When I wrote The Forgiveness Gothard Taught and the Control It Created, I knew I didn’t want to stop at just naming the harm. Readers deserve more than a mere critique. Survivors, or those hurting, deserve a path forward that doesn’t retraumatize us or place the weight of reconciliation on the people who were harmed.

This is the follow‑up. Not a shout into the void, but a reframing. A different way to understand what healing can look like when we step outside the systems that taught us forgiveness was our responsibility alone.

Forgiveness is supposed to be a meaningful, human practice. In Bill Gothard’s world, it became a rule. A requirement. A tool used to keep people compliant and quiet. For those of us shaped by IBLP and ATI, forgiveness wasn’t an invitation to healing. It was an expectation, and usually aimed at the person with the least power.

One friend broke the news. Another friend told me.

There’s a man in a hospital today. He’s in a coma after a heart attack. The sad thing is, this man is the cause of immeasurable harm done in the name of truth. In the name of Jesus. Some of that harm landed in my own life, rippling into every corner of my family, relationships and personal well-being.

I did not grow up thinking of fear as fear. I grew up thinking of it as wisdom, as seriousness, as spiritual maturity. I thought fear was just being scared of something. In the fundamental, evangelical world of my childhood, graphic martyr stories, rapture warnings and fear-based tracts were not treated as unusual or extreme; they were simply part of the formation process. What I absorbed, long before I had language for it, was that terror could be instructional and that holy people were expected to submit to it.