Many of us were taught that forgiveness means excusing harm, reconciling, or ‘being the bigger person.’ We were told it’s about letting someone off the hook — about moral virtue or spiritual maturity. But when you’ve lived through deep hurt, those definitions feel impossible. They can even feel like betrayal. You might think: “If I forgive, I’m saying what happened was okay.” “If I forgive, I’m letting them win.” “If I forgive, I’m abandoning myself.”

There’s a particular emotion that almost every client I work with carries quietly in the background — an emotion that rarely gets named yet shows up loudly in the body. Resentment. It’s one of the most human emotions we have, and yet it’s one of the hardest to acknowledge.

For a long time, I thought purpose was something I had to find; a destination. A title. A role. A sentence I could write neatly on a website or say confidently when someone asked, “So, what do you do?” But purpose — as I’ve learned through my own healing and the work I now do, isn’t a fixed identity. It isn’t a job description or a mission statement. It isn’t even something you ‘discover’ once and then carry forever.