09 Mar 2026

Unforgiveness, if left unchecked can isolate individuals, harden once-tender hearts and turn self-protection into rigid walls rather than healthy boundaries.

This was said by television producer for Corporate Sustainability Reporting Show, sustainability reporter, healing advocate and Re Imetswe project coordinator, Ms Thabiso Phaphe recently. Ms Phaphe defined forgiveness not as a spoken declaration but as an internal decision.

“Sometimes forgiveness is not saying, I forgive you. Sometimes it is saying, you no longer get to live in my nervous system and dictate how I show up in life,” she shared.

She therefore challenged conventional narratives and urged all to reconsider what it truly meant to let go. According to Ms Phaphe, when pain went unaddressed, it quietly embedded itself in everyday interactions, often without conscious awareness. While acknowledging that anger was a natural human emotion, she warned that bitterness was corrosive.

“Bitterness raises your emotional volume but quietly diminishes your influence,” she explained, highlighting the irony that the person who refused to forgive may be moving forward freely, while the offended party remained emotionally entangled.

Speaking candidly about her own journey as an empath who naturally absorbs the emotions of others, Ms Phaphe revealed that she once equated forgiveness with automatic reconciliation. Growth, she said, taught her a crucial distinction that forgiveness did not require enduring abuse or tolerating repeated harm.

In some situations, she emphasised, forgiveness and reconciliation were not synonymous, adding that it was possible to forgive without restoring proximity to release resentment while choosing distance, to forgive while limiting access, and to extend grace without reopening doors to harm.

“The focus is not restoring proximity. It is restoring peace,” she said. BOPA