Songfacts®:

• Jillette Johnson is forgiving herself in this song, which was influenced by the work of Eckhart Tolle, author of The Power Of Now. "He talks a lot about the 'pain-body' and how there is this entity within all of us that is connected to our ego, which is an inherited wall that separates you from other people," Johnson said before she performed the song on the Songfacts Podcast. "It can be triggered by all sorts of experiences, both personal and hereditary, and it got me thinking about my relationship with anger and people I love, and why I can sometimes get triggered into this fairly irrational place."
  
  "'Forgive Her' is a tutorial for myself to learn how to forgive myself when I'm in my 'pain-body,'" she continued. "As I've gotten older and learned how to form healthy relationships, I've watched it happen more. The forgiveness we are capable of having for ourselves can translate to other people and can help us reconnect and break down the pain body wall. The more time I spend in a place of not trying to control things, but in a place of surrender and trying to connect with other people, the better my songs are. That closed-off angry place doesn't create a song with a spark because there's no sense of hope in it. Songwriting is supposed to give that hope."
• The opening line, "Forgive her, for she doesn't really know what she does, what she did to you darling," is a reference to a quote from the Bible (Luke 23:34) that Jesus says when he is being crucified: "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing."
• Like all the tracks on her third album, It's A Beautiful Day And I Love You, Johnson wrote this piano ballad herself. She recorded it in Nashville with producer Joe Pisapia.