The reason you haven't forgiven them is not that you lack the faith or the character or the willingness to do the right thing. It's that forgiving them feels like saying what they did was acceptable, like handing them an absolution they haven't asked for and don't deserve, like erasing the truth of the harm with a gesture that benefits them and costs you. And you are not willing to do that. Because what happened was not acceptable. And someone should know that. Someone should hold that.
That resistance makes complete sense given the definition of forgiveness you are working with. The problem is that the definition is wrong, not in a way that makes you foolish for holding it, because it is the most common misunderstanding of forgiveness there is, but wrong in a way that matters enormously for where you go from here.
Forgiveness is not the declaration that what was done was acceptable. It is not the removal of consequences, the restoration of trust, the pretense that the harm didn't happen or wasn't as serious as it was. It is not something you do for the person who hurt you, and it does not require their repentance, their acknowledgment, or their presence. It is something you do for yourself, the release of your right to hold the debt, not because the debt isn't real, but because carrying it has a cost that lands entirely on you while the person who owes it may not even know you're still holding it.
The harm they did is not erased by your forgiveness. The truth of it remains. The consequences, whatever they are or should be, are not yours to remove or assign. What forgiveness releases is not their accountability. It is your attachment to the injury as the defining feature of your interior life. The holding of it, the returning to it, the weight of it, that is what forgiveness sets down. Not the fact that it happened. Not the verdict on whether it was wrong. Just the carrying of it as something you are responsible for resolving. If what is underneath the resistance is something more fundamental, not a misunderstanding of forgiveness but a genuine unwillingness to extend it, because what they did was too serious and they have never acknowledged it, the prayer for when you don't want to forgive is the honest place to begin.
If you need help seeing forgiveness clearly enough to decide what to do with it, not the act yet, just the understanding, you can request a prayer for forgiveness. Bring the confusion alongside the wound. Both belong in the same place.
Colossians speaks of forgiveness extended among people who have genuinely wronged each other, which means scripture has never assumed that forgiveness happens in the absence of real harm. It has always assumed the harm is real. What it asks is not that the harm be minimized but that the carrying of it be released, not for the sake of the person who caused it, but as an act of grace that has its primary effect in the person who extends it.
The truth of what was done to you does not depend on your unforgiveness to survive. You do not have to keep holding the injury in order for the injury to remain true. The record of it does not disappear when you release it. What disappears, gradually, imperfectly, over time, is the power it has over your interior life, the way it occupies space that belongs to other things, the weight of being the keeper of a debt that someone else incurred. If the person you are struggling to forgive is someone you are also grieving, someone whose harm and whose loss have arrived together, the prayer for grief when you grieve someone who hurt you holds both the wound and the mourning in the same place.
You are allowed to take your time getting to this. You are allowed to need the definition clarified before you can make an honest decision about it. You are allowed to say: if that is what forgiveness actually is, then maybe I can consider it, but I needed to know it wasn't the same thing as excusing what happened, because excusing what happened is something I am not willing to do and should not be asked to do.
No one is asking you to excuse it. The harm was real. The forgiveness, when it comes, will not change that. It will only change what you are required to carry because of it.
That is worth asking for. For your sake, not theirs. The forgiveness prayers gathered here hold space for exactly this, for the person who needs the definition before they can consider the decision.