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You Don’t Have to Let It Go
How positivity culture forces us into extra emotional labor
A woman recently posted on r/AmItheAsshole on Reddit and shared how her family was criticizing her for not attending her sister’s wedding.
Her sister was marrying the poster’s ex-boyfriend. Who had cheated on her with the sister. And gotten her pregnant.
Most people would avoid the emotional torment of attending such an event. And yet the woman said that her family was encouraging her to “let the past go” and support her treacherous sister.
This story reminded me of similar events in my life, when I was asked to “let go” of painful memories or continue to support toxic people. It would be the “higher road,” the “mature thing to do,” apparently. It fell upon me to make up for others’ bad behavior, and my own efforts at self-protection were cast as “selfish” and “stuck in the past.”
The woman who posted on Reddit had been gaslit by her family into believing that her feelings didn’t matter. And that’s the common denominator among all these cases of insisting that a traumatized person simply “let it go.”
After all, if they let it go, the person who did wrong doesn’t have to feel guilty any more.
