Forgive Seventy-Seven Times: Not a Licence

Part 2 of 3 · Forgiving a parent who keeps hurting you

If you have been quietly handed the verse "forgive seventy-seven times" and felt your chest tighten instead of loosen, this piece is for you.

It is late. The house is finally quiet. You have read the passage in your devotion again, the way you were taught to. Matthew 18. Peter asks how many times. The answer comes back, not seven, but seventy-seven. With your father's name still moving through your chest, the verse feels like it is being used against you.

You close the app. Your chest is tighter, not looser. That is odd, you think. This is supposed to be comfort.

What if the verse was never asking what you were taught it was asking?

The reading most of us have inherited

The way this verse often gets used, in families and in churches, is as a kind of instruction to absorb. To keep absorbing. To keep extending, regardless of whether the person has changed. To keep the door open to whatever comes. If you are the child of a parent who keeps hurting the family, the verse has probably been handed to you, at some point, with that instruction attached. Sometimes gently. Sometimes not.

I want to offer a different reading, in the voice of a therapist rather than a theologian.

Reading the whole chapter

The passage comes from Matthew 18. It sits inside a larger chapter. A few verses earlier, the same chapter outlines what to do when someone who has hurt you refuses to hear you: a process of naming the harm, of witnesses, and, eventually, of a kind of separation. A few verses later, the parable of the unforgiving servant turns on a man who has received great mercy and refuses to offer the small mercy he owes in return.

What I notice, sitting with the whole chapter, is that the shape of it is not a shape of endless compliance. It is a shape of honesty about harm, of a willingness to release, and of the possibility, but not the guarantee, of return.

Forgiving seventy-seven times was never the same thing as handing him, seventy-seven times, a key to a door he keeps breaking.

What forgiveness is not

Counselling researchers Alan Demmitt and Krystel Chenault, writing in Psychotherapy Networker, observe that many people stay stuck on the word forgiveness because they assume it means agreeing with what the other person did, endorsing it, forgetting it, or restoring the relationship to what it was before. None of those are forgiveness. Those are closer to self-erasure.

Forgiveness is not pretending it did not happen. Forgiveness is not deciding it was fine. Forgiveness is not resuming the same access. Forgiveness is not a guarantee that he will be different. Forgiveness is not a spiritual performance to make yourself acceptable again. It was never meant to be any of those things.

What forgiveness actually is

So what is it, then?

The working definition I return to with clients is this. Forgiveness is the slow, uneven process of releasing the grip that resentment has on you. It happens inside you, for your own wellbeing. It does not require the other person to change. It does not require continued access, contact, or financial provision. It does not require a tidy ending.

Clinical psychologist Janis Abrahms Spring, in How Can I Forgive You? The Courage to Forgive, the Freedom Not To, draws a distinction that has been quietly useful to many of the clients I work with. Forgiveness and reconciliation are not the same thing. Forgiveness is internal. Reconciliation requires the other person to do real work: acknowledge the harm, repair it, and demonstrate change over time. You can forgive without reconciling. You can release the grip of resentment and still keep the door closed.

Demmitt and Chenault use the phrase "selfish forgiveness" for this kind of internal work, and they use the word kindly. When forgiveness is framed as an obligation you owe the person who hurt you, the control stays with them. When it is reframed as an internal act of self-care, the control comes back to you.

You are not doing this for him. You are fanning the smoke out of your own kitchen because you are the one inhaling it.

This kind of forgiveness can coexist with anger. It can coexist with distance. It can coexist with not picking up the phone. It can take years. Some days it loosens. Some days it tightens. That is not failure. That is how this actually works.

The teaching, at its best and at its worst

At its best, the teaching to forgive was never a weapon used against a person who has been hurt. It was an invitation to loosen the grip of an injury on your own life, so that you are not spending the rest of it tethered to someone else's wrongdoing.

At its worst, it gets used as pressure to keep quiet, to keep access open, to keep providing, to keep pretending the pattern is not the pattern.

You are allowed to hold onto the best reading and refuse the worst.

Taking the good of a teaching is not the same as swallowing the way it has been used against you.

An invitation

If the verse has been sitting on your chest, try this. Read it again, but this time, read the whole chapter. Notice the separation option a few verses earlier. Notice the parable a few verses later. Notice what the chapter as a whole is actually teaching.

Then ask yourself, gently. If forgiveness is an internal loosening, and not a restored access, what would it look like for me? Not today. Not all at once. Just, in the direction I am heading.

You may find the chest begins to loosen a little. Not because you have solved it. Because you have stopped believing that "forgive seventy-seven times" meant what you had been told it meant.

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The house is still quiet. The verse is still open on your phone. It is not pressing on your chest in the same way. Forgiving him, if it ever happens, will not be the day you hand back the key. It will be the day you stop carrying the resentment for him, and start carrying yourself instead.

Further reading

• Alan Demmitt and Krystel Chenault, counselling researchers. In Consultation: Forgiveness as Self-Care. Psychotherapy Networker, November/December 2025.
• Janis Abrahms Spring, clinical psychologist. How Can I Forgive You? The Courage to Forgive, the Freedom Not To. Harper Perennial, 2004.

Crisis support and a note on this piece

This piece is educational and is not a substitute for psychotherapy. The territory it touches, family betrayal and spiritual pressure, is heavy, and it is worth working through with someone. If you are in crisis in Singapore, please reach out. Samaritans of Singapore (SOS) is available at 1767. The Institute of Mental Health 24-hour helpline is 6389 2222. In an emergency, call 999.

If any of this resonates and you would like a space to work through it, you are welcome to Book a Consultation or Explore Working Together.