Daily Inspiration Quote by Gerald Jampolsky

“Forgiveness means letting go of the past” is therapy-speak at its most deceptively simple: a clean, portable line that smuggles a whole behavioral program into one sentence. Gerald Jampolsky, a psychologist known for popularizing a gentle, almost spiritual approach to healing, isn’t defining forgiveness as a moral verdict handed down to someone else. He’s reframing it as a practical act of psychological divestment. The target isn’t the offender; it’s the ongoing mental lease you keep renewing on an old injury.

The intent is quietly strategic. “Letting go” sidesteps the courtroom model of forgiveness (who’s guilty, who deserves what) and replaces it with an internal, present-tense skill. That move matters because resentment often survives on narrative repetition: replay, revise, relitigate. Jampolsky’s line implies that the past’s real power is not what happened, but how faithfully we keep it alive. Forgiveness, then, becomes less a gift to the other person than a refusal to keep donating attention, adrenaline, and identity to a moment that’s already over.

The subtext is also a challenge to our culture’s attachment to justified anger. We treat grievances as evidence of seriousness: if you “let go,” you risk looking naive, complicit, or weak. Jampolsky pushes against that by making forgiveness a form of agency. The context here is late-20th-century self-help psychology, where emotional well-being is framed as something you can practice, not just feel. It’s an invitation to trade moral purity for mental freedom - and to accept that healing sometimes looks less like vindication and more like release.