I once had a therapist tell me, “Forgiving your rapist is the first step toward recovering from your sexual assault." Well, it has been four years and I have come to realize that there may never be a day where I “forgive” my rapist, and that is okay.

Throughout our lives we are constantly told to forgive those who have hurt us in order to move on, but what happens when you can’t forgive? What happens when you do not want to forgive?

It’s so easy for someone on the outside to tell another person, especially a victim of sexual assault, that the best thing to do is forgive and forget. It’s easy for anyone who hasn’t experienced trauma to say that and encourage it as the healthiest thing to do because they can never imagine the way that trauma affects you.

But what I could never understand is why anyone would want me to forgive my rapist. “Forgive and Forget” doesn’t work when the rest of your life is affected by the actions of someone else. There is no forgetting that the first time a man touched me was when I was 16 years old being held down and raped on the concrete floor of a garage. So why must we constantly expect victims of assault and violence to forgive their abusers?

Our society not only puts the blame of sexual assault on survivors like me, but it forces us to become vocal advocates for other survivors of sexual assault. And although some of us, even myself sometimes, take part in continuing the important discussion surrounding sexual assault, we shouldn’t have to constantly be put through the re-traumatization of having to portray ourselves as these “strong survivors who forgave their rapists and lived a normal life after being assaulted." Having to constantly be the spokesperson for sexual assault and “inspire” others to push forward in their path to recovery is a large burden to put on survivors. The truth is that by forcing us to fit into these molds of being “heroic survivors,” you are forcing some of us to be the spokesperson for things we can’t always handle speaking about.

Although all of us have different experiences of life after being assaulted, for some of us like myself we may never get to live a “normal” life after our sexual assault. For some of us, the thought of “forgiving” the person that raped us makes us sick because we know that we will never be able to do that. And not only will we never be able to forgive our rapists, we never want to have to forgive them for what they have done. For some of us, being sexually assaulted will always have an impact on our daily lives and we will think about what happened to us every single day until the day that we die. And none of that makes us weak.

When you tell someone to forgive their abuser and move on from their trauma you are invalidating their experience. You are telling them that their anger, sadness and frustration is not valid. You are telling them that their attacker deserves that forgiveness because “everyone makes mistakes.” When you tell someone to forgive their abuser, you are forcing them to take on the responsibility of putting the pieces of themselves back together that their attacker broke off. Sometimes it takes us years to even consider putting the pieces of ourselves back together after our attacker shattered everything inside of us, and sometimes we never want to pick those pieces back up again because it is just easier to leave them in the past.

Trauma affects everyone in different ways. No matter how many “steps to recovery” your therapist tells you about, there is no universal way to recover and cope from your trauma. No one has to forgive those who have hurt them. And no one has to ever forget about the negative experiences from their past because there’s a pretty big chance that those experiences are going to shape your future. There is no wrong way to live your life and cope with your trauma. You are your own survivor. And you deserve your own experience on your journey of healing.