How To Forgive A Parent Who Hurt You: Even When Empathy Isn't the Problem

Forgiveness isn't about the other person. How healing the father/mother wound actually works, and why waiting keeps you stuck in old loops.

cutting cords for spiritual healing and forgiveness

This is the piece I never thought I’d write, about forgiving the parent I spent decades defending.

They say to forgive and forget. Two words people love to string together like they’re the same thing.

But they are not. Not even close.

For most of my life, I thought I’d already done the forgiveness work with my father. I didn’t feel the rage you hear about in every trauma memoir. I felt something quieter than that. Something that looked, from the outside, like peace.

It wasn’t peace at all. It was peace dressed up as a very good form of avoidance.

I was five years old when the state removed me from my father’s care. And even then, somehow, I understood he didn’t know how to keep me safe. I had empathy for him before I could even understand what happened to me. That empathy felt generous and kind. If I had empathy, I didn’t have to face the cold, hard truth of what my father actually did to me. Or maybe I should say what he didn’t do for me: protect me.

Then I started doing the real deep inner work of healing my complex childhood trauma.

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Empathy Disguised As Healing

For years, my father wasn’t someone I needed to heal from. He was someone I thought I understood. At least that’s what I convinced myself of. He didn’t know better. He was broken before I was even born. What was there to forgive in a man who never had a chance himself?

That story held up fine on the surface. Underneath it, my body kept score in ways my mind refused to.

Migraines. Autoimmune flares. A body that never fully relaxed, no matter how many yoga classes or meditation sessions I threw at it. I didn’t connect any of it to my father for years. Why would I? I’d already forgiven him. I’d decided that a long time ago, hadn’t I?

When I finally started doing deep inner work, not for anyone else, but for me, the empathy I’d been so proud of started to crumble. Underneath it was rage I had never let myself feel. Judgment I didn’t know I was still holding. I called him weak. A coward. Neglectful. Unloving. Words I never would have said out loud a decade earlier, and here they were coming from an invisible space I refused to recognize before.

I remember being seven, in a foster home, all alone, that wasn’t his house anymore, and another kid asking why I didn’t live with my parents. I told them my dad was sick. Not sick like a cold. Sick like something he didn’t choose. I was a child, already running PR for a grown man’s absence. That’s not empathy, it’s a nervous system deciding it’s safer to protect the adult than to feel the abandonment and embarrassment of being left.

And the wound didn’t just live in my relationship with him. It lived in my marriage. In how much power I handed to Paul without realizing it, because somewhere in me, a little girl still believed love was something you had to earn by disappearing a little. I didn’t trust men to stay, not really. I didn’t trust myself to be safe without one. That was my father wound, and it ran deeper than any stab to the heart. The thing is, it doesn’t stay in your childhood. It quietly follows you into every situation you walk into as an adult, especially in relationships that involve men.

I went back and forth for a long time between the empathy and the rage. Some weeks I’d feel compassion for the lost man he must have been. Other weeks I wanted nothing to do with him at all.

When I was a rebellious teen holding quiet rage, I completely cut him off for years. Not wanting to be bothered. Just the way he didn’t want to be bothered with being a loving and supportive father to my two sisters and me, when my mother passed away. Feeding us to the wolf, his live-in abusive and psychotic drug-addicted girlfriend and turning the other way.

When the Words Don’t Come

Here’s the part nobody tells you about the work of forgiveness. At some point, you sit down to forgive the person for real, and the words won’t come.

I truly tried. I sat with intention, in meditation, in journaling, in imagined conversations, and nothing could be said to express how I really felt. It all felt hollow and forced. Like I was performing a paragraph from a trauma healing book instead of living one. And I rehearsed his response, afraid that I would never get from him what I needed. I didn’t even know what that actually was because there were never any expectations when it came to my dad.

That’s when I realized I wasn’t struggling to forgive my father because I didn’t love him enough. I was struggling because I still thought forgiveness was something I owed him. A gift I’d hand over once he’d earned it, or apologized enough, or had become someone different.

The point was never to release him from responsibility; it was to release me from the rage, grief, and betrayal that lived deep in my body. I didn’t want the energetic tie to direct my life any longer.

Ho’Oponopono Teaches To Let Go

There’s a practice I turned to once I understood that forgiveness isn’t about him, it’s about my own freedom, called Hoʻoponopono. It’s an ancient Hawaiian prayer of reconciliation, and I think of it less as forgiveness in the way we’re taught to picture it, and more as alchemy. You’re not transforming the other person. You’re transforming what their story is still doing inside your own mind, body, and spirit, and how that creates friction and more struggle than we sometimes realize.

The prayer is four simple, yet powerful, statements

I’m sorry

Please forgive me

I love you

Thank you

Read that again slowly, because most people assume it’s meant to be said to the person who hurt you. It isn’t. You’re saying it to your own experience of them. To the part of you that’s still holding the memory, the wound, the story. You’re not asking this person for forgiveness. You’re releasing your own pain and suffering around it.

Dr. Hew Len was a psychologist who worked with a ward of criminally insane patients in a Hawaii state hospital. The ward was considered one of the most dangerous in the system. It couldn’t stayed staffed. The patients were shackled, medicated, kept under constant restraint because of their mental state. The doctor never held a single session with any of the patients. Instead, he reviewed each patient’s file and, privately, repeated the Hoʻoponopono prayer over what he found there, taking responsibility not for what they did, but for the energy that kept them tied to it. It was documented that, over time, repeating the Hoʻoponopono prayer transformed the hospital. The patients were taken off medications, and staff turnover dwindled. Eventually the hospital closed, not because of budget cuts but because there was no longer a need. That is how powerful this prayer and intention is.

I don’t tell you that story to promise you a miracle. I tell you because it paints the picture of how true healing works. We think the work is out there, on the other person, waiting for them to change, apologize, or finally get it. You could be waiting a lifetime for other people to finally wake TFU. The work is always, always, inside our own energetic field. That is what radical self-responsibility is.

Trauma doesn’t just live as a memory in the mind. It lives in the body, in the nervous system, in our auric field, and can outlast the actual event. Your nervous system doesn’t know the difference between a story you’re remembering and a threat happening right now. So every time you replay it, every time you rehearse the rage or the justification, your body responds as if it’s happening now. It’s an actual energetic cord that lives on until you decide you are ready to release it. It’s also a physiological loop your system keeps running because some part of you believes staying attached to the old wound is what keeps you safe. Forgive doesn’t mean forget.

Forgiveness doesn’t eliminate responsibility for the other person. It teaches your nervous system that the danger is over and it is safe to finally let go. It’s the permission slip that has been sitting on the kitchen counter waiting to be signed. Once it is, you can finally feel free again.

This shows up for you too, whether the person is a parent, an ex, a friend who betrayed you, or a version of yourself you haven’t forgiven yet. The wound isn’t the problem anymore; it’s the unwillingness to let go.

Forgiveness On Your Terms

Forgiveness was never about letting your father, mother, husband, friend, or whoever your version of them is, off the hook. It was never about deciding what they deserved. Every time you withhold forgiveness, waiting for someone to earn it, you’re the one still standing in the pot of boiling hot water, tied to the story, unable to get out of it.

This process, because it’s a process, doesn’t ever need to be rushed. You are allowed to forgive when YOU are ready, not when a podcast tells you it’s time, not when someone else thinks you should be over it by now. Some healings take time. Mine took decades. There is no shame in doing it your way on your terms. I actually encourage you to do this when you feel ready. Maybe that starts with a small step. One statement, not all four at the same time.

But I’d be lying to you if I said there was no cost to waiting forever. If that readiness never comes, you don’t get to skip the consequence. You continue to carry the grief, rage, the story, all of it remains as an invisible ache in your body, running your reactions, shaping who you let close and who you keep at arm’s length, whether you ever look at it again or not. Forgiveness is not an obligation, and it’s not a moral report card. But when it finally comes, when you finally release your grip on a story you’ve been holding since before you knew how to hold anything, it is a sweet release. Nothing else feels quite like it. I can only name it as liberation from what’s held you back and kept you in loops that silently run your life.

The Drive That Changed My Life

So instead of holding the empathy story on the surface and the rage underneath it, I started doing the actual work.

I practiced the Ho’oponopono prayer, again and again, not for my father’s benefit but for my own. I wrote him a letter of forgiveness I never intended to send. It all mattered because I was becoming the person I was meant to be. Not letting the pains of my past direct my life but allowing my connection with Divine love and acceptance to create a new reality.

But there was still a pressure underneath it all, quiet and persistent. Something a letter and a prayer couldn’t fully alchemize. I went back and forth in my head for years about whether saying it to him in person even mattered anymore. Whether it would change anything. Whether he’d even understand what I was telling him or if he would say those words to me that I longed to hear. I love you. I am sorry.

A few months ago, I drove to his house. And I told him, in person, that I forgive him. That I love him.

I didn’t do it for some dramatic reconciliation scene. I did it because I didn’t want him carrying that unfinished business with him when he passes. And I didn’t want to carry it either. It was uncomfortable. Part of me wanted to turn the car around more than once. But I kept going, and when I said the words out loud to his face, something in me finally let go. Not because he earned it but because I was ready to stop holding the door open for a story that no longer needed to live in me.

A Forgiveness Practice To Start Now

You don’t need a dramatic in-person conversation to start this. You just need to start where I did: inside myself, saying the words to my own experience before I ever said them to him.

This week, try this. Think of one relationship where you’re still holding a story, a judgment, a cord you haven’t cut. It might be a parent. It might be yourself. Sit quietly, hand on your chest if that helps you feel it in your body, and say these four lines slowly, directing them at your own experience of that person or moment.

I’m sorry. Please forgive me. I love you. Thank you.

Say it once. Or say it every night this week. Notice what shifts in your body, not your thoughts. That’s where this work hits.

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I know how far away that sweet release can feel when you’re still in the empathy or the rage or the back and forth between them. I lived there for years. But the version of you that’s still holding the story isn’t failing anything by not being done yet. She’s simply not there yet. I trust you’ll know the moment you are, the same way I finally did, standing in front of my father saying words I never thought I’d say out loud and hearing back from him, I love you, I am sorry. The sweetest release of my life.

Do This Next

If this stirred something in you, that father wound, that pattern of giving your power away, that story you keep almost releasing and then picking back up, that’s not a coincidence. That’s your soul asking for more. Be gentle, be kind, and gracious with yourself. Healing isn’t something you convince yourself of or force because you think you should. Your heart knows the truth and the way. Follow it. And when you’re ready to let go of your pain from the past, forgiveness is a great next step.

I followed my intuition to forgive my father; yours may be quietly nudging you to take the next step.

If you’re not sure how your intuition speaks to you, take the Soul Signal Assessment. It only takes a few minutes and will show you exactly how your intuition communicates and how to use it to guide you in life.

👉 Take My Soul Signal Assessment

And if you’re ready to go deeper, Soul & Mind Alchemy, my private mentorship, walks you through four phases: Remembering, Releasing, Returning, and Living. It’s for the woman who is done cycling through the same story and ready to come home to herself. You can learn more here.

👉Take My Power Back and Live With Freedom

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I’d love to know whose forgiveness are you still holding onto as unfinished business? Comment below and let’s have a chat.

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All my Love, Nikki K 🩷♾️

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