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 — and instead, you get blame, silence, denial, or distance you can’t close because they’ve moved away, cut off contact, or simply 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?

Janis Abrahms-Spring, in her book How Can I Forgive You?, offers a name for exactly this situation: acceptance. It isn’t a consolation prize, and it isn’t giving up. It’s a different path than forgiveness as most people picture it — one that doesn’t require the other person to show up, apologize, or change at all.

This is what that path actually looks like, and how to walk it without waiting for something that may never come.

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, in turn, has something real to respond to — an apology, a change in behavior, evidence that the harm actually landed and mattered to the person who caused it.

That process breaks down completely when the other person isn’t participating. Maybe they deny it happened. Maybe they minimize it, or turn it around and blame you instead. Maybe they’re not cruel or defensive at all — they’re just gone, unrepentant in their absence, and there’s no one left to have the conversation with.

That’s not the same thing as what Spring calls “refusing to forgive” — which is about holding onto protective anger and resentment even when part of you wants to let go. This is different: the other person simply isn’t offering anything to forgive toward. For that situation, Spring offers a distinct path: acceptance. It’s also not the same as rushing to say the words ‘I forgive you’ just to make the discomfort go away — that kind of premature peace-making, what we’ve written about as cheap forgiveness, usually leaves the real injury untouched underneath it.

Acceptance means facing what happened, honestly and without minimizing it, and deciding — on your own — what kind of relationship, if any, you’ll carry forward with that person or their memory. It doesn’t require their remorse. It doesn’t require reconciliation. 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 — it’s 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. The shield protects you from more harm, but it doesn’t treat the wound you’re already carrying.

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 stay with than anger is. Anger feels active, even powerful. What’s underneath it often feels like the opposite — and that’s part of why anger is so much easier to live in.

But it’s the vulnerable feelings, not the anger, that actually point to what needs healing. If you can name 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 alone doesn’t give you that. It just keeps the focus on them, and on what they did, instead of on 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 — not excuse, but explain — how someone ends up capable of causing this kind of harm?

This isn’t a requirement, 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 real relief: understanding that someone’s cruelty or carelessness often traces back to their own unaddressed pain doesn’t make what they did acceptable. It just makes it less personal.

Context and accountability aren’t opposites. You can hold both at once — understanding how someone became capable of hurting you, while still holding them fully responsible for the choice they made. One doesn’t cancel the other out.

And if context isn’t available — if 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 simply because you’re a good person, or careful, or deserving of better. That’s not a comforting thought 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. Acceptance is not the same as reconciliation, and it 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 actually 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 simply can’t hold what it once did.

If 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’ve failed, or that 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 it. 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. Acceptance doesn’t require them to be available. It only requires you to stop waiting for something that was never going to come, and to decide, on your own terms, how you want to carry this forward.

What Freedom Actually 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 simply 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, and it doesn’t pretend the hurt wasn’t real or wasn’t serious. What it does is hand 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 gets to look like from here — not because what happened didn’t matter, but because you’re learning to trust yourself enough to stop letting it be the thing in charge.

That’s not a single decision you make once. It’s something you’ll return to, probably more than once, especially on the harder days. But each time you choose it, you’re a little more free than you were before.

Ready to stop waiting for peace they may never give you?

You don’t need the other person’s participation to do this work — individual counseling can help you process the hurt, honor what you’ve been carrying, and find your own way toward peace, on your own timeline.