The Forgiveness Trap: Why "Forgive and Forget" Perpetuates the Very Harm It Claims to Heal

Former Sex Worker and Incest Survivor Veronica Monet Reveals the Hidden Danger in How We Approach Trauma

Jul 29, 2025

Dear friends,

What if everything we've been taught about forgiveness is making the problem worse?

This uncomfortable question emerged from my conversation with Veronica Monet, a former high-end escort turned therapist who survived childhood in what she describes as "a family of pedophiles." Her insights about breaking cycles of abuse challenge everything we think we know about healing.

Most of us learned that forgiveness means "forgive and forget"—that if you truly forgive someone, you welcome them back into your life. Religious communities reinforce this: confess to God, and everything's erased.

But as Monet discovered, this approach doesn't heal—it enables.

"What we had was religious sanctimonious forgiveness," she explains. "They confessed to Jesus and gave their heart to the Lord, so it's forgiven. Well, that doesn't actually change behaviors. People continue to do the things that they supposedly confessed and got forgiven for."

The pattern in her family was devastating: both parents were incest survivors who became perpetrators. Their siblings were survivors who became perpetrators. The cycle stretched back generations.

"My mom and dad are incest survivors too. They were molested, and so are my aunts and uncles. So where does the misery stop?"

True forgiveness, Monet argues, is something you do for yourself—to unburden yourself from grudges. But it never requires allowing harmful people back into your life. The distinction isn't semantic; it's the difference between healing and perpetuating harm.

Perhaps most challenging is her observation about shame: rather than preventing harmful behavior, it drives it underground and ensures its persistence. The very moral outrage meant to protect children may actually ensure more children get harmed.

"When we shame them, we're actually perpetuating it. We're causing more of it to happen."

Monet isn't advocating leniency toward perpetrators. She's advocating for approaches that actually work to stop cycles of harm rather than just expressing moral disapproval.

As she puts it:

"The only way we're going to eliminate pedophilia is if we start treating them like people and find out how to heal them. Heal families, heal communities, heal churches, heal schools."

Sometimes the most uncomfortable conversations are the ones we most need to have.

Golden light,

Dr. Richard L. Miller

Links & Resources:

theshamefreezone Website
Veronica Monet’s Instagram
Veronica Monet’s YouTube Channel
Full episode and 20 years of archived conversations: mindbodyhealthpolitics.org

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