How to Forgive Someone Who Isn’t Sorry – Or Won’t Apologize

You’ve been waiting for an apology that isn’t coming.

Maybe it’s been months. Maybe years. You keep hoping this person will finally see what they did and say so. Instead, you get blame, silence, denial, or distance you can’t close because they’ve moved away, cut off contact, or aren’t capable of the kind of honesty repair requires. Sometimes there’s no path back to them at all. They’ve died, they’re in prison, or contact with them isn’t safe.

So you’re left holding all of it alone: the hurt, the anger, the constant replaying of what happened, and underneath that, a harder question — how do you forgive someone who isn’t sorry? How do you move forward when only one of you is willing to do any of the work?

In her book How Can I Forgive You?, Janis Abrahms Spring describes a response to exactly this situation: acceptance. It isn’t a consolation prize or a way of giving up. It’s a different path from forgiveness as most people picture it, one that doesn’t require the other person to show up, apologize, or change at all.

Prefer to watch? Here’s the video version of this post, from several years ago.

What Do You Do When Forgiveness Isn’t a Two-Way Street?

Most of what we hear about forgiveness assumes both people are in the room. One person did the harm, recognizes it, and works to repair it. The other person has something real to respond to: an apology, a change in behavior, evidence that the harm landed and mattered to the person who caused it.

That process breaks down completely when the other person isn’t participating, whether they deny what happened, turn the blame back on you, or are out of the picture. This is separate from what Spring calls “refusing to forgive,” a hardened hold on anger and resentment, or the stuckness of wanting to let go and not being able to.

Rushing to say the words “I forgive you” just to make the discomfort go away is another trap. Spring’s term for that kind of premature peace-making is cheap forgiveness, which we’ve written about before. It usually leaves the injury itself untouched.

Acceptance means facing what happened without minimizing it, and deciding what kind of relationship, if any, you’ll carry forward with that person or their memory. It doesn’t require their remorse. What it requires is you.

Why Does Anger Feel Like the Only Emotion You Have?

Anger arrives fast and stays close. It’s usually the first thing you feel after being hurt, and it can start to feel like the only thing you feel — a low hum of resentment and bitterness that flares whenever you think about what happened, or about them.

That makes sense. Anger is protective. It tells you that you didn’t deserve what happened, that you have a right to feel wronged, and that you won’t be caught off guard the same way again. In that sense, anger works like a shield, the thing standing between you and getting hurt twice.

But a shield doesn’t heal anything underneath it. It only blocks. And staying behind it costs something: a kind of bracing that never fully lets up, even on the days nothing is actively happening.

Underneath the anger, there’s usually something more vulnerable: pain, sadness, grief, a sense of having been made small, or a fear that you weren’t important enough to matter to the person who hurt you. These feelings are harder to experience than anger is. Anger feels active, even powerful. What’s underneath it feels like the opposite, which is part of why anger is so much easier to live in.

But those feelings point to what needs healing. If you can put words to what’s underneath, not just “I’m furious” but “I felt small,” or “I felt like I didn’t matter enough to protect,” you have something to work with. Anger keeps the focus on them and on what they did. The vulnerable feelings bring it back to you and what you need now.

Does Understanding Them Mean Letting Them Off the Hook?

Once the anger has room to loosen its grip, something else sometimes becomes possible: stepping back and looking at the person who hurt you in a wider frame. Where did they come from? What shaped them? What might explain how someone ends up capable of causing this kind of harm?

This is optional, and it isn’t always possible. If you don’t know much about the person, or the harm was severe enough that context doesn’t feel relevant, that’s okay too. But for some people, this step brings relief. In my experience, someone’s cruelty or carelessness often traces back to their own unaddressed pain and fear. Understanding that doesn’t make what they did more acceptable. It makes it less personal.

You can hold context and accountability at once: understanding how someone came to hurt you, while still holding them fully responsible for the choice they made.

And if context isn’t available, and this person is a stranger to you in every way except the harm they caused, there’s still something to land on: you’re not being singled out by the universe. Difficult, unfair things happen to people, and you’re not exempt from that because you’re a good person, or careful, or deserving of better. It’s a hard thought to sit with in the moment, but it can loosen the question so many people get stuck on — why me — which usually doesn’t have an answer that helps.

Does Acceptance Mean You Have to Reconcile?

No. Accepting what happened doesn’t obligate you to any particular relationship with the person who hurt you.

You get to decide what role, if any, this person has in your life going forward. That’s the freedom acceptance offers — not freedom from what happened, but freedom in how you respond to it now. For some people, that means staying in occasional contact: a family member you see at holidays but keep at arm’s length, a coworker you’re civil with but no longer confide in. For others, it means no contact at all, because continued proximity isn’t safe or because the relationship can’t hold what it once did.

If you’re afraid of the person who hurt you, or you don’t feel safe at home, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available 24/7 at 1-800-799-7233, or by text (text START to 88788). If you’re in immediate danger, call 911. 

When you’ve tried to repair things and the other person isn’t willing to do their part, you’re allowed to stop trying without that meaning you didn’t care enough or that you gave up too soon. Protecting yourself from ongoing harm isn’t a failure of forgiveness. It’s a form of acceptance. You can hold compassion for someone and still refuse to stay in a situation that keeps hurting you.

This is also true when the option to reconnect doesn’t exist at all — when the person has died, is incarcerated, or is otherwise permanently out of reach. They don’t have to be available for acceptance. It asks only that you stop waiting for something that was never going to come.

What Freedom Looks Like

There’s a story about two men who were wrongly imprisoned for over a decade. The guards who held them were cruel — the kind of cruelty that leaves marks long after the physical wounds heal. Years after their release, the two men ran into each other again. One of them said, “I don’t know if I could ever forgive those guards. If I saw one of them today, I don’t know what I’d do.” The other man was quiet for a moment, then said, “That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard. You’re still in prison.”

That’s what happens when the freedom acceptance offers goes unclaimed. The people who hurt you may be long gone: moved on, unreachable, indifferent to what they caused, or out of your life entirely. But if you’re still spending your days replaying what happened, still organizing your peace around whether they ever apologize, still stuck on vengeful thoughts, you’re the one still locked in a cell they built and then walked away from.

Acceptance doesn’t erase what happened to you, or minimize how real and serious the hurt was. It hands the key back to you. You stop waiting for someone who isn’t coming to let you out. You decide, on your own, what your life will look like from here, because you’re learning to trust yourself enough to stop letting what happened be the thing in charge.

You’ll return to this decision more than once, especially on the harder days. Each time you choose it, you’re a little more free than you were before.

You don’t need an apology to find peace.

Individual counseling gives you a place to work through the hurt, the anger, and the grief with someone steady beside you. You’re welcome to call our office to set up a free 15-minute consultation or an appointment.