Today's Monday • 8 mins read
— By Dr. Sandip Roy.
You hurt a narcissist. Maybe intentionally, maybe not. You apologized and explained. Then you gave it time.
And still, nothing. The resentment and the coldness stay. Every conversation you have carries the weight of something unresolved.
And you begin to wonder: will they ever let this go?
If the narcissist in your life has strong antagonistic traits, the research now has a clear answer. And it is not the one most people hope for.
What Forgiveness Actually Does for Mental Health
Before getting into why narcissists struggle to forgive, it is worth knowing what forgiveness actually does, and why its absence carries a cost.
Psychologists define forgiveness as the process of releasing negative cognitions, emotions, and behaviors toward someone who has hurt you, and replacing them with more constructive responses (McCullough et al., 1998).
It comes in two forms.
- State forgiveness is situational: letting go of resentment after a specific transgression.
- Dispositional forgiveness is a broader personality tendency: some people are consistently more forgiving across situations and relationships.
Both forms carry measurable benefits. Higher forgiveness is associated with lower anxiety and depression, better self-esteem, improved relationship satisfaction, and better overall mental health (Webb & Toussaint, 2020; Gao et al., 2022).
People who forgive more tend to carry less chronic stress and show fewer symptoms of psychopathology.
The inverse is also true. Chronic resentment, avoidance, and hostility toward others are not neutral states. They cost the person holding them as much as, sometimes more than, the person they are directed at.
Forgiveness is not the same as excusing someone or pretending the harm did not happen. Do you know the 7 myths about forgiveness that people generally believe?
Why Narcissists Cannot Forgive
Forgiveness requires a set of psychological capacities that narcissism tends to undermine.
To forgive, a person needs to take the perspective of the one who hurt them. They need to understand the motives and circumstances of their offender, regulate their own emotional reactivity, and shift from a self-protective stance to a more open one.
But those are precisely the capacities that narcissistic traits, particularly grandiosity, hostility, and emotional reactivity, tend to compromise (Emmons, 2000; Miller et al., 2021).
Earlier research found that narcissistic individuals generally struggle to forgive others (Besser & Zeigler-Hill, 2011; Exline et al., 2004).
A well-cited finding from Exline et al. (2004) described narcissistic entitlement as a specific barrier to forgiveness: because narcissists feel they deserve better treatment than others, transgressions against them feel more severe and more unjust.
That perceived injustice makes letting go harder.
But for years, the research treated narcissism as a single construct. When researchers started separating it into distinct facets, the picture became more specific.
The Antagonistic Narcissist: A Special Case
Contemporary psychology identifies three facets of narcissism:
- Agentic (self-promoting, charming, grandiose),
- Antagonistic (hostile, entitled, exploitative), and
- Neurotic (hypersensitive, withdrawn, shame-prone).
The research on forgiveness does not apply equally across all three.
Fatfouta and colleagues (2017) examined all three facets in a large community sample of over 1,100 participants. Their finding was precise: antagonistic narcissism was strongly and negatively linked to dispositional forgiveness.
Meanwhile, agentic narcissism showed no such link. In fact, agentic narcissism was slightly positively associated with forgiveness.
This distinction matters practically. The charming, high-achieving narcissist who seems magnetic and confident is not necessarily someone who holds grudges. The antagonistic narcissist, arrogant, hostile, and quick to rivalry and enmity, is a different story entirely.
Antagonistic narcissism is the facet most consistently linked to aggression, externalizing behavior, and persistent grievance (Du et al., 2022).
It is also the facet that poses the greatest challenges in psychotherapy, partly because it combines heightened reactivity to perceived interpersonal injury and an almost chronic inability to move past it (Kealy et al., 2017).
The Paradox: They Forgive Less But Claim Otherwise
Most research on narcissism and forgiveness relies on self-reports. People answer questionnaires about how forgiving they tend to be, or how they feel toward someone who wronged them.
The problem is that forgiveness is socially desirable, and antagonistic narcissism is not. That gap creates a self-presentation bias: people with strong antagonistic traits may report more forgiveness than they actually experience, because admitting otherwise reflects poorly on them.
A 2026 study by Wülfing, Spitzer, Severus, and Fatfouta addressed this directly. They recruited 102 female patients from a psychosomatic clinic and measured both explicit (self-report) and implicit (Implicit Association Test, or IAT) levels of antagonistic narcissism and forgiveness.
The IAT is a test based on reaction times. It captures automatic associations below the level of conscious reflection. It measures what the brain does before deliberate thought intervenes.
The findings were noteworthy. Implicit antagonistic narcissism, the automatic, pre-reflective level of antagonistic traits, was robustly associated with lower forgiveness across multiple measures. They scored lower on implicit forgiveness on the IAT, greater avoidance of the person who hurt them, reduced benevolence toward that person, and lower dispositional forgiveness overall (Wülfing et al., 2026).
Crucially, the implicit measure explained unique variance in forgiveness outcomes even after controlling for what the explicit self-report measure already captured.
In plain terms: the IAT was detecting something real that the questionnaire alone was missing.
The Difference Between Grudge-Holding and Revenge-Seeking
One finding in the study deserves special attention because it is both surprising and clinically important.
The implicit antagonistic narcissism measure did not predict revenge motivation.
That seems counterintuitive. Antagonistic narcissists are typically associated with vengefulness (Exline et al., 2004; Du et al., 2022). But the study suggests a meaningful distinction between the two types of unforgiveness.
- Automatic and affective unforgiveness: avoidance, coldness, and withdrawal from the person who hurt you. This is what the implicit measure captured. It reflects the immediate, affect-driven expression of antagonistic self-associations that operate below conscious thought.
- Deliberate and strategic unforgiveness: planning revenge, seeking retaliation, wanting the other person to suffer. This appears to require more cognitive elaboration and self-regulatory engagement, a kind of “cold revenge” that involves conscious planning (West et al., 2022).
What the study suggests is that antagonistic narcissists, at the automatic level, are wired for disengagement and hostility rather than active revenge plots.
They do not necessarily want to destroy you. But they simply cannot let the injury go, and that inability operates at a level below their own awareness.
That is, in many ways, harder to address than deliberate revenge. You cannot negotiate with an automatic process.
What This Means If You Are Waiting for Forgiveness From a Narcissist
If you are in a relationship with someone who has strong antagonistic narcissistic traits, and you are waiting for them to forgive you, the research suggests that waiting is unlikely to bear fruit.
The difficulty is not primarily a choice they are making. At the implicit, automatic level, antagonistic narcissists process interpersonal injury as a persistent threat. The hostility and avoidance that follow are not fully under their conscious control.
Therapy can help. The study’s authors note that interventions targeting emotion regulation, perspective-taking, and implicit relational schemas, such as psychodynamic or mentalization-based approaches, may gradually help transform antagonistic automatic responses into more adaptive ones (Wülfing et al., 2026).
But this requires the narcissist to engage in treatment, which itself presents a challenge given the trait’s characteristic resistance to vulnerability.
For the person waiting: the most useful reframe may be to stop expecting forgiveness as a precondition for your own peace. You cannot resolve their implicit relational schemas from the outside. What you can work on is your own response to the ongoing hostility and what boundaries you set around it.
An Important Caveat: The study was conducted exclusively on female clinical patients, with a relatively small sample of 102 participants. The authors explicitly note the need for replication in larger and more diverse samples, including male participants and non-clinical populations (Wülfing et al., 2026).
The core finding, that implicit antagonistic narcissism is linked to reduced forgiveness beyond what self-reports capture, is consistent with prior community research. But how strongly this applies to subclinical populations remains an open question.
Final Words
Most people think of forgiveness as something the wronged party extends. When a narcissist is involved, the norm reverses in a troubling way: the narcissist becomes the one who cannot forgive, and everyone around them ends up managing the fallout of that inability.
Wülfing & Spitzer’s 2026 research makes clear that this is not simply a personality quirk or a stubborn choice. Antagonistic narcissism interferes with forgiveness at an automatic, pre-conscious level. The resentment is not just something they are holding. It is something that is holding them.
That does not make living with it any easier. But it does make it less personal. The grudge is not really about you.
√ Also Read:
- How To Forgive Someone Who Broke Your Trust, And Move On
- Why Narcissists Lie: How Each Type Deceives You
- When Can A Narcissist Change Their Behaviors?
√ Please share this with someone.
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