I believe it is the only way if you truly want a single user to have complete control of decryption. There are other solutions if you don't. I heard of one the other day (from MaidSafe maybe?) where you have a shared secret amongst your "friends" and if a quorum of them agree, it can reset your password. I assume this means your data is duplicated and encrypted via that shared secret as well which could be coerced I suppose.