulate—not as unreachable ideals, but as lived examples of what is possible within the human spirit.

Figures like Jesus, Mother Mary, Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela—alongside Gautama Buddha, Quan Yin, and Thich Nhat Hanh.

They are not just names in books or figures placed on pedestals. They were human beings who knew suffering intimately—persecution, grief, war, imprisonment, loss. And yet, they understood something essential: hatred binds the one who carries it, while compassion is not weakness—it is liberation.

Their forgiveness was not naïve.

It was not passive.

And it was never about excusing harm.

It was about refusing to let suffering turn them into something they were not.

It was deliberate.

I didn’t forgive to be saintly.

I forgave to stay whole.

What Forgiveness Actually Is

Forgiveness is not approval.

It is not reconciliation.

It is not forgetting.

Forgiveness is release — emotionally, neurologically, physically.

It is choosing to stop storing pain in the body.

Choosing to stop reliving the past through tension, illness, and exhaustion.

Choosing to reclaim safety from the inside out.

Today, I honor what I once rejected.

My intelligence.

My heritage.

My language.

My sensitivity.

My body.

They were never the problem.

And the forgiveness that set me free wasn’t something I gave away.

It was something I reclaimed — because I wanted to live.