Hello Reader,
There is something nobody warns you about when you have been hurt: the pain doesn't only come from what was done to you. It also comes from what you cannot do with that pain.
It is a double pain, quiet and often nameless.
The first is the original wound — what they did, what they took from you. The second is harder to explain: the weight of carrying something you feel you should be able to let go of, and simply can't. In that space between wanting to and being able to, a very particular kind of anguish lives.
Alicia was 43 when she walked into my office carrying the kind of exhaustion that doesn't come from work — it comes from constant thought.
Two years earlier she had discovered that her lifelong best friend — her hermana elegida, her chosen sister — had betrayed her in the way that cuts deepest: by taking the words Alicia had shared in moments of complete vulnerability and turning them into weapons.
Alicia wasn't sleeping. She would wake at 3 a.m. with the scene replaying on a loop. In our first session she said, exhausted:
"I don't understand. I'm the one who should be okay. She's the one who hurt me. So why am I still the one suffering?"
That question deserves an honest answer.
The extra weight of being a good person
If you grew up in a Latino family — or in any faith tradition that places forgiveness at the center — you know this in your bones. Perdona. Forgive. It's what good people do. It's what your abuela modeled, even when she had every reason not to.
And you believe that. You are a good person. That's exactly why this hurts so much.
Because when you face the person who hurt you — or simply their memory — it doesn't come. Not from a real place. And so a second layer appears on top of the wound: the guilt of not being able to forgive. As if something in you were broken.
I want to say this clearly: not forgiving is your right
It is not a character flaw. It is not a sign that you are a bitter or small person. It is a human, understandable, even adaptive response to a real wound. No book, no person, no church has the authority to put a deadline on your inner process.
The problem isn't the right you're exercising. The problem is the price you pay for exercising it.
Alicia described it this way: "It's like having someone living in my head rent-free — and I never invited them."
That metaphor is more precise than it sounds. When we don't forgive, the mind generates what researchers call rumination — repetitive, involuntary thoughts that return to the scene again and again. You didn't choose them. They appear in traffic, in the shower, right before sleep. And they consume attention, working memory, the capacity to be present: resources that should be available for your life, your joy, your people.
The body keeps the score
Many of us were raised to aguantar — to endure, to stay strong, not to let the pain show. But the body doesn't lie.
When we hold the emotional activation of an unresolved grievance, the autonomic nervous system stays in chronic alert. Sustained cortisol is associated with systemic inflammation, immune deterioration, disrupted sleep, and higher cardiovascular risk.
And here is the hardest part to hold: you did nothing wrong. You received the harm. And yet it is your body accumulating the stress, your sleep fragmenting, your thoughts that cannot find peace. The person who hurt you is probably sleeping fine tonight.
That is a double injustice. You have every right to name it as such.
And still — this is the hardest thing to hear — releasing the poison is not a favor to the one who poisoned you. It is a favor to yourself.
Alicia, one year later
Her process was neither linear nor fast. There was no single day when she arrived and said, "I forgave — it's done."
What happened, little by little, was different: she learned to separate her former friend from her own inner life. She came to understand that forgiveness doesn't mean saying what happened was okay. It doesn't mean reconciliation. It doesn't mean going back.
After nearly a year, she came in one morning and said something I've held onto:
"I don't dream about her anymore. And when I think about what she did — I can breathe."
That, to me, is what real forgiveness looks like. Not forgetting. Not reconciliation. The freedom to breathe.
If you can't forgive today — that's okay. Don't pressure yourself. Forgiveness is not a moral milestone you have to reach to prove you're a good person. It can only be real when it comes from genuine choice, not obligation.
What I do ask is that you don't carry it alone.
This is the book I wrote for exactly this
After more than 30 years sitting across from people carrying betrayal, grief and family silence, I wrote Forgive on Your Terms — a twelve-week map that combines the neuroscience of nervous system regulation, Mexican ancestral wisdom, and the Forgiveness Cultivation Inventory, a tool I developed to help you identify where you actually are before trying to "move forward."
It does not ask you to forgive. It walks with you while you find out whether you want to.
Read more about the book →
Introductory pricing ends Thursday, September 10.
Paperback $15.95 (regular $18.95) · E-book $8.99 (regular $11.99)
Available in paperback, PDF and EPUB. Audiobook coming soon.
And if you'd rather start with something small, with no commitment: there is a free companion workbook on the same page — every question and exercise from the book, with space to write your own process, week by week.
Thank you for being here.
With care,
Dr. Carmen Roman
Licensed Clinical Psychologist · California
Gestalt Therapy · Transpersonal Psychology
P.S. If someone in your life is carrying something they haven't been able to put down, forward this to them. Sometimes the right reading arrives at exactly the right moment.
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