Forgiveness
First let me start off by saying: you don't HAVE to forgive anyone. It's your prerogative, your choice, your life - you do you, boo. If you're not ready that's just the breaks. At this stage; wind it back to focusing on you & processing what you're still holding onto.
Secondly, here’s all the things that aren’t obligatorily conjoined with forgiveness [there may be more but you get the gist]:Inherently trusting the person again.
Letting someone back into your life.
Deciding that whatever was done to you is acceptable behaviour toward you/others.
Telling the person (or adjacent people) that you forgive them.
Not pursuing legal justice (if that’s relevant to you).
However, forgiveness is the endgame of processing your trauma. It's a HUGE release - truly - it's freedom. The issue is that people have been thinking about it as a TOOL; something to use to give yourself the release (or let someone else off the hook), and it's just not that. You can't force yourself to forgive with your mind. You can set the intention to, but it just won't happen until you've actually emotionally processed whatever happened fully (including energetically related past incidents that set the pattern). Forgiveness is the RESULT. It just HAPPENS when you've really integrated all the hurt and found at least a degree of peace. And in some cases; forgiven yourself for aspects of what happened too. Whether that was your innocence, trust, naivety, compliance, or maybe even putting it into your soul plan to begin with.
If you're not there yet it just means that somewhere in the past there's a version of you (or more) that are still hurting and that need to be seen fully through your consciousness, expression, and integration. And that's perfectly fine - like above; you just focus on you for now.
With that said.. ultimately forgiveness is for YOU. It happens in you, for you. You don't need someone's permission to forgive yourself. You don't need someone's remorse or apology to forgive them (though it can help a bunch for sure). The person doesn't have to forgive themselves for you to forgive them either. Sometimes we just get to the point where we want closure and really that's only something you can give yourself.
The culmination of practicing Shadow integration, emotional expression, and forgiveness is realising we're all flawed human beings doing our best to navigate an often confusing world where most of the time we've been running on programs of fear and hurt, trying to survive in this world and meet our own needs. So when you're ready (never before) there's a version of whoever hurt you that was hurt similarly too, and it can help to understand that they were once a bright young kid learning from and exposed to the people around them too and their hurt and broken programming. Remember, it always takes a victim to create a victim. Only hurt people hurt people. And holding onto blame, bitterness, anger, and hate only poisons us from the inside out, even if it feels protective for a time.