FORGIVENESS, REDEMPTION, REGRET, AND THE MIDDLE PATH
I recently had a coaching call with a Palestinian woman, and some of the things we talked about have stayed with me. I’ve been sitting with them for a few days, and it keeps coming back to a few themes:
self-love, forgiveness, compassion, understanding, redemption, regret, impermanence, black-and-white thinking, and the middle path.
I want to walk through those here, mostly the way I talked through them on the call, because I think they’re useful no matter what you’re going through.
❤️ FORGIVENESS VS. REDEMPTION
💡 WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE?
For me, there’s a difference between forgiveness and redemption.
Forgiveness is something you give.
Redemption is something you earn.
I think you need both to be whole. Especially if you’re a perfectionist, you carry a lot of regret, or you’ve done things that weren’t fair or just – or received things that weren’t fair or just – whether to yourself or someone else.
Forgiveness is like acceptance, understanding, letting go. It’s not very tangible.
Redemption is earned. It’s behavior. It’s action. It’s, “I did something to repair this.”
You can see this really clearly in relationships.
🧩 WHY BOTH ARE NEEDED
If you have forgiveness without redemption, you can’t really have a full relationship – even with yourself. You might say, “I understand, I accept, I forgive,” but there’s still a little bit of a grudge in there. A feeling of:
“You haven’t really earned my love back.”
“You haven’t really earned your way back into the light.”
“You haven’t really earned the right to be close again.”
You can say “I forgive you” all you want, but if someone never redeems themselves, it’s very hard to trust them, to relax, or to feel safe with them.
👦 SORRY IS’NT GOOD ENOUGH
I see this with my kids all the time.
My son is a little more difficult than my daughter. He’s always saying he’ll do something. He’s always saying, “Sorry.” And we’re really having to work on the idea that:
You can say something,
but then you have to follow that up with action.
You have to redeem yourself.
Because if you don’t redeem yourself, we can’t have a real relationship. I can forgive you, understand you, and accept you all I want – but if you don’t do what you say, if you don’t earn things back, if you don’t redeem yourself, then I don’t want to be in that same pattern with you forever.
That’s my son, so of course we’re going to have a relationship regardless. But I still have to teach him that pattern: words plus action. Forgiveness plus redemption.
🪞 HOW THIS APPLIES TO YOU
The same thing applies to yourself.
You can forgive yourself. You can understand yourself. You can write all the journal entries, say all the right words, have all the insights. But if you don’t redeem yourself – if you don’t change your behavior – you can’t have a truly whole relationship with yourself.
Some part of you knows:
“I’m not holding up my end of what should be fair to me.”
“I’m not living in alignment with what I know I owe myself.”
That gap is where shame, self-contempt, and self-betrayal live.
🍽️ A SIMPLE EXAMPLE IN MARRIAGE
A simple example in marriage: say life is busy and one of us takes a break. One of us is burnt out, and the other one has to pull more weight – with the kids, with the house, with work, even with something as small as the dishes.
Let’s say my wife comes to me and says she’s stressed and feeling alone in it. I realize I haven’t been pulling my weight. I say, “I’m sorry.” She forgives me. It’s not the end of the world.
But if I want the strength of our relationship back, if I want the trust back, if I want us to stop snapping at each other over small things when it’s really about the dishes, I have to actually start doing the dishes more.
That’s redemption.
“I’m sorry for this, so I’m going to redeem myself by doing what I said I would do, by showing up for my half of the commitment.”
Now we have both: forgiveness and redemption. Now we can move back toward wholeness.
On the flip side, if someone redeems themselves but you don’t forgive them, the relationship still isn’t whole. Maybe they’ve been consistent, maybe they’ve changed, maybe they’re doing their part – but if you’re still holding a grudge, if you haven’t accepted or understood, then they’re still standing outside the warmth of your love.
You need forgiveness and redemption together to get back to love – with others and with yourself.
🧠 WHAT FORGIVENESS REALLY REQUIRES
🚫 “JUST FORGIVE AND MOVE ON” ISN’T REAL
We throw around “forgive and move on,” but in practice, forgiveness is not simple.
I see this a lot when people have gone through abuse, especially sexual abuse. I’ve experienced some myself. Many of the people I coach have too – from “small” things to very big things. And no, I’m not ranking people’s internal experiences, but there is a real difference in the severity of what happens. Some things are objectively worse than others.
When we talk about forgiveness, people often push back:
“How could I ever forgive that?”
“Why would I forgive them?”
“What they did is unforgivable.”
We always end up talking about this:
Forgiveness is not for them. It’s for you.
It’s cliché, but it’s still true. Without some form of forgiveness, it’s very hard to go on with your life without that event owning you.
🔍 PART 1: UNDERSTANDING
I think forgiveness has two main parts:
Understanding
Acceptance (which overlaps with letting go)
The tangible part is understanding.
You need to actually think through it. You need to understand how you feel. Sometimes you need to try to understand how the other person felt. You might need to understand:
– the context,
– the situation,
– the historical background,
– the predicament they were in,
– the predicament you were in,
– the “why” behind what happened.
You want to attack the “why” from as many angles as you can. That gives you a broader perspective. With greater perspective, you can zoom out of your immediate experience and gain a bit more of an objective view.
That doesn’t make what happened okay. It just makes it more understandable. And with more understanding, forgiveness becomes more possible.
🕊️ PART 2: ACCEPTANCE
The other part is acceptance.
You still have to accept that it happened. Even if you never fully “understand,” you have to accept:
“This is how things ended up.”
“This is what happened.”
“I did that.” or “They did that.” or “That was done to me.”
You feel that shift in your body. It’s like a quiet “Okay. This is real. This is the past. This is what I’m living with.”
That’s not technical. It’s not a step-by-step process. It’s something you allow yourself to do.
You let yourself forgive.
Understanding without acceptance isn’t enough. Acceptance without understanding is naive. And naive forgiveness isn’t complete, because without understanding, you’re likely to repeat the same patterns – with yourself or with others.
So you do need both:
– understanding, so you don’t repeat it,
– acceptance, so you can stop fighting the fact that it happened.
At that point, forgiveness starts to become real.
🕳️ REGRET AS GRIEF FOR AN UNLIVED FUTURE
💭 WHAT REGRET REALLY IS
Regret is another obstacle that sits between forgiveness and redemption.
At its core, regret is simple:
You wish you would have done something differently.
You wish something would have happened in another way.
You wish a different future existed.
Regret is grief for a potential future that never happened.
“I regret that I didn’t make that choice.”
“I regret that I stayed.”
“I regret that I left.”
“I regret that I didn’t study, or didn’t start that business, or didn’t say what I needed to say.”
You’re grieving something that didn’t happen, but could have.
🏚️ HOW REGRET KEEPS YOU STUCK
The longer you stay in regret, the more it slows you down. You get stuck staring at the version of your life that never came to be. And when you’re stuck there, you can’t fully move into forgiveness or redemption, because you’re still fighting reality.
You can’t get your head around the fact that:
“This is what happened. This is where I’m at now.”
In almost every coaching session I’ve had around regret or guilt, it eventually comes down to this:
We have to change the behavior.
We have to change the outcomes going forward.
The situation can be complex. We still have to talk it all the way through: we process, we understand, we accept, we cry, we rage, we sit with it. But at the end of that, the path forward is some form of redemption:
“What can I do now, with who I am and where I am, to move differently?”
⚠️ WHEN OPTIONS ARE GONE
People are often terrified of that part. They’re scared of what happened, scared of what they lost, and then they recreate the loss by staying in regret.
“I wish I had gone to school.” And then 5 years later… you still haven’t gone.
“I wish I would’ve treated that partner better.” And then you repeat the same patterns in the next relationship.
“I wish I would’ve protected myself back then.” And then you still don’t set boundaries now.
You keep reliving the regret in the present.
Now, there’s a real limitation here:
You don’t always have all the options you had back then.
Sometimes something is gone. Completely.
Sometimes there is permanent loss.
In that case, you can’t redeem yourself one-to-one. You can’t recreate the exact opportunity or moment. Even if the “same” opportunity shows up later, time has passed, you’re different, the situation is different.
That scares people, because it connects with our fear of death and endings. We don’t want things to end. We don’t want to lose. We don’t want to die.
But part of being human is that we experience loss.
🌱 REDEMPTION WITH WHAT’S LEFT
So the question becomes:
Given that I can’t get the exact moment back,
how closely can I honor what was lost?
Maybe you had a chance to be there for someone and you weren’t. You can’t go back and be there for that person in that moment. But you can become someone who shows up now – for others, for yourself, for the people still in your life.
You don’t have the full option anymore.
But maybe you have half of it. Or a different version of it.
The important part is that you don’t compound regret by staying frozen. You don’t keep making the same decision just because you can’t have the old version back.
We all go through hell.
We don’t have to stay there.
!! This is not meant to address the loss of people or loved ones - However, it can be applied in such situations.
⏳ IMPERMANENCE AND WHY NOTHING REPEATS
♻️ NOTHING HAPPENS TWICE THE SAME WAY
Impermanence is the backdrop to all of this.
Nothing is forever.
You can’t relive the same moment twice.
We don’t get time machines.
You might have similar experiences. You might run into similar obstacles. It might feel like “the same thing” is happening again.
But it isn’t exactly the same, because you’re not the same.
You’ve already been through something like it.
You have new information.
You have new scars, new wisdom, new fears, new strengths.
So even when life seems to circle back, it’s still moving forward.
We often want life to be permanent when it feels good, and temporary when it feels bad. But impermanence applies to both. The good doesn’t last forever. The bad doesn’t either.
Impermanence is scary when we want safety.
It’s a gift when we need change.
⚖️ BLACK-AND-WHITE THINKING VS. THE MIDDLE PATH
⬛⬜ OUR ADDICTION TO CERTAINTY
Most of us want certainty and safety. That pulls us into black-and-white thinking:
Forgive or don’t forgive.
Redeem or don’t redeem.
Stay or go.
Good or bad.
Right or wrong.
But real life doesn’t really work that way.
The path to redemption is often not clear or linear.
The path to forgiveness is often not clear or linear.
Sometimes it’s not “I forgive everything” or “I forgive nothing.”
Sometimes it’s, “I’m going to try to understand first.”
“Let me accept this part and sit with that.”
“Let me forgive in stages.”
“Let me set boundaries while I figure this out.”
There’s a gray area in almost everything.
⚖️ THE GRAY AREA
Even in the law, which is supposed to be black and white, there are gray areas. Things get so complex that we have to write new laws, or judges have to make decisions based on context, feeling, precedent, and their own judgment.
That’s the gray area.
Humans are terrified of gray areas. We want to know where we stand. We want certainty, especially if we grew up without a lot of it.
But here’s the thing:
Your capacity to tolerate uncertainty
is also your capacity to change your life.
If you don’t like the way things are, you actually don’t want full certainty. You don’t want it to be guaranteed that your life will stay this way forever. You want some “wiggle room” in reality – space for things to shift.
Uncertainty is where:
– creativity lives,
– imagination lives,
– critical thinking lives,
– your gut and instincts live.
You can’t write those things into a rulebook. They only show up when things aren’t black and white.
❤️ WHY RELATIONSHIPS FEEL SO RISKY
Where do people struggle with this most?
I think it’s relationships.
Love, family, partnership – those sit right next to survival. We want to know:
Will this person stay?
Can I trust them?
Will they choose me?
Will I be alone?
That’s life-and-death energy for our nervous system. It makes sense that uncertainty here feels unbearable.
But there is no way to love without uncertainty.
There is no way to build family without risk.
We want the certainty of being loved, chosen, and safe, and at the same time, we’re asked to tolerate the risk that things can change – that people can leave, that life can hit, that circumstances can shift. That tension is where the middle path lives.
So when you find yourself in a situation that is clearly not black and white, the invitation is:
Stop trying to make it black and white.
Accept that you’re in the gray.
Accept that you have to feel it out.
Accept that there isn’t a perfect rule or formula.
You can gather understanding. You can talk to people. You can weigh your values. But at the end of the day, you have to choose:
“Where in this gray area am I going to stand?”
That choice is highly individual. No one else can make it for you.
💗 WHAT SELF-LOVE ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE
💓 LOVE AS ACTION
The last thing I didn’t get to fully talk about on that call, and that I want to add here, is self-love.
Self-love really just boils down to love.
Whether that’s toward yourself or toward someone else, it’s not just a feeling – it’s what you do.
Self-love is all the small acts that keep you aligned with who you are:
– taking a walk,
– taking a shower,
– stretching,
– cooking yourself a real meal,
– spending time with loved ones,
– calling someone you care about,
– resting when you’re exhausted,
– telling the truth when it would be easier to lie.
They’re all acts of love.
When you stop doing those acts of love – for yourself or for others – you slowly become someone you’re not. You move away from who you are.
And there’s already enough of the opposite in the world. There’s enough hate, enough neglect, enough numbness, enough people moving through life with no real love in their actions.
🌧️ WHEN LIFE GETS HEAVY
When you’re going through something hard, or when there’s a lot of responsibility on your shoulders, those small acts are the first things to go. You tell yourself you don’t have time, you don’t have energy, and sometimes that’s true.
But if you make it to the “other side” of a hard season
without love, what was the point?
There are enough people who arrive wherever they were trying to go having sacrificed their heart along the way. That’s how people end up broken in ways that spill into the world. That’s how wars start, how cycles of abuse continue, how hurt keeps rippling out.
It’s people moving forward without love.
🌤️ CARRY LOVE THROUGH THE HARD PARTS
For you, for me, for anyone reading this:
Remember that even in the hardest times, you want to carry love with you.
You want to keep some part of your life sacred. You want to keep doing at least a few of those small acts of love – toward yourself, toward the people around you – even when you’re tired, even when you’re scared, even when you’re grieving.
Because when you get to the other side, it will matter how you carried the burden.
Not just for you and the people around you,
but for the generations that come after you.
If we hope to make the world a better place, if we hope to evolve as humans, we have to keep what makes us human intact. And I think the core of what makes us human is that capacity to love – to act from love, even under weight.
If we lose that along the way, it doesn’t really matter where we’re going. If we get to our “destination” without love, is it really the destination we were trying to get to.
👉 IF YOU NEED TO TALK THIS THROUGH
If something in here touched a nerve – regret, redemption, forgiveness, abuse, relationships, the gray area you’re standing in right now – you don’t have to untangle it alone.
You can always reach out, reply, or ask me to walk through it with you. I can offer ideas, reflections, or just listen. We can sort through the gray together.
But even with support, there’s a part no one can do for you:
– forgiving yourself,
– seeking redemption in your behavior,
– accepting what happened,
– choosing where in the gray you’re going to stand,
– and keeping love alive in how you move.
That’s the part only you can carry.
And it’s exactly the part that makes you who you are.