Forgiveness After Suicide Loss: Three Directions You May Explore

The idea of forgiveness comes up in our support group at SOS Madison the way it often does. Quietly, through something someone else says. Over the years I have heard versions of the idea of forgiveness spoken several different ways. Someone looks up and says they think they need to forgive the person they lost, but they are not sure how they are supposed to feel. Many of the survivors don’t know how to process those words.

As a suicide loss survivor and suicide loss facilitator who has sat with the loss of our son to suicide since 2009, I have heard that idea many times. Forgiveness after suicide loss does not generally announce itself. It arrives unexpected, when no one was looking for it. It is not a simple thing, and it does not arrive on a schedule.

If the word “forgiveness” made your stomach tighten the moment you read the title of this post, that reaction makes complete sense. The guilt, the anger, the grief itself. Any of those can make the idea of forgiveness feel impossible right now, maybe even offensive. That is not a failure on your part. That is a grief response doing exactly what it is built to do.

Your guilt, blame, and anger are protecting something, whether that is a standard of accountability or the sheer unfairness of what happened. There is meaning in that, even while it also causes pain.

If you are in crisis right now, please call or text 988 for the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. They are available around the clock, and reaching out is not a detour from this work. It is the most important first step.

Why Forgiveness After Suicide Loss Moves Differently Than Other Grief

For many survivors, the first response to this kind of loss is not forgiveness. It is blame. The mind searches for a cause it can blame and a direction it can point the anger at, because a loss this formless is unfathomable to hold on to. That instinct is not wrong, and our post on blame after suicide loss goes into why that happens and what it is doing for you.

Forgiveness tends to live further down that same road, sometimes after blame has had its say for a while.

Suicide grief carries a complexity that other kinds of loss do not. Guilt, shame, the relentless search for why, a sense of having been left behind without warning. Suicide loss researcher Dr. Jack Jordan has spent decades studying what actually distinguishes suicide bereavement from other kinds of grief, and this group of feelings is a large part of what he found. These are not just strong emotions passing through. They are the specific issues associated with surviving a suicide loss , and most of them are pointing fingers. At you. At others. At the person who is gone.

That is where forgiveness enters, if and when it does. Not as a cure, and not a destination you owe anyone. Some survivors describe finding themselves drawn toward it, years into their grief, as a way of putting down what they have been carrying.

One research finding is worth mentioning, not to pressure you, but because it says something important. A 2020 study in Frontiers in Psychiatry found that suicide loss survivors with low levels of self-forgiveness showed the highest rates of depression and suicidal thinking of any bereaved group studied, including people grieving sudden and expected deaths from other causes. That is not a measure of your character. It reflects how hard suicide loss grief is, and how much self-forgiveness matters inside it.

If that sentence describes where you are right now, 988 is there, day or night.

Before going further, it is worth being explicit about what forgiveness is not. It is not reconciliation. It is not forgetting what happened. It is not deciding the death was acceptable or that the pain it caused was fair. On the blog I have written before about forgiveness as a loosening rather than excusing, and that distinction holds throughout everything I say below. Loosening your grip on something is not the same as saying it never should have hurt you.

Forgiveness after suicide loss, when it becomes something that you are up to exploring, tends to move in three separate directions.

• Forgiving yourself
• Forgiving others
• Forgiving the person you lost.

If You Are Not Ready, That May Be the Grief Talking

I want to touch base with you for a moment, because skipping past this would be unfair.

For many survivors, especially in the early years, forgiveness is not just unreachable. It can feel like a betrayal, or like letting someone off a hook they should never leave. Those feelings are real and deserve to be taken seriously rather than rushed past.

I have sat in group meetings at SOS Madison with survivors for seventeen years and there are those who were still nowhere near a place where forgiveness felt possible, and some of them never fully arrived at it in the traditional sense. They still found ways to live, to care for the people around them, and to carry the person they lost with real dignity. Forgiveness is not a requirement for healing. It is one possible thread in a much larger fabric of healing.

If reading this is stirring something heavy in you right now, that is worth taking a serious look at rather than ignoring it. A useful question to sit with, not to act on, just to sit with, is whether the anger or blame you carry has shifted from something that protects you into something that consumes you. Protection looks like a standard you are holding. Consumption looks like a loop that keeps taking more of your life without giving anything back. One small, practical way to test that for yourself is to notice, just for a week, whether thinking about it leaves you feeling steadier or more depleted afterward. Our post on roadblocks to healing after a suicide loss walks through several patterns like this one, including self-blame and avoidance, if this question feels worth sitting with longer. Even more importantly, it is a good topic to bring up with your suicide loss clinician.

There is no pressure here. Whenever you arrive at a moment where even gentle exploration of forgiveness feels possible, this post will still be here. You have not missed anything.

Forgiving Yourself for What You Did or Did Not Do

This is the direction many survivors attempt first, and for a lot of us, it is the most persistent.

What survivors carry is rarely the dramatic failure they imagine from the outside. It is the ordinary moments. A last conversation that ended badly or too quickly. A text that went unanswered because life got in the way that particular afternoon. A warning sign that only became visible in hindsight. An appointment that got rescheduled.

Psychologists call one part of this pattern hindsight bias, the mind’s tendency to look back at ambiguous signals and reframe them as obvious warnings after the fact. After a suicide loss, hindsight bias works against survivors relentlessly, turning ordinary moments into what feels like missed opportunities. Our post on hindsight bias and the pain of “could have known” walks through this pattern in more depth, along with a practical exercise for challenging it.

Why does self-forgiveness feel so much harder after a suicide loss?

Because the mind keeps searching for the one moment that would have changed everything, and suicide loss gives that search endless material to work with. Alliance of Hope’s resource on guilt, blame, and forgiveness says it simply. Many survivors come to understand, given enough time, that they made decisions with the information they actually had, not the information hindsight later supplied. You were not required to be all-knowing.

There is a real distinction worth holding onto here. Self-forgiveness after a suicide loss does not mean deciding nothing went wrong. It means gradually releasing the belief that you were the deciding factor in a death driven by pain you could not fully see and could not fully stop. I wrote a post on guilt versus responsibility that goes further into why those two things are not the same, even though grief insists they are. And the post on moving beyond guilt is a good next stop if this direction feels like the heaviest one for you right now.

For a structured, practical companion piece on this specific grief work, What’s Your Grief has written twelve concrete tips for self-forgiveness in grief that pair well with what is written here, even though their focus is grief broadly rather than suicide loss specifically.

Forgiving Others for What They Did or Did Not Do

This direction gets far less attention in grief writing than it deserves, but it takes up real space at our support group meetings. It is often something that is hard to even grasp how to approach.

The list of people some survivors carry is longer than many survivors admit out loud. For example, A clinician who missed something that looks obvious in retrospect. A family member who knew something and stayed quiet. A friend who disappeared right when it mattered most. A hospital that sent someone home when staying seemed like the safer call. For some survivors, there is also anger at a higher power, or at the world in general, for allowing this to happen at all.

Forgiving others does not mean deciding their actions were acceptable. It means choosing, in your own time, how much of your future they continue to occupy. You are not required to decide the missed diagnosis was forgivable in some objective sense. You are deciding whether that person still gets to run part of your life from a distance.

There is also a second group worth including here as well, the people who failed you after the death rather than before it. The ones who disappeared, or said something clumsy and genuinely painful, or avoided you entirely because they had no idea how to hold something this large. Many of those fractures were not cruelty. They were people who simply did not know what to do with grief this difficult and stepped back instead of stepping in. That does not make the absence hurt less, but it can, over time, change how much weight you decide to keep carrying about it. If working through this direction with professional support appeals to you, our practical guide to finding a grief counselor covers what to look for in someone equipped to hold this specific kind of anger.

Forgiving the Person You Lost

This is the direction many survivors are afraid to even acknowledge to themselves, and often the one that takes the longest to approach.

Anger at the person who died is real, common, and almost never discussed openly, because it can feel like a betrayal of someone who is no longer here to explain themselves. Many survivors in our group have described feeling both a closeness to that person that words barely hold and a genuine fury at them, at the exact same time. Both feelings are true. That is part of what makes this particular loss so hard to sit inside.

The anger, when looked at honestly, usually carries several layers at once. Anger at being left behind. Anger at what the death forces on everyone who remains, the unanswered questions, the futures that shifted because of one irreversible act. Anger at the secrecy or the silence, at not getting a chance to say what needed saying.

Dr. Jordan’s research identifies transforming your relationship with the person who died as one of seven distinct tasks survivors work through toward psychological integration after this kind of loss, and forgiving the person you lost sits squarely inside that task. It does not mean approving of what happened. It means slowly rebuilding a relationship with someone who is no longer here to keep building it with you.

What has helped some of the survivors I have walked alongside is arriving, gradually and often over years, at an understanding that their person’s brain betrayed them. The thinking that drove them toward suicide was not free, clear-headed reasoning. It was thinking shaped by pain that had become unbearable, narrowed down to a state that had closed off its own exits. For people who reach some measure of peace in this direction, the anger does not disappear. It shifts, from believing the person chose this and did not care, toward grieving someone who could not find a way out of something that had overtaken them.

You are not required to get to this direction. Nothing about your devotion is in question if this direction stays closed for you. But for some people, at some point, something does shift. They find themselves grieving a person again instead of fighting one.

None of this assumes the relationship was uncomplicated before the death. If the person you lost also caused you real harm while they were alive, the anger you carry may not be only about the loss itself, and it deserves a different, more careful kind of attention than what is described here. That work is real and important. It is simply not the same work.

Does Forgiveness Actually Help?

This is the honest question sitting underneath everything above.

For many survivors, yes. But the same research that supports that answer is equally clear that this is not a linear process, and it does not respond to pressure or a sense of obligation. Forced self-forgiveness is not really self-forgiveness. It is performance, and grief tends to know the difference.

A 2020 case study in the journal Social Sciences on forgiveness postvention with a suicide loss survivor documented something researchers called a cascade effect in that survivor’s process. Working through forgiveness in one direction seemed to make it more accessible in the others. It is one case, not a broad finding, but it matches what I have seen more than once in our group. Working on forgiving yourself does not always stay contained to that single direction. It can open something else, quietly, without anyone deciding to make that happen.

Among the suicide loss survivors I have sat with over seventeen years, forgiveness rarely shows up as a single decision. It shows up as something smaller. A day when the replaying slows down a little. A week where the question of what you did wrong comes up less often. A moment where you remember the person you lost for who they were before the loss became the whole story.

There is no fixed timeline for any of this, and whatever your own pace looks like, it is not evidence of you doing anything wrong. As a rough observation, some survivors find the second or third year is when this grief work first becomes thinkable, not necessarily something to act on yet, but something that no longer feels impossible to consider. For others it arrives sooner, or much later, or in waves that come closer and then pull back again. That movement is not failure. It is simply how grief tends to work.

For some survivors, faith plays a real part in this process, whether through prayer, a faith community, or a tradition of forgiveness they were raised with. For others, this loss fractured that relationship, and the word forgiveness carries a weight they are not ready to pick back up. Both experiences are held here without judgment, and neither one is a requirement for the work above.

If you are also looking for in-person peer support alongside this, AFSP’s support group finder connects survivors with local groups meeting near them. And if you are not sure if a grief counselor can help, you might want to explore the post on the issues facing suicide loss survivors.

You Get to Approach This on Your Own Terms

If forgiveness feels completely out of reach as you finish reading this, nothing here is asking you to change that today.

This was never a post about what you must do, or a timeline you need to hit before you are allowed to move forward. It is a post about something many survivors eventually find themselves considering, often when they were not looking for it, in their own time.

When Teri and I lost our son John on Good Friday 2009, he was seventeen years old. We have been sitting with forgiveness, in all three of its directions, for seventeen years now. It did not arrive fully formed, and it did not arrive all at once. Some of it is still very much a work in progress. What I can tell you honestly is that carrying the anger and the guilt without ever looking at them directly was heavier than the slow work of beginning to look.

John is not defined by how he died. That is, sadly, just how he died. Who he was, what he meant to us, the way he made people laugh, still belongs to us. It always will.

Whatever forgiveness looks like for you, if it arrives, and in whatever direction it takes, I hope you get to feel the weight of it lift, even a little. When you are ready, this will still be here.

And if you are not ready, we are still here too. You are not alone.

Posts You May Also Like

• Moving Beyond Guilt: A Path Toward Healing After Suicide Loss – A deeper look at why survivor guilt feels so permanent and what has helped survivors begin to carry it differently.
• Guilt vs Responsibility After Suicide Loss: You Are Not to Blame – Grounded in suicide crisis syndrome research, this post separates the feeling of guilt from the fact of responsibility, a distinction that underlies most of the self-forgiveness work above.
• Blame After Suicide Loss: Why the Grieving Mind Needs a Target – A close companion to this post, exploring why the mind reaches for someone or something to blame before forgiveness ever becomes possible.
• Failed as a Parent: Guilt You Didn’t Earn After Suicide Loss – For parents specifically working through the self-forgiveness direction, a deeper look at exactly what they’re being asked to forgive themselves for, and why it was never really theirs to control.
• Understanding Anger and Conflicted Emotions in Suicide Loss – Explores how anger and deep care for the person who died can coexist, a companion to the third direction of forgiveness explored here.
• Finding Sunshine and Forgiveness – A shorter, personal reflection on forgiveness as loosening rather than excusing, closing with a survivor-written poem about a double loss.

PRINTABLE GUIDE PDF

A two-page PDF guide has been generated for survivors to print, save, or share.