Published December 11, 2025 | By Alyx E, Founder of Collectors MD

There’s a hard truth many of us eventually face in recovery: not every wound we caused will be forgiven. Not every person we hurt will want to reopen the door. Not every apology will be accepted—no matter how sincere, how overdue, or how desperately we wish we could rewrite the past.

It’s one of the most painful parts of healing. During addiction—or any period of compulsion—we can act in ways that don’t reflect who we are, who we were, or who we hoped to be. And when the fog finally lifts, the weight of what we did can feel unbearable. We want to make things right. We want to show we’ve changed. We want closure.

But recovery teaches us something both uncomfortable and necessary: closure doesn’t always come from the people we hurt. Sometimes it has to come from within us. You may reach out to apologize—and they may not respond. You may try to make amends—and find the door is firmly closed. You may acknowledge the harm—and still be met with silence or distance.

Sometimes the damage is too deep. Sometimes the trust is gone. Sometimes they’re healing in their own way, and that healing doesn’t include us. And sometimes it’s simply out of our control. What is in our control is how we move forward. How we integrate the lesson. How we transform the guilt into growth instead of punishment.

Sometimes the only closure we get is the closure we create for ourselves—and that has to be enough to keep moving forward.

There are ways to find peace even without reconciliation:

Write the apology you never delivered. Read it aloud. Sit with it. Then burn it or tear it up—not in anger, but as a symbolic letting go of a chapter you can’t rewrite but no longer need to carry.

Pay it forward. If you can’t repair that specific harm, you can honor its lesson by helping someone who is struggling. Your lived experience—your mistakes, your honesty—can become someone else’s lifeline. That is a form of amends too.

Make living amends. Commit to being the person you wished you were back then. Show up with consistency, honesty, restraint, and compassion. Let your daily choices become the apology that will last longer than any words.

Create boundaries with your former self. Look back at the version of you who caused harm with clarity, not shame. You’re not returning to that person—but you’re not pretending they didn’t exist.

Seek forgiveness in community, not just individuals. Sometimes the healing we hope to find from one person is found in many—through shared stories, through accountability, through people who know what it means to rebuild.

In recovery, we learn to accept that we don’t get to decide how others heal. But we do get to decide how we heal. Sometimes closure is granted. Sometimes closure is earned. And sometimes—maybe most importantly—closure is created.

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Even when forgiveness isn’t given back to us, we can still choose to heal forward—one honest step at a time.

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