▶ Watch the film — Amnesty Opens on YouTube in a new window.
Forgiveness is one of the most misunderstood words in trauma recovery. The Domain of Amnesty offers a different way to think about it — not as letting someone off the hook, but as setting ourselves free.
The name of this Domain matters enormously, so let me start there. Amnesty comes from the Greek amnéstia, meaning forgetfulness. It shares a root with amnesia, the traumatic loss of memory. In modern usage it has come to describe the drawing of a line under the atrocities of conflict — an acknowledgement that both sides may have caused pain, and that retribution and punishment will not be pursued. I chose the word with care, because this Domain is about exactly that kind of release: not a forgetting of facts, but a laying down of the demand for payback.
This is difficult territory, and I will not pretend otherwise. Most of us feel a powerful urge to apportion blame, to hold someone accountable for our pain — and after the careful sorting we did in Accountability, that urge can feel entirely justified. It is genuinely easy to hate and to be angry when we focus only on our own experience. The complication arrives when we begin to recognise that those who harmed us were so often, in their own turn, harmed themselves — that their cruelty to us was a projection or a reproduction of their own pain. That recognition can stir a deep Turmoil: a confusing ambivalence, as we hold their woundedness alongside the unaltered reality of our own.
If we refuse to forgive someone, we keep ourselves bound to them — waiting, often indefinitely, for an apology or admission that, in my experience, rarely comes.
What forgiveness is, and is not
Here we have to establish what ‘forgiveness’ actually means, because so much harm is done by a shallow version of it. Amnesty is not about forgetting — we do not, in truth, forget anything we were fully conscious of. (There is a separate, real phenomenon where survivors who were very young, or pre-verbal, carry no explicit memory at all; I was thirty-seven before I remembered the sexual abuse of my own childhood, and I am grateful that I still cannot recall many of the details. But that is the mind’s protective amnesia, not a moral act of forgetting.) Amnesty, rather, is about making choices that move us beyond our experiences, into a life that is no longer defined by them.
I find it helps to picture a tug of war. We hold one end of the rope and picture the person who hurt us at the other. As long as we hold on, we are tied to them; we are stuck. Yet, they may not be holding the other end, they may have dropped the rope long ago and moved on. So, who wins if we simply drop the rope? Letting go of the rope is not a denial of what happened, nor a minimising of our pain. It is a refusal to keep pouring our finite energy into a lost cause — a decision to redirect that energy towards people and situations that are good for us. There is a line from the film Mask I often quote: “Who needs it? You take their money, you gotta take their s**t!” If we are no longer hoping for anything from them, we can no longer be disappointed by them.
The connection between us, you see, is a two-way street. If we hold on to them, they can still influence us — we deceive ourselves if we think we can grip the rope without being affected by whoever is on the other end. Releasing the desire for an apology or for retribution breaks that conduit, so that nothing more can travel down the pipeline to us. We discharge them from any obligation to meet our needs or make restitution — and in doing so we discharge ourselves from any obligation to them. They are not responsible for our happiness or our healing; we are not responsible for theirs. That is the freedom Amnesty offers.
And there is a reason the laying-down has to be active rather than merely intended. Even where the conscious mind has filed something away, the body has not. As van der Kolk and Rothschild both document, our bodies keep a record that our conscious mind never signed off on — which is why Amnesty cannot be achieved by a simple decision to ‘think no more about it’. The held resentment lives in the tissues, the breath, the tension in our shoulders, and so it must be discharged through the body as much as resolved in the mind. That is why the work of this Domain is so deliberately physical.
Tourniquet, and the protection of distance
For many survivors, the person who harmed them is a relative or family friend they may still encounter at gatherings. This makes the work harder, and sometimes a clean separation is impossible. Here a particular function comes into its own: the Tourniquet. Just as a real tourniquet stops a wound from bleeding out, the emotional and psychological Tourniquet is a way of tying off our feelings and memories so that we are not haemorrhaging pain and shame, and are protected from being freshly triggered or re-abused. It is not denial; it is a deliberate, temporary measure of self-protection that lets us finalise — to choose how and when we move forward — and ultimately to detach, severing the old bonds and refusing to keep replaying the scripts we developed in relation to that person.
Underneath all of this is the body’s need for catharsis — a word from the Greek katharos, ‘pure’, and kathairein, ‘to cleanse’. The worst thing we can do for our wellbeing is to keep everything pent up inside. We need to be cleansed, even purged, of what ails us and keeps us bound. So this Domain is full of cathartic, embodied exercises: writing letters we will never send and then destroying them; moving the trapped energy through running, swimming, hitting a punch-bag; naming, one piece of paper at a time, the wrongs we are ready to set down, and burning or shredding each one rather than merely throwing it away.
The brutal honesty it asks
There is one more thing Amnesty requires, and it is the hardest. When I reflect honestly on my own life, I see the many times my trust was betrayed — the ridicule, the exclusion, the gossip, the neglect, the abuse, the violence, the lies. And I also see the times when I lied, was cruel, gossiped, excluded and neglected others; and the times when, in desperation, I did those things to myself. This kind of reflection asks an almost brutal honesty, because we cannot lay down a burden we will not admit we are carrying, and we cannot find the forgiveness we need while we deny our own part. The passage I return to is Luke 7:47 — that the one who has been forgiven much, loves much. When we can accept our own humanity and limitation, our own capacity to wound, we become more able to extend grace to others, and far less trapped in the superior, loveless prison of blame, resentment and the desire for revenge.
Amnesty is, in the end, an act of self-liberation, not exoneration. It is for our freedom, and we return the other to the Source.
I am not suggesting that recognising an abuser’s pain excuses their behaviour — it never does, and I am emphatic about that. I am suggesting that Amnesty is, in the end, an act of self-liberation, not exoneration. It is for our freedom, and we return the other to the Source. Helping a client find their way through it — at their own pace, never on anyone else’s timetable, and never as a moral demand imposed from outside — is some of the most delicate and important work in this whole model, and a central thread of the Level 7 training.
A few questions to sit with
- Is there a rope you are still gripping — a person you are bound to by the wait for an apology that may never come?
- How do you respond when a client is not yet ready to forgive? Can you resist imposing it as a moral duty?
- What is your own working definition of forgiveness — and has it changed as you read this?
About the course
The Anastasis Model sits at the heart of a Level 7 Diploma in trauma-informed, advanced therapeutic practice — written for counsellors and psychotherapists who want to work more deeply with developmental and relational trauma, and who are moving towards senior accreditation (SCoPEd Column C).
It runs online, with three in-person residentials, over fifteen months: October 2026 to December 2027. The group is deliberately small — capped at twelve — so no one is ever just a face in a crowded screen. The fee is £5,250, with payment plans available.
To enquire, email training@authentictandt.uk or call Annie on 07949 677405. We shape the cohort together through conversation, so do get in touch early.