How to Forgive a Parent Who Abandoned You

Forgiving a parent who left begins with a decision you make long before you feel anything: you stop trying to collect the debt yourself, and you hand the collecting of it to God. That is not the same as saying it was small, and it is not the same as letting them back into your life. Those are three separate questions, and treating them as one is why most people stall for years.

Is forgiving my parent the same as letting them back in?

No. Forgiveness is something you can do alone in a car in a parking lot. Reconciliation takes two people, one of whom has to tell the truth about what they did. Scripture never promises you the second.

About the first, Christians disagree honestly, and you should know that before someone quotes a verse at you. One side reads Luke 17, where Jesus ties forgiving to a brother who repents, and concludes that what you owe an unrepentant parent is a settled willingness rather than a finished transaction. The other side points at Stephen, praying for the men who were stoning him, and says the release is handed over whether or not it is ever asked for. Serious people hold both. What neither side allows is the position most of us actually live in, where the grudge is kept warm and called patience.

Paul puts the release in transactional language, which is helpful, because abandonment really is a debt. Missed birthdays. Money that never came. A childhood you covered for in front of your friends.

Don’t seek revenge yourselves, beloved, but give place to God’s wrath. For it is written, “Vengeance belongs to me; I will repay, says the Lord.”
Romans 12:19 (WEB)

Notice what that verse assumes. It assumes there is something to repay. It does not tell you the wrong was imaginary or that you have been dramatic about it. It tells you the case is real, and it is being moved to a court you do not sit in. Giving place to God’s wrath is not swallowing the anger. It is putting it down somewhere it will actually be dealt with.

Which means you can forgive a parent and still not answer the phone. You can forgive and keep them away from your children. If a parent is violent, or actively using, or the contact leaves you unable to function for days, distance is not unforgiveness. It is wisdom. In the United States, if any contact involves threats or violence, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233.

What did Joseph do when the family who threw him away came back?

Joseph is the closest thing Scripture gives us to this exact situation, and the details matter more than the moral. His brothers put him in a pit and sold him at seventeen. He spent the next two decades in a foreign country, part of it in prison. When they finally stood in front of him, he did not deliver a speech. He wept, more than once, loudly enough that the household heard him.

Then, at the very end of Genesis, when their father is dead and the brothers are certain the reckoning has finally come, he says this:

As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save many people alive.
Genesis 50:20 (WEB)

Read the first half again. You meant evil against me. He does not soften it, revise it, or find a reason it was really fine. Forgiveness here is not amnesia. It is naming the act correctly and then declining to be the one who settles it. A verse earlier he asks his brothers, “am I in the place of God?” That is the same move Paul makes in Romans. Joseph steps out of the judge’s seat, not out of the truth.

One honest caution about this story. It ends with a reunion because the brothers came back, changed, and asked. Your parent may never do any of that. Many do not. Joseph’s ending is a description of what God did in one family, not a guarantee about yours, and reading it as a promise sets you up to feel cheated.

What if I say the words and feel nothing?

Then you are normal, and you are not finished. Feeling follows the decision by months, sometimes years, and it does not travel in a straight line. You will think it is done, and then a school play with nobody in the second row for you, or your own child turning the age you were when they left, will open the whole thing again.

Peter asked how many times he had to keep doing this. He suggested seven, which he probably thought was generous.

I don’t tell you until seven times, but, until seventy times seven.
Matthew 18:22 (WEB)

We tend to hear that as a tally spread over a lifetime of different people. For a lot of people it is one person and one wound, forgiven again on a Tuesday because it came back on Monday. That repetition is not evidence that the first time failed. Jesus picked a number nobody would sit down and count to, which is the whole point of picking it.

What does Scripture not promise about this?

It does not promise your parent will repent, apologize, or explain. It does not promise you will ever hear why they left. It does not promise the relationship will be restored, or that your own parenting will come easily, or that the ache stops. People who tell you forgiveness makes the ache stop are describing something they read, not something they did.

What it does say is narrower and better:

When my father and my mother forsake me, then Yahweh will take me up.
Psalm 27:10 (WEB)

David does not say the forsaking stops mattering. He says there is someone underneath it. Take me up is not a line about feelings. It is the language of someone being picked up off the ground and taken into a house. What you lost is not replaced. You are simply not left on the ground with it.

How do I actually start?

Start by writing the debt down specifically. Not “he wasn’t around,” but the eleventh birthday, the graduation, the phone number that changed without warning. Vague grievances cannot be released because they were never really held. Specific ones can.

Then grieve it as a death, because functionally it is one. Losing a parent who is still alive is a bereavement nobody sends cards for, and skipping the grief in order to get to the forgiveness quickly is the most common way this goes wrong.

Then say the release out loud, by name, in prayer, and put a date on it. Not because God needs the ceremony, but because you will want something to point back to on the days it does not feel true.

And get real help. If you carry childhood trauma, that is a medical matter, and treatment is the right response to it, not a lack of faith. A trauma-trained licensed counselor can do things prayer is not designed to do, and needing one says nothing about your walk with God.

• Your doctor, for a referral to a counselor trained in childhood trauma.
• 988, the US Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, call or text, any hour, if you are thinking about ending your life.
• 1-800-662-4357, SAMHSA, free and confidential, if you have been drinking or using to keep the memories down.
• 1-800-799-7233, the US National Domestic Violence Hotline, if contact with your parent involves threats or violence.

Let all bitterness, wrath, anger, outcry, and slander, be put away from you, with all malice. And be kind to one another, tender hearted, forgiving each other, just as God also in Christ forgave you.
Ephesians 4:31-32 (WEB)

Paul says put the bitterness away, which implies it is currently being carried, and that carrying it is a choice you are making dozens of times a day without noticing. Set it down this morning. Set it down again tonight. Nobody who has done this ever describes it as a single afternoon’s work.