The Fallacy of Forgiveness: The Rage That Heals
- Takia Thompson
- Oct 9
- 5 min read
How many times have you been told to forgive when you were simply naming your fury?
How many times were you told that wanting someone to pay for what they did made you “ungodly”?
How many times did you swallow the scream because someone said, “Take the higher road”—as if the higher road wasn’t paved with our own suffering?
I remember saying it out loud once: I hope they die.
I wanted them to die together in a fiery crash.
I wanted it to hurt. I wanted it to take hours. I wanted them to feel every ounce of what they made me carry.
It wasn’t polite. It wasn’t holy. It was human.
That was the moment I stopped pretending forgiveness was peace.
It was rage that saved me first—rage that told the truth before I could name it.
Rage that burned through the silence of “be the bigger person.”
Rage that made room for the possibility of real release—because what I’d been taught to call forgiveness was nothing more than spiritual bypass dressed in scripture.
They told me to take the higher road.
But what they meant was: suffer quietly so we don’t have to witness what they did to you.
Forgiveness, as I was taught, was never about healing.
It was about keeping everyone else comfortable.
The Fallacy — What Forgiveness Has Become
The Fallacy of Forgiveness is this:
It demands peace before justice.
It insists on performance before truth.
It rebrands silence as virtue.
In the Western and Christianized world, forgiveness has been turned into a moral currency—something that proves your goodness more than it supports your healing.
It tells the harmed to smile through blood.
It tells the body to shut up.
It tells the soul that holiness is found in forgetting.
But this kind of forgiveness doesn’t heal you—it hollows you.
It creates a split between what your mouth says and what your body knows.
And the body always knows.
The body is made to be honest; when it’s forced to lie, it finds ways to tell the truth anyway.
What This Does to the Body
When you are told to forgive before your truth has been spoken, your body carries the debt.
Your jaw locks.
Your shoulders rise.
Your breath becomes shallow.
Your stomach churns, your spine tenses.
The rage you were told to repress doesn’t disappear—it finds a home. It hides in the body until it’s forced out through illness, anxiety, exhaustion, or disconnection.
You start confusing numbness for peace. You start calling quiet holy.
This is what happens when forgiveness is forced: your nervous system learns that survival requires silence.
Rage Was My Teacher
My rage was not quiet. It was explosive. It was alive. It was sacred.
When I spoke my fury, people ran to scripture. They used verses as shields—“forgive seventy times seven”—not to bring peace, but to avoid the truth.
Forgiveness became a tool to keep things tidy.
But my rage made a mess—and that mess was necessary. It was the only way the rot could be revealed.
The truth is this: my rage did not destroy me. It freed me. It burned through the illusions of holiness I had been groomed to uphold. It reminded me that I am allowed to name what was done, to demand accountability, and to feel every degree of the fire that injustice deserves.
Rage as Ancestral Fire
In ancestral knowing, fire is not punishment. It is purification.
It clears the field for new life.
Rage is fire.
It is not evil. It is intelligence.
It is the alarm of the soul that says, “This cannot continue.”
Our foremothers knew how to use heat as medicine—to cauterize wounds, to drive out infection, to mark boundaries. That wisdom still lives in us. When we allow our rage to speak, we are not breaking faith—we are remembering it.
The FRAY path — how this work moves
The path I teach and practice is called FRAY — Forgiveness, Reconciliation, Amplification, Yielding.
It is not a checklist for politeness. It is a map for deep repair.
Forgiveness here means release, not approval. It is the intentional act of letting go of the energetic debt you’ve been forced to carry—after you’ve processed the truth.
Reconciliation is not a return to the abuser. It is the return to yourself—finding the parts that were silenced and welcoming them home.
Amplification is taking up the space your life requires—speaking and creating from the pieces of yourself that were reclaimed.
Yielding is the bearing of fruit—the visible life that grows when the fire has cleared the field.
Important: Forgiveness is not Step One. Forgiveness is the exhale after fire. It cannot be demanded before your body has been heard.
Ritual: Forgiveness for the Hellbound
This is not a ritual of revenge.
It’s a ritual of reclamation.
It’s what I call Forgiveness for the Hellbound—a guided visualization I teach in my coaching containers for Black women ready to release rage in a sacred, embodied way.
The Practice
1. Call the Fire
Sit or stand somewhere safe and undisturbed. Breathe deep until your body begins to settle. Bring to mind the person, institution, or memory that harmed you. Let the image take shape.
2. Speak the Unspoken
Say everything you have swallowed. Every curse. Every wish for their suffering. Every prayer for their ruin. Do not censor yourself. Let the words come through like heat leaving your skin.
3. Witness the Fire
See them standing before you in the flame. You are not powerless—you are witnessing justice in symbolic form. You are no longer the child or the silenced one. You are the witness, the judge, and the one who lives to tell the truth.
4. Release the Ash
When you’ve said what must be said, imagine the fire cooling. The ashes settle into the soil. You can place your hand on your chest or the earth and say:
“I release this debt. I do not carry what they refused to hold.”
5. Cool the Flame
Pour water over your hands, or take a shower, letting the steam rise and wash away the residue. The body knows when the work is done.
After the Fire
When the rage clears, what remains is not bitterness—it’s space.
Space for truth.
Space for rest.
Space for living without pretending.
Forgiveness does not begin the work. Forgiveness completes the work—when you are ready, when the body has spoken, when the truth has been named.
A Closing Reflection
If forgiveness was ever used to silence your pain, you were never the problem.
You were simply too honest for a world that profits from your quiet.
Ask yourself:
What have you been told to forgive before you were ready?
And what might your fire make room for, if you let it burn?
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