Why Anger and Forgiveness Aren't Enemies

Anger isn’t a villain, and forgiveness isn’t a hero.

Anger and forgiveness are often pitted against each other as archrivals. In my research for my book, You Don’t Need to Forgive: Trauma Recovery on Your Own Terms, I discovered that in this contest, forgiveness is cast as the hero, while anger is cast as the villain. However, this opposition makes little sense.

Anger isn’t a villain.

We live in an anger-phobic society, where people are afraid of your anger as well as their own. We’re taught as children to avoid, restrict, and internalize our rage. We often hear phrases such as “Calm down,” “There’s no reason to get angry,” “You’re overreacting,” and “Why are you so angry?” They imply that there is something terribly wrong with anger. In this environment that we have created for ourselves, we do not feel safe experiencing, expressing, processing, or integrating our anger. It has become a stigmatized emotion, which is why it makes the perfect villain.[i] Yet, anger is not a villain; it’s simply an emotion.

Anger is not good or bad or right or wrong; it’s an emotion, no better or worse than any other emotion. Happiness is not good or bad; it’s an emotion. All emotions have the potential to be problematic. Any emotion that feels overwhelming or that you cannot process can cause psychological distress, even a supposedly positive one like happiness. Imagine that you feel happy all the time and are unable to feel anything else. You might struggle to relate to other people who aren’t always happy, and your relationships will suffer. After all, if a friend comes to you feeling down about something, how could you possibly understand them? You may also notice a monotony in your everyday life, and your happiness may start to feel stale.

Emotions, then, are like anything else: healthiest in moderation. They themselves—including anger—are not the problem. It’s how they are experienced, expressed, and processed that impacts your quality of life.[ii] Anger is a valuable emotion that shouldn’t be feared or stigmatized but instead embraced.

Forgiveness isn’t a hero.

When was the last time you heard anything negative about forgiveness? These occurrences tend to be rare. You might have been told that forgiveness is 100% positive, and if you are a moral person, you should always forgive. You might have heard that forgiveness will always be beneficial and will never cause you harm. These all-or-nothing messages and beliefs are misleading. Forgiveness is not a panacea, as it doesn’t always produce positive results, and could be harmful.

Forgiving your offenders can cause you harm by compromising your feelings of safety, reinforcing damaging gender roles and societal inequalities, hindering your need to feel, express, and process your anger, and promoting shame. Unfortunately, some people even intentionally use forgiveness as a weapon to harm, silence, or police you—or to, in fact, center and prioritize the interests of your offenders rather than your needs—under the guise of moral virtue.[iii] Is forgiveness a villain? No. Forgiving can be very beneficial, just not for everyone under every circumstance. Therefore, it’s unfair to hold forgiveness to the impossible standard of being a hero.

Anger and forgiveness are not opposites.

Many people equate anger with being unforgiving. They say that if you are angry with your offender, you have not forgiven them, and if you do not feel angry at them, then you have forgiven them. This interpretation is a vast oversimplification. Anger has a correlational relationship to forgiveness, as one who forgives is likely to feel less angry. However, eliminating anger does not cause forgiveness, and forgiveness is not automatically achieved when you are no longer angry. When you forgive, your anger may lessen without going away entirely, or you may feel no anger at your offender and still choose not to forgive them. Therefore, feeling angry is not the opposite of forgiving and vice versa.

This battle has no winner because forgiveness and anger were never at odds. It is our misunderstanding of them that has created this false rivalry. How can we free these artificial enemies from their manmade battle? We can acknowledge that they both have value, neither is perfect, and we do not need to choose one over the other. We can allow them both to occur however and whenever necessary. They might come together, and we can have both; one may be stronger than the other, or one may stick around simply because the other is no longer needed. We don’t need to perpetuate the belief that one is good and the other is bad or that one is right and the other is wrong. [iv] We can value them both equally.

[i] Gregory, A. You Don’t Need to Forgive: Trauma Recovery on Your Own Terms. Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books; 2025, 73.

[ii] Gregory, A. You Don’t Need to Forgive: Trauma Recovery on Your Own Terms. Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books; 2025, 77.

[iii] Gregory, A. You Don’t Need to Forgive: Trauma Recovery on Your Own Terms. Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books; 2025, xix.

[iv] Gregory, A. You Don’t Need to Forgive: Trauma Recovery on Your Own Terms. Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books; 2025, 90.

Purchase my book, You Don’t Need to Forgive