4 Reasons God Won’t Let You Forget How They Hurt You

You’ve forgiven them. You’ve tried to move on. And you’ve let a significant amount of time pass. But for some reason, you still feel an immense wave of pain when you remember how that person hurt you.

Maybe you thought they were the one because they told you they loved you. But then they suddenly broke up with you and started dating someone else. Or maybe you had strong feelings for this person, but when you opened up, they rejected you harshly. Or maybe you two had a violent verbal argument where they said incredibly cruel things to you.

You want to forget the pain and move on, but for some reason you can’t. What is God doing?

Here are 4 possible reasons you can’t seem to forget how this person hurt you in the past.

1. You Might Still Remember the Wrongs Because Forgetting Is Not a Part of Forgiving When You’re Human

We’ve all heard the saying, “forgive and forget.” It sounds right, but when applied to humans, it’s really not possible. Whenever the Bible talks about forgiving and forgetting, it always refers to God:

• Isaiah 43:25, “I, I am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins.”
• Jeremiah 31:34, “And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”
• Psalm 103:12, “. . . as far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us.”

While God does “forget” our sins, even he doesn’t erase the memory of them completely. For example, Scripture is also clear that while we are forgiven so that we can be pure forever through Christ (1 Corinthians 1:30-31), we will also be judged for the good and bad we did (2 Corinthians 5:10). How could God judge us if there were no past evidence of our wrong?

Thus, these verses are best understood as “anthropomorphisms,” which is when God is referred to with human features to help us understand him who is beyond full human understanding. So really, when God says that he won’t remember our sins anymore, he’s really saying he will never hold our sins against us again and allow them to hurt our relationship with him. God’s “forgetting” means he will never use our sins against us again.

So while we can never fully erase the memory of someone’s sins against us, we can seek to be like God in not holding those sins against that person anymore because we have truly forgiven them (Ephesians 4:32-5:1).

In time, as we continue to forgive, this does also begin to lessen the pain of those past hurts.

2. You Might Still Remember the Wrongs Because Your Body Will Always Remember the Trauma

When you go through something traumatic, your body keeps a record of it. This is why things in our environment can be triggering. They remind our bodies of something traumatic in the past. The classic example would be a big boom triggering a soldier to have painful flashbacks to his time in war. In a similar way, our bodies will always retain a memory of hurtful things people said or did to us.

Forgiving is a spiritual act, but forgetting is a biological one. While ideally, human forgiveness achieves complete restoration, the memory of the sin will always remain in the bodies and brains of those who were hurt.

Thankfully, however, God can even heal our bodies and brains. While your body and brain may never fully erase the memory of what someone did, when you exercise spiritual forgiveness and your heart begins to heal, your body and brain will get new experiences that can be at the forefront of your mind.

When you remember the hurt in the past, you can also choose to remember the healing that God has already given you and is giving you right now. We can’t erase memories. But we can add new memories that we choose to dwell on more often (Philippians 4:6-9).

Romans 12:21, “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”

3. When You’ve Forgiven Them But Have Not Rejected Their Lies, the Pain Can Remain

Forgiveness is a huge part of healing. However, more steps are often needed to really heal after someone hurt you.

For example, when someone hurts you with their words, it’s not the sounds that hurt – it’s the meaning behind the words. When someone said something cruel, you can forgive them. You can even accept that they didn’t really mean it. Sometimes people do say things they don’t mean.

However, before you can really let it go, you have to make sure you aren’t still believing the lies they spoke over you. Sometimes you can forgive them and accept they didn’t mean it, but you will still feel the pain if you are still living under the lie that they said to you.

Thus, whether they meant their words or not, to really move on and not feel the pain of past hurtful words, you have to choose to reject the lies and believe God’s truth instead.

For example, if someone said you were selfish and unbearable to be around, that would warp how you view yourself if you agreed with those statements. While we are all sinful, we also need to remember we are not our sin (Romans 7:20). Thus, you must say to yourself in prayer, with the Holy Spirit present, “No, in Christ, I am not a selfish person that is unbearable to be around. God has made me new in Jesus to be selfless. I’m fearfully and wonderfully made.”

When you break agreements with the messages that came through the hurts in your past, that’s often when you can really move forward and let go of the pain.

4. God Won’t Let the Pain Pass Too Quickly Because It Can Be Used to Train and Transform Us

While we should never blame ourselves for other people’s sins against us, there are often lessons to learn from hurtful past experiences.

Maybe you got mixed up with an unbeliever who ended up really hurting you. Maybe there were red flags from this new believer you were dating, but you chose to ignore them. Or maybe all your family and friends were trying to warn you, but you didn’t listen.

While God always wants to teach us lessons without pain when possible, he will never waste the pain that does come into our lives (2 Corinthians 12:7-10). Sometimes we are unable to learn a lesson until we go through something painful (Luke 15:24).

Psalm 119:67, “Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I keep your word.” When we make a bad choice that leaves us open to getting hurt, sometimes God will not remove the pain too quickly because he will use it to train us and transform us so we never have to experience those types of hurts again.

Hebrews 12:11, “For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.”