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Nat King Cole’s “Smile” is one of those songs that drifts in like a warm memory. You hear it in an old movie or streaming on a playlist while stirring something familiar on the stove, and it wraps around you with a kind of gentle nostalgia. The lyrics encourage you to smile through ache, fear and sorrow - a message meant to soothe, not aggravate. But when you sit with the words, you notice something else: a quiet pressure to mask pain, hide sadness and push through emotional distress with a pleasant expression. The promise is simple and seductive - if you smile, tomorrow will be better.
This is going to sound opposite of what you’ve likely believed, but in evangelical spaces, children were never centered; the adults were.
Dating someone who survived a high‑demand religious group is its own kind of learning curve. Survivors carry patterns shaped by fear, obedience and years of being told who they should be. Partners often sense something is different but don’t have language for it.
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.
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.