17 | Stop Trying to Forgive: What Psilocybin and Grief Teach About Letting Go
~10 MINS READ
WHAT BETRAYAL TRAUMA DOES TO THE BODY, WHY GRIEF COMES BEFORE RELEASE, AND WHAT PSILOCYBIN RESEARCH REVEALS ABOUT THE SELF-COMPASSION THAT MAKES FORGIVENESS POSSIBLE.
There is a kind of stillness that follows betrayal.
Not peace. Not calm.
The stillness of the body deciding whether it is safe to keep living with the heart open.
If you've been there, and if you're reading this, I suspect you have, you know what I mean. The moment when the story you've been living inside cracks down the center and you realize: the person I trusted most just taught me something I never wanted to learn. Whether the betrayal was infidelity, deception, or the slow erosion of trust by someone you loved, the wound cuts to the same place: the part of you that believed you were safe.
This post is for the people standing in that crack. Not to rush you through forgiveness, but to walk with you through what healing after betrayal actually asks, from the biology of betrayal trauma to the grief work most people skip, to what psilocybin-assisted therapy and MDMA research are teaching us about letting go.
Betrayal Trauma: The Body Remembers What the Mind Tries to Manage
Before we talk about forgiveness, we need to talk about what betrayal does to the nervous system.
It doesn't just hurt your feelings. It reorganizes your biology. Researchers call this betrayal trauma, the specific injury that occurs when trust is violated by an attachment figure, someone your survival instinct told you was safe. The person you had trusted to be there for you becomes associated with threat, and the body does what it was designed to do: brace, scan, protect. The mind runs its movie on repeat. Acute anxiety takes root. You find yourself searching for the moment you should have known.
Johns Hopkins researchers have found that unforgiveness correlates with higher blood pressure, increased anxiety, disrupted sleep, and elevated stress hormones. The body keeps bracing, as if the betrayal is still happening. Because for the nervous system, it is.
This is not weakness. This is biology.
“I am not what happened to me. I am what I choose to become.”
What Forgiveness Actually Is (And What It Isn't)
If you're trying to figure out how to forgive after betrayal, these are the core distinctions that changed my understanding:
Repair is a relational process. It requires truth, accountability, transparency, and changed behavior from the person who caused harm.
Forgiveness is an inner process. It's the releasing of ongoing hatred and rumination. The return of your own agency. The moment you stop letting the injury author your future.
These are not the same thing. And confusing them is where most people get stuck. The conscious choice, "I will not retaliate, I will not let this chain me," can happen early. The body actually releasing its grip takes its own sweet time. Like the desert after a long drought, the first rain doesn't make everything bloom. The soil has to remember how to receive.
And here's what forgiveness is not:
It’s not excusing what happened or minimizing the damage done
It’s not forgetting, as though the betrayal can be erased from memory
It’s not automatic reconciliation or returning to the relationship as it was
It’s not restoring trust without evidence that trust has been rebuilt through changed behavior
It’s not "being the bigger person" at the cost of your own wholeness and safety
It’s not spiritual bypassing, using prayer, meditation, or ceremony to skip over anger and grief
Viktor Frankl wrote that between stimulus and response, there is a space, and in that space lies our power to choose. Forgiveness lives in that space. But so does discernment.
Forgiveness is not a surrender of dignity. It is a reclaiming of life.
Why You Can't Forgive Yet: Grief Comes First
The people I work with have taught me this again and again: many can't forgive because they're trying to forgive instead of grieving.
Grief is the honest accounting of what was lost. Not just the relationship as it was, but the future you believed in. The innocence. The safety. And sometimes the hardest grief of all: trust in your own perception. "How did I not see it?"
If that grief goes unprocessed, forgiveness becomes impossible or performative. This is why so many people struggling to heal after infidelity feel stuck: they're trying to skip the grief and jump straight to release.
I wrote about this more fully in the grief series (Grief and the Path Back to Ourselves, Part 1 and Part 2). The essential teaching: grief is the doorway forgiveness walks through. Not around. Through.
A woman I walk with named it perfectly: "I kept trying to forgive him. Praying about it, journaling about it, meditating on it. Nothing moved. Then one day I stopped trying to forgive and just let myself cry about what I'd actually lost. That's when something shifted."
She wasn't doing forgiveness wrong. She was doing it out of order.
If you're stuck in forgiveness, you may not need more willpower. You may need permission to grieve.
A simple practice, if you're willing. Ten minutes with a pen:
What did I lose?
And then, more gently: What part of me still hopes it wasn't true?
What I Thought Was the Hardest Forgiveness of My Life
Years ago, I learned of my then-wife's infidelity. The ground moved. The story cracked. In time, I came to see my own contribution clearly, the ways I had been absent, the patterns I brought into the marriage that made it easier to leave than to stay. I did the work, grieved, raged, and eventually found something I could honestly call forgiveness. Not quickly. Not cleanly. But real.
I thought that was the hardest forgiveness I'd ever face. I was wrong.
Years later came a different betrayal: the experience of having reality itself distorted in legal proceedings, and watching that distortion separate me from the people I love most in this world, my children. I won't say more than that. I know I carried patterns into that chapter too, and I own what was mine. But the forgiveness required when you lose daily contact with your kids, when the distance is not your choice, is a forgiveness I am still in the middle of.
The hatred I sometimes feel costs me. It doesn't bring my kids closer. It keeps my nervous system in a war with no end. So every day, I practice. Because my children deserve a father whose heart is not hardened by what happened.
And then came the forgiveness I wasn't expecting. Somewhere in all that grief, I had to face the truth that the person I was most disappointed in was myself. Not for being betrayed. For the ways I hadn't shown up as the man I knew I could be. For the moments, I chose reactivity over presence. For the times I could have loved more unconditionally, led with compassion instead of defense. A veteran I walk with once said, "I keep punishing myself for not seeing the ambush. But nobody sees the ambush. That's why it's an ambush." I've written about the weight veterans carry in War After War: A Veteran's Battle to Heal. That pattern of self-punishment is one of the deepest currents in this work.
That quiet reckoning has been the most transformative forgiveness of all. It freed me from the myth that I was only a victim. It returned me to agency, to the person who chooses, every morning, to love across distance and keep his heart open. I wrote about what that kind of starting over asks of us in Beginning Again: The Practice of Presence Over Performance. And it gave me something I didn't expect: the capacity to be present with my children without bitterness leaking into the room.
This is why I write about forgiveness as someone still walking through the fire, not yet standing on the other side.
Self-forgiveness is how the betrayed stops betraying themselves.
What the Myths Knew Before the Research
The Greeks understood this. Consider Hephaestus and Aphrodite. The god of the forge discovers his wife's affair with Ares, god of war. He rages. Builds an unbreakable golden net, traps the lovers, drags them before the gods for public humiliation.
And then he lets them go.
Not because the betrayal didn't matter. But because carrying the net, maintaining the trap, was its own form of imprisonment. That's the teaching: forgiveness is not the absence of fury. It's the moment you realize the golden trap you built to hold your betrayer is also holding you.
“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”
What Nature Already Knows
In fire ecology, certain seeds can only germinate in the presence of extreme heat. The lodgepole pine produces cones that remain sealed for decades, waiting for fire. Without destruction, new growth is biologically impossible.
The forest doesn't "forgive" the fire. But it integrates the damage. The ash becomes nutrient. The cleared canopy lets light reach the floor for the first time in generations. What looked like devastation becomes the most fertile ground in the ecosystem.
I've seen this in the people I walk with. The betrayal that burned everything down becomes, with time and tending, the ground from which something truer grows.
The most fertile soil often comes from what was burned.
What the Traditions Teach
I explored my own relationship with faith in Beyond Belief: Psychedelics and the Post-Religious Spiritual Path. When it comes to forgiveness, two images from the traditions have stayed with me longest.
In Buddhism, resentment is grasping a hot coal you intend to throw at someone else. You're the one burning. The teaching isn't "be nice." It's "notice what you're holding and what it's doing to your hand." In Christianity, forgiveness is releasing a debt: choosing to stop collecting, because the cost of collection has become greater than the debt itself. Anyone who has spent years replaying a betrayal, rehearsing the confrontation, building the case, knows exactly what that cost feels like.
What every tradition agrees on: hatred binds the one who carries it. Forgiveness restores the heart's freedom. And forgiveness is entirely compatible with boundaries, justice, and the refusal to be harmed again.
The Shadow Side: When "Forgiveness" – and Even Psychedelics – Do More Harm Than Good
Some of the deepest wounds I've witnessed have come not from the original betrayal but from the pressure to forgive. Premature forgiveness, forgiving to stop the pain or keep the attachment intact, isn't healing. It's another form of survival. Coerced forgiveness, "If you were really spiritual, you'd let it go," does extraordinary damage wrapped in the language of growth.
I know spiritual bypassing from the inside. In my Silicon Valley years, I was cramming ceremonies between corporate workdays, using sacrament as a crutch rather than a catalyst. The mushroom can open a door, but it won't carry your grief for you.
Is my forgiveness making me freer and more truthful, or smaller and quieter?
Real forgiveness expands you. False forgiveness shrinks you. Trust the difference.
“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
Psilocybin, MDMA, and Forgiveness: What the Clinical Research Shows
In a clinical trial of psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy for alcohol use disorder at NYU, published in Frontiers in Pharmacology (Bogenschutz et al., 2018), researchers found that participants' pivotal experiences centered on feelings of forgiveness, self-compassion, and love. A qualitative follow-up in Psychology of Addictive Behaviors (Agin-Liebes et al., 2024) found psilocybin promoted self-compassion, interconnectedness, and the capacity to forgive. One participant said: "I received a really strong instruction: stay open-hearted."
A Phase 3 MDMA trial published in Nature Medicine (Mitchell et al., 2021) found that 71% of participants no longer met PTSD criteria. A 2025 study demonstrated that self-compassion fully mediated MDMA's therapeutic effects. Dr. Rachel Yehuda at Mount Sinai described it this way: MDMA helps trauma survivors become "less self-critical and fearful, and more open and forgiving toward themselves."
What the sacrament teaches isn't "forgive because it's spiritual." It's more visceral:
Holding hatred is heavy. Reality is larger than the betrayal. Your identity is not the wound. You can release without returning to danger.
These insights emerge most reliably within structured containers: proper preparation, integration support, and a guide who has done his (or her) own work. I wrote about this in Psychedelic Preparation: The Work That Begins Before Ceremony and Choosing a Psychedelic Guide: Questions Your Life Depends On. If you're curious about how this path began for me, My Psychedelic Journey is where I tell that story.
The Sentence That Brings You Home
Forgiveness comes down to something almost unbearably simple…
“Forgiveness is the moment you stop asking the past for permission to live.”
I'm still learning this. In my own life, in my own relationships, in the miles I travel to stay present and devoted to my children. But love, imperfect, tested, verb-not-noun love, is still the most reliable compass I've found.
How to Start Healing: A Simple Path Forward
Stabilize. Get your nervous system somewhere it can breathe. A walk. A thinking partner. A body of water.
Grieve. Tell the truth about what was lost. The future you imagined, the innocence, the trust in your own judgment. Don't skip this.
Release. When the time is right, and only you will know when, set down the weight. Not for their sake. For yours.
If this post may support someone you know, I'd be grateful if you shared it.
And if you're walking through your own fire and want a guide who's been in it, let's talk.
From my Heart to yours,
Yeshua Adonai
Psychedelic Guide
aboutyeshua.com
Yeshua is a psychedelic guide based in Portland, Maine, and Phoenix, Arizona. U.S. Marine combat veteran and former diplomat, he has spent two decades exploring contemplative traditions across the world and learning to trust his own experience along the way.
Frequently Asked Questions About Forgiveness After Betrayal
-
Forgiveness isn't a moral obligation. It's an option for liberation. Most people find that carrying unforgiveness indefinitely extracts a cost, physically, emotionally, spiritually, but the timeline is yours. No one else gets to set it.
-
Absolutely. Forgiveness and reconciliation are separate processes. You can release the grip of hatred and still choose not to stay. Boundaries are not the opposite of forgiveness. They're often what makes forgiveness possible.
-
You may need grief work, not forgiveness work. Many people get stuck because they're trying to release something they haven't fully named or mourned. Start with the grief practices above and see what moves.
-
You don't have to stop being angry to begin forgiving. Decisional forgiveness, the choice to stop letting the betrayal run your life, can coexist with anger. Emotional forgiveness, the body releasing its grip, usually comes later and in waves. Anger isn't the opposite of forgiveness. Suppressed anger is.
-
In structured settings with proper preparation and integration support, psilocybin and MDMA have shown promise in increasing the self-compassion and psychological flexibility that forgiveness requires. But sacrament is not a shortcut. I wrote about this in Psychedelic Preparation. The sacrament opens a door. You still walk through it.
-
As long as it takes. Decisional forgiveness can happen relatively quickly. Emotional forgiveness often takes months or years. Both are real. Both matter. And the process is rarely linear; you may forgive on Tuesday and rage on Wednesday. That's not failure. That's how humans heal.
-
Self-forgiveness is not letting yourself off the hook. It's accountability without lifelong punishment. It means releasing the fantasy that you "should have known" or "should have been different." Sometimes the deepest forgiveness is for the gap between who you are at your best and who you were in your hardest season. That gap doesn't make you a fraud. It makes you human.
-
Forgiveness after infidelity, when you’re choosing to stay, involves both inner healing and relational repair. What matters most are consistent patterns over time: transparency, accountability, changed behavior, and emotional attunement from the partner who caused harm. Trust is rebuilt through repeated actions, not words alone. Forgiveness without repair becomes self abandonment. And the betrayed partner gets to move at their own pace.