The Importance of Forgiveness

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New research shows how harboring resentment is bad for your health.

Lasting resentment can result in painful feelings and emotional injury.

Research has shown how forgiveness can heal resentment and bring us greater health and peace of mind.

New research reveals how harboring resentment can undermine our health, leading to chronic stress, inflammation, and many serious diseases (Aghakhani and colleagues, 2026). Yet research also shows how forgiveness can relieve these effects, leading to greater peace of mind, recovery, and renewal (Almeida and Cunha, 2025).

The negative effects of resentment. A recent study on resentment and forgiveness in older adults (Almeida and Cunha, 2025) found that when painful feelings are not processed, we may feel lasting resentment, continued pain, dysfunction, and emotional injury. Resentment from old hurtful experiences can stay with us for years, buried deep in our memory. What the researchers call “lasting, ruinous, painful resentment” can produce a range of emotions from aggression to apathy that can block us from meeting our fundamental needs and undermine our relationships (Almeida and Cunha, p. 1191). We can feel unsafe, victimized, caught up in chronic survival mode as our amygdala, the brain’s alarm center, continually sends messages of threat throughout our bodies (Van Der Kolk, 2015). Then, if we’re triggered by some current event, active resentment and anger can emerge, further compromising our immune systems (vanOyen Witvliet and colleagues, 2001).

In a revealing Dutch study, when participants were asked to recall hurtful memories and old grievances, they experienced heightened........

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