Christmas is a strange time. The tinsel comes out, the family WhatsApp group suddenly springs back to life like a cicada after rain, and you find yourself revisiting old emotional files you thought were safely archived.
You may be spending time with your family this Christmas. Or very deliberately not. You may be sitting at a table with people who once criticised your haircut, your career, your choice of partner, pet, or political persuasion. Or perhaps the grievance is newer and sharper, a friend who vanished when things got hard or a partner who broke the rules in a way that blew your world apart.
Some hurts are traumatic. Abuse, betrayal, sustained cruelty from someone who should have known better.
And yet, inconveniently, these hurts don’t just sit there. They move in with you. They eat your groceries. They lie awake with you at 3 a.m. replaying conversations that ended years ago.
The problem with carrying anger, resentment, and bitterness is that they are spectacularly bad for you.
The Effects on Your Health
According to the Mayo Clinic, holding onto grudges has measurable effects on your health.
Less sleep. More anxiety. Higher blood pressure. Weakened immune response. An increased risk of heart disease.
In other words, the person who wronged you may be long gone, but they are still messing with your cardiovascular system.
Forgiveness is one of those concepts that has been hijacked by greeting cards and bad theology. It is often presented as a moral obligation, preferably performed with a saintly smile and an immediate group hug. This is deeply unhelpful.
Forgiveness does not mean pretending something didn’t happen. It does not mean excusing bad behaviour. It does not require reconciliation, renewed trust, or inviting someone back into your life. And it absolutely does not mean that serious wrongdoing should escape consequences.
We have seen extraordinary public examples of forgiveness, such as Erika Kirk forgiving the man who murdered her husband. This did not mean she thought prison was optional. It meant she refused to allow the act to destroy what remained of her own life.
That distinction matters.
At its core, forgiveness is an internal decision to loosen the grip that someone else’s actions have on your nervous system. It is about reclaiming your own peace.
The science is surprisingly blunt about this. Studies cited by Johns Hopkins Hospital show that chronic anger keeps the body locked in fight-or-flight mode. The body behaves as though danger is still present, even when the threat is now a memory.
Forgiveness, by contrast, calms the system. It lowers stress hormones. It improves sleep. It reduces anxiety and depression. Forgiveness, medically speaking, is a pressure release valve.
How to Forgive
This does not mean forgiveness is easy. If it were, we would all be floating serenely through family gatherings like well-adjusted Buddhists.
Psychologists often describe forgiveness as a process. One commonly cited framework is the REACH method: Recall, Empathise, Altruistic gift, Commit, Hold.
Recall means acknowledging what actually happened, without minimising it or pretending it was fine. Empathise means attempting to understand context without excusing harm (a difficult but clarifying exercise). The altruistic gift is recognising that forgiveness is something you give because it frees you. Commit means deciding, consciously, to forgive. Hold means revisiting that decision when your brain helpfully replays the greatest hits of outrage on loop.
And sometimes the starting point is very small. According to Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, practicing forgiveness in everyday irritations can build the muscle for bigger work.
Someone cuts you off in traffic. Someone is rude at the checkout. You acknowledge the irritation, remind yourself it wasn’t personal, and let it go.
This is emotional hygiene.
What If You Can’t Forgive? or Not Yet?
Then you are human. Forgiveness can stall when there has been no apology, no accountability, or ongoing harm.
In those cases, the work may involve counselling, journaling, prayer, meditation, or simply time. It may involve forgiving in stages. It may involve forgiving again and again.
And it may involve deciding that forgiveness does not equal access.
At Christmas especially, there is enormous pressure to be “over it.” To smooth things over for the sake of the table. But genuine forgiveness is quiet. It is internal. And it happens on your timetable, not the festive season’s.
The point is not to become endlessly tolerant of harm. The point is to stop letting old injuries run the show.
Forgiveness is about lowering your blood pressure, sleeping better, breathing more easily, and reclaiming space in your own head.
If nothing else, think of it as this: you don’t have to forgive because they deserve it.
You might forgive not because they deserve it, but because your heart and blood pressure have lodged a formal complaint.