You Don't Need to Forgive: Trauma Recovery on Your Own Terms

Featured in The New York Times, "10 Ways to Keep Your Mind Healthy in 2025"

"A valuable resource for clinicians and patients that navigates questions of forgiveness with tact."--Foreword Reviews

You can find peace, whether or not you forgive those who harmed you.

Feeling pressured to forgive their offenders is a common reason trauma survivors avoid mental health services and support. Those who force, pressure, or encourage trauma survivors to forgive can unknowingly cause harm and sabotage their recovery. And such harm is entirely unnecessary--especially when research shows there is no consensus among psychologists, psychiatrists, and other professionals about whether forgiveness is necessary for recovery at all.

You Don't Need to Forgive is an invaluable resource for trauma survivors and their clinicians who feel alienated and even gaslighted by the toxic positivity and moralism that often characterizes attitudes about forgiveness in psychology and self-help. Bringing together research and testimony from psychologists, psychotherapists, criminologists, philosophers, religious leaders, and trauma survivors, psychotherapist and expert in complex trauma recovery Amanda Ann Gregory explores the benefits of elective forgiveness and the dangers of required forgiveness. Elective forgiveness gives survivors the agency to progress in their recovery on their own terms. Forgiveness is helpful for some, but it is not universally necessary for recovery; each person should have the power to choose.

Amanda Ann Gregory is a trauma psychotherapist whose work focuses on complex trauma recovery. Her unique perspective as both a clinician and a trauma survivor allows her genuinely to understand the needs of survivors. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Psychology Today, Psychotherapy Networker, and psychotherapy.net. With over seventeen years of clinical practice alongside EMDR and National Counseling certifications, Gregory has provided trauma education and training for the American Counseling Association, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, Ronald McDonald House Charities, among others. Gregory lives in Chicago, Illinois, with her partner and their sassy black cat, Mr. Bojangles.