I stayed in an abusive relationship because I believed a lie.
The lie was simple: if I’d just let it go, certain events wouldn’t have happened. If I’d been better at moving on, at forgiving, at not holding onto things… maybe he wouldn’t have hurt me. Maybe I wouldn’t have lost everything.
I made myself responsible for staying because I couldn’t let it go.
That’s what “just let it go” does to survivors. It shifts the blame onto us. It makes the abuse our fault.
When Suppression Becomes Unbearable
I reached a point where I thought about taking his life.
I did drugs to earn his love. I destroyed myself trying to be good enough, trying to be the person who’d make it work. I lost everything.
When you tell someone who’s that desperate, that broken, to just let it go… you’re not offering healing advice. You’re asking them to let go of themselves.
Research on trauma bonds confirms what I learned the hard way: we’re biologically hardwired to turn to attachment figures when threatened. So we turn to our partners when abuse happens, even when they’re the ones abusing us. The problem wasn’t my inability to move on. The problem was the neurological trap I was caught in.
The Disconnect Between What We Say and What Survivors Hear
Here’s what most people don’t realize about giving advice to survivors.
What we say and what we hear are usually different things. When someone tells a survivor to “just let it go,” they think they’re offering perspective. The survivor hears: you’re blowing this out of proportion.
Here’s the real question: are survivors saying what’s going on?
Why are we always saying “fine”?
Survivors say “fine.” People accept “fine.” Everyone avoids the real conversation. Then when the surface level version of events gets dismissed with “just let it go,” the survivor learns their full truth is too much.
Studies on traumatic invalidation show this: when your emotional reality gets dismissed, minimized, or denied during vulnerable moments, you start believing your experiences are unreasonable or insignificant. You feel anger, shame, guilt, and worthlessness.
You question your worth.
What Survivors Need to Hear
Instead of “just let it go,” I needed two things:
It’s not your fault.
And: Ever hear about a trauma bond?
When someone said those words… when I learned about trauma bonds… everything shifted. I realized if I’m not the problem, then there’s no solution I create. It ends when the abuser wants it to end, not when I’m good enough.
That realization put the power back into me.
Real support returns power to the survivor. “Just let it go” strips it away by making us responsible for managing everyone else’s comfort with our pain.
Research confirms this: feeling pressured to forgive is a common reason trauma survivors avoid mental health services. Those who force or encourage survivors to forgive cause harm and sabotage recovery. Clinical studies show there’s no consensus about whether forgiveness is necessary for healing.
The Difference Between Genuine Healing and Performance
Authenticity is rare in healing culture.
We start healing when we stop lying to ourselves. But “just let it go” asks survivors to lie. To pretend we’re fine, pretend it didn’t matter, pretend we move on before we’re ready.
When survivors are pressured to forgive before their pain is fully witnessed, it feels similar to the original trauma. You’re being asked to bypass your experience, disconnect from your truth, and protect someone who hurt you.
That’s not healing. That’s re-traumatization wearing a spiritual mask.
The Instagram quotes, the forgiveness narratives, the pressure to move on… this is toxic positivity dismissing the real pain trauma survivors face. When we’re told to “just be positive,” it implies our difficult emotions are wrong or we’re failing at recovery.
Toxic positivity reinforces victim shaming and makes trauma recovery more difficult.
Ownership Versus Dismissal
There’s a difference between someone else telling you to let it go and you choosing to break patterns yourself.
When I look in the mirror now, I realize: we’re choosing to stay. We’re choosing to forgive. We were conditioned, and it’s our responsibility to break patterns and uncondition ourselves.
That’s ownership.
When someone else tells you to let it go, that’s dismissal.
You’re not on anyone else’s schedule. Healing has no expiration date. The journey focuses on creating healthy boundaries, refusing to hold toxic secrets, learning to prioritize your needs, and healing the younger parts of yourself stuck in trauma.
If forgiveness isn’t part of your journey, nothing is wrong with you.
What Society Needs to Shift
We need to stop creating victims.
The concept of trauma bonding focuses on the survivor’s emotional state rather than the perpetrator’s manipulation. Terms like trauma bonding and codependency blame the survivor’s psychology for continued contact with an abuser.
When we label a survivor with “trauma bonding,” we ignore the actions of others making it harder to leave. We’re not seeing their actions as a logical form of resistance to abuse.
Society needs to shift from comfort-based dismissal to empathy-based support. Sit with discomfort instead of reaching for easy phrases. Ask more questions instead of offering quick solutions.
Some of the deepest wounds aren’t caused by what happened to us, but by how others responded when we tried to speak about it.
Stop telling survivors to just let it go.
Ask what they need. Believe them. Validate that their timeline is their own.
Real healing begins when we stop lying to ourselves about what happened and what we need. Not when we perform forgiveness for everyone else’s comfort.
The power returns when survivors reclaim their timeline, their truth, and their definition of what healing means.
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