Nick StumboExecutive Director driving healing from sexual brokenness

Forgiveness is Grieving Together What You Both Lost

20 Feb 2025

Watch on YouTube

A short excerpt from a February 2025 YouTube talk by Nick Stumbo about forgiveness in the context of addiction recovery and relationships. Stumbo emphasizes that forgiveness is a joint process of grieving shared losses (what each partner lost during addiction) rather than a simple declaration that restores equality immediately. The clip highlights personal and relational losses between the speaker and his partner Joanna.

Forgiveness looks like that kind of coming together and grieving together. What we both lost. And I think that is the process that we weren't really understanding in our own recovery was the need to actually come together in forgiveness and not it just to be this kind of, I forgive you, and you're now equal to me. But for us, can we come together and acknowledge what we lost? What I lost for years in my addiction and what Joanna and I lost as a couple, what she lost as a wife.