{"id":1466,"date":"2026-08-28T15:22:55","date_gmt":"2026-08-28T15:22:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/authentictandt.uk\/main\/?page_id=1466"},"modified":"2026-08-28T15:22:55","modified_gmt":"2026-08-28T15:22:55","slug":"amnesty","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/authentictandt.uk\/main\/blogs-news\/amnesty\/","title":{"rendered":"Amnesty"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n\n\n\n\n<style>\n.anastasis-post{max-width:820px;margin:0 auto;color:#2A2A28;font-family:Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:18px;}\n.anastasis-post strong{font-weight:700;}\n.anastasis-post em{font-style:italic;}\n.anastasis-post a{color:#1F4E4A;text-decoration:underline;text-decoration-color:#9A6B1F;}\n<\/style>\n<div class=\"anastasis-post\">\n\n<figure style=\"margin:0 0 1.8em;\">\n  <img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/authentictandt.uk\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/11_amnesty-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"Amnesty \u2014 releasing ourselves from the bondage of hatred\" style=\"display:block;width:100%;height:auto;max-height:420px;object-fit:cover;border-radius:8px;\">\n  \n  <!-- <figcaption style=\"margin-top:.5em;font-size:.85rem;color:#6B6B6B;font-style:italic;text-align:center;\">Anastasis Logo<\/figcaption> -->\n<\/figure>\n\n<p style=\"margin:0 0 1.8em;line-height:1.5;\">\n  <a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/Y2J_zp2Iakk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" style=\"display:inline-block;padding:.7em 1.4em;background:#1F4E4A;color:#FFFFFF;text-decoration:none;border-radius:6px;font-size:1rem;border-bottom:3px solid #9A6B1F;\">\u25b6&nbsp;&nbsp;Watch the film \u2014 <em>Amnesty<\/em><\/a>\n  <span style=\"display:block;margin-top:.6em;font-size:.85rem;color:#6B6B6B;font-style:italic;\">Opens on YouTube in a new window.<\/span>\n<\/p>\n\n<p style=\"margin:0 0 1.5em;line-height:1.5;\"><strong>Forgiveness is one of the most misunderstood words in trauma recovery. The Domain of <em>Amnesty<\/em> offers a different way to think about it \u2014 not as letting someone off the hook, but as setting ourselves free.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n<p style=\"margin:0 0 1.5em;line-height:1.5;\">The name of this Domain matters enormously, so let me start there. <em>Amnesty<\/em> comes from the Greek <em>amn\u00e9stia<\/em>, meaning forgetfulness. It shares a root with <em>amnesia<\/em>, the traumatic loss of memory. In modern usage it has come to describe the drawing of a line under the atrocities of conflict \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n<p style=\"margin:0 0 1.5em;line-height:1.5;\">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 \u2014 and after the careful sorting we did in <em>Accountability<\/em>, 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 \u2014 that their cruelty to us was a projection or a reproduction of their own pain. That recognition can stir a deep <em>Turmoil<\/em>: a confusing ambivalence, as we hold their woundedness alongside the unaltered reality of our own.<\/p>\n\n<blockquote style=\"margin:2em 0;padding:.1em 0 .1em 20px;border-left:4px solid #9A6B1F;color:#1F4E4A;font-style:italic;font-size:1.18rem;line-height:1.4;\"><p style=\"margin:0;\">If we refuse to forgive someone, we keep ourselves bound to them \u2014 waiting, often indefinitely, for an apology or admission that, in my experience, rarely comes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n<h2 style=\"margin:2em 0 .45em;line-height:1.25;color:#1F4E4A;font-family:Georgia,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.45rem;\">What forgiveness is, and is not<\/h2>\n\n<p style=\"margin:0 0 1.5em;line-height:1.5;\">Here we have to establish what \u2018forgiveness\u2019 actually means, because so much harm is done by a shallow version of it. <em>Amnesty<\/em> is not about forgetting \u2014 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\u2019s protective amnesia, not a moral act of forgetting.) <em>Amnesty<\/em>, rather, is about making choices that move us beyond our experiences, into a life that is no longer defined by them.<\/p>\n\n<p style=\"margin:0 0 1.5em;line-height:1.5;\">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? <strong>Letting go of the rope is not a denial of what happened, nor a minimising of our pain.<\/strong> It is a refusal to keep pouring our finite energy into a lost cause \u2014 a decision to redirect that energy towards people and situations that are good for us. There is a line from the film <em>Mask<\/em> I often quote: <em>\u201cWho needs it? You take their money, you gotta take their s**t!\u201d<\/em> If we are no longer hoping for anything from them, we can no longer be disappointed by them.<\/p>\n\n<p style=\"margin:0 0 1.5em;line-height:1.5;\">The connection between us, you see, is a two-way street. If we hold on to them, they can still influence us \u2014 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 \u2014 and in doing so we discharge ourselves from any obligation to them. <strong>They are not responsible for our happiness or our healing; we are not responsible for theirs.<\/strong> That is the freedom <em>Amnesty<\/em> offers.<\/p>\n\n<p style=\"margin:0 0 1.5em;line-height:1.5;\">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 \u2014 which is why <em>Amnesty<\/em> cannot be achieved by a simple decision to \u2018think no more about it\u2019. 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.<\/p>\n\n<h2 style=\"margin:2em 0 .45em;line-height:1.25;color:#1F4E4A;font-family:Georgia,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.45rem;\"><em>Tourniquet<\/em>, and the protection of distance<\/h2>\n\n<p style=\"margin:0 0 1.5em;line-height:1.5;\">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 <em>Tourniquet<\/em>. Just as a real tourniquet stops a wound from bleeding out, the emotional and psychological <em>Tourniquet<\/em> 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 <em>finalise<\/em> \u2014 to choose how and when we move forward \u2014 and ultimately to <em>detach<\/em>, severing the old bonds and refusing to keep replaying the scripts we developed in relation to that person.<\/p>\n\n<p style=\"margin:0 0 1.5em;line-height:1.5;\">Underneath all of this is the body\u2019s need for <em>catharsis<\/em> \u2014 a word from the Greek <em>katharos<\/em>, \u2018pure\u2019, and <em>kathairein<\/em>, \u2018to cleanse\u2019. 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.<\/p>\n\n<h2 style=\"margin:2em 0 .45em;line-height:1.25;color:#1F4E4A;font-family:Georgia,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.45rem;\">The brutal honesty it asks<\/h2>\n\n<p style=\"margin:0 0 1.5em;line-height:1.5;\">There is one more thing <em>Amnesty<\/em> requires, and it is the hardest. When I reflect honestly on my own life, I see the many times my trust was betrayed \u2014 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 <strong>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.<\/strong> The passage I return to is Luke 7:47 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n<blockquote style=\"margin:2em 0;padding:.1em 0 .1em 20px;border-left:4px solid #9A6B1F;color:#1F4E4A;font-style:italic;font-size:1.18rem;line-height:1.4;\"><p style=\"margin:0;\"><em>Amnesty<\/em> is, in the end, an act of self-liberation, not exoneration. It is for our freedom, and we return the other to the <em>Source<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n<p style=\"margin:0 0 1.5em;line-height:1.5;\">I am not suggesting that recognising an abuser\u2019s pain excuses their behaviour \u2014 it never does, and I am emphatic about that. I am suggesting that <em>Amnesty<\/em> is, in the end, an act of self-liberation, not exoneration. It is for our freedom, and we return the other to the <em>Source<\/em>. Helping a client find their way through it \u2014 at their own pace, never on anyone else\u2019s timetable, and never as a moral demand imposed from outside \u2014 is some of the most delicate and important work in this whole model, and a central thread of the Level&nbsp;7 training.<\/p>\n\n<h3 style=\"margin:2em 0 .4em;color:#1F4E4A;font-family:Georgia,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.15rem;\">A few questions to sit with<\/h3>\n\n<ul style=\"margin:0 0 1.5em;padding-left:1.25em;\">\n<li style=\"margin:.35em 0;line-height:1.5;\">Is there a rope you are still gripping \u2014 a person you are bound to by the wait for an apology that may never come?<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin:.35em 0;line-height:1.5;\">How do you respond when a client is not yet ready to forgive? Can you resist imposing it as a moral duty?<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin:.35em 0;line-height:1.5;\">What is your own working definition of forgiveness \u2014 and has it changed as you read this?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n<hr style=\"border:0;border-top:1px solid #d9d2c4;margin:2em 0;\">\n\n<h3 style=\"margin:2em 0 .4em;color:#1F4E4A;font-family:Georgia,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.15rem;\">About the course<\/h3>\n\n<p style=\"margin:0 0 1.5em;line-height:1.5;\">The <em>Anastasis<\/em> Model sits at the heart of a <strong>Level&nbsp;7 Diploma in trauma-informed, advanced therapeutic practice<\/strong> \u2014 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&nbsp;C).<\/p>\n\n<p style=\"margin:0 0 1.5em;line-height:1.5;\">It runs online, with three in-person residentials, over fifteen months: <strong>October&nbsp;2026 to December&nbsp;2027<\/strong>. The group is deliberately small \u2014 capped at twelve \u2014 so no one is ever just a face in a crowded screen. The fee is <strong>\u00a35,250<\/strong>, with payment plans available.<\/p>\n\n<p style=\"margin:0 0 1.5em;line-height:1.5;\">To enquire, email <strong><a href=\"mailto:training@authentictandt.uk\">training@authentictandt.uk<\/a><\/strong> or call Annie on <strong>07949&nbsp;677405<\/strong>. We shape the cohort together through conversation, so do get in touch early.<\/p>\n\n<p style=\"margin:0 0 1.5em;line-height:1.5;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.authentictandt.uk\">www.authentictandt.uk<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":1101,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":"","footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1466","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/authentictandt.uk\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1466","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/authentictandt.uk\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/authentictandt.uk\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/authentictandt.uk\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/authentictandt.uk\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1466"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/authentictandt.uk\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1466\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1467,"href":"https:\/\/authentictandt.uk\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1466\/revisions\/1467"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/authentictandt.uk\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/authentictandt.uk\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}