The Power to Release: What Forgiveness Teaches Us About Manhood

By Kenneth Braswell, CEO, Fathers Incorporated

I’ve been wrestling with forgiveness lately. Not the kind you write about. Not the kind you quote in scripture. But the kind that stares you down in a crowded room and asks,“You still holding on to that?”

A while back, I had a powerful conversation with my friend Darryl Green on my I Am Dad podcast. His story is one I’ve carried with me because it challenged everything I thought I knew about what it means to let go.

Darryl’s younger brother was murdered — stabbed by a 14-year-old boy over a pair of borrowed bowling shoes. It shattered his family. “I came home with a nine-millimeter German Luger,” Darryl told me. “I wanted to kill him, his mother, his father, his sister, his brother, the dog, the goldfish. I wanted his family to feel the same pain my family felt.”

That kind of pain doesn’t pass quickly. It lingers. It hardens. And if you’re not careful, it becomes who you are.

But something shifted in him.

“I asked God to take the anger off of me,” he said. “I didn’t know what He was going to give me in exchange, but He gave me forgiveness.” And that decision, to release what was killing him, became the first step toward healing.

What struck me wasn’t just that Darryl forgave the boy who murdered his brother. It’s that he did it fully. Publicly. With his whole chest. He stood in court, looked the young man in the eye, and said, “You’ve been known for taking life. Now let’s you and I go save some lives together.”

And they did.

Darryl and that young man, now grown, travel the country together, speaking about healing, redemption, and the power of deep forgiveness. “Forgiveness is not for the other person,” he told me. “It’s for you. You can forgive just because you can.”

That truth hit me differently this year.

There was a time in my life, personally and professionally, where I was deeply wounded by a group of people. Their actions were calculated and harmful. Most of them are no longer in my life, and I’ve thanked God for that release. But one of the women at the center of that pain reached out. She apologized, and her apology came with something rare: an explanation. I accepted it. Not because it erased the wrong, but because it gave me something to work with. Understanding.

Then, more recently, I ran into another woman who had been part of that same season. We exchanged a few words, and I felt moved to apologize for how I had treated her in the aftermath — cold, guarded, distant. I knew why I had been that way, and I owned it. I told her I was intentional in my behavior at the time, but I also told her I was ready to let that go.

It felt good. For a moment.

But after we parted, something she said stirred something in me again. She had accepted my apology but never once acknowledged the original wrong, and I found myself right back at the emotional edge, not out of anger, but out of reflection.

It reminded me how complicated forgiveness can be.

Darryl said, “It’s a decision. Period. It’s choosing to move from the darkness into the light.” He told me, “We give everybody else grace. Why don’t we give ourselves some grace?” And I think about that line often, especially when the apology you give is met with silence. Or worse — acceptance without accountability.

Forgiveness isn’t about getting the other person to change. It’s about not letting what they did change you anymore.

I’ve been in rooms with grown men who haven’t talked to their fathers in decades. I’ve sat beside brothers who shake hands with their dads at 62 for the first time because they realized that holding on wasn’t helping. And I’ve been that man — angry, disappointed, grieving what should have been.

But what Darryl taught me is that sometimes the healing comes not from what someone says to you but from what you say to yourself: It’s time to let this go.

Because if you don’t, the memory of the pain becomes its own kind of prison. It feeds on every trigger, every missed call, every sideways glance. You may not be able to forget what happened. But with forgiveness, you can learn how to live without its weight on your chest.

You don’t need a response to your apology to make it real. And forgiveness doesn’t demand an audience. It’s a sacred, solo act of courage.

You may never get total closure. You may never get full resolution. But what you can get is clarity.

You can come to a place where the memory doesn’t control you. Where the wound stops defining you. Where you can look back with respect and even honor — not for what happened but for the fact that you survived it.

So if you are someone, especially a man, dealing with the weight of past or present pain, hear me when I say this: Apology and forgiveness are good first steps. They are acts of liberation. They are acts of maturity. And they are invitations to healing.

You may never forget the pain, but you can choose not to live under its shadow.

Let forgiveness be your release. Let apology be your beginning. And let clarity guide you the rest of the way.

You deserve that much peace.

—Kenneth Braswell
CEO, Fathers Incorporated
Host, I Am Dad podcast
Author, Echoes of My Father and Too Seasoned to Care