By Naazi Morad

What If the Person I Needed to Forgive Was Me?

There comes a moment in healing when we stop asking, “Why did they do this to me?” and begin asking a much more uncomfortable question: “Why did I abandon myself for so long?”

Sometimes we can become consumed by the need for answers, accountability and justice. We replay conversations, analyse behaviour and wonder why the other person didn’t see our pain, why they didn’t change, or why what they did wasn’t enough to make them understand the impact it had on us. We may believe that if they could just acknowledge it, apologise for it, or finally understand our pain, something inside us would finally settle.

But what happens when they do acknowledge it — and it still isn’t enough?

Perhaps that is when we begin to realise that we were never only seeking justice from them. Perhaps we were trying to give justice to a part of ourselves that had felt unseen, unheard and forgotten for far too long.

There is a particular kind of grief that comes when we realise that we have spent years holding onto what a relationship could be, rather than what it actually was. We can grieve the love we imagined, the family we envisioned, the future we kept hoping would arrive. Sometimes we aren’t only grieving a person. We are grieving a possibility.

And somewhere within that grief can come another realisation: I had become so focused on someone else’s comfort, timeline, needs and expectations that I stopped asking what was right for me.

That realisation can bring anger. It can bring sadness. It can even bring the painful question, “How could I have allowed this?”

But perhaps self-forgiveness begins when we stop using that question to punish ourselves. We were making decisions with the awareness, strength and understanding we had at the time. We may have stayed because we hoped. We may have tolerated because we loved. We may have kept trying because we believed things could change.

And perhaps now the work is not about rewriting the past.

Perhaps the work is about discovering ourselves again.

What does love actually mean to me? What does respect look like? What are my standards for connection? Where did I lose my voice? Where did I begin putting someone else’s comfort before my own? And perhaps the deepest question of all:

Who am I when my relationship is no longer the centre of my identity?

Healing does not always begin when someone else finally understands what they did to us. Sometimes it begins when we finally begin to understand what happened to us — and what we need from ourselves now.

And that is where the real work begins.

If something in this reflection feels deeply familiar, perhaps there is more beneath the surface that deserves to be explored.

This gives us a gentle session hook without selling the session. The reader is left with questions rather than answers — which is exactly where therapeutic curiosity can begin. ❤️