A student opens her phone to find her peers mocking her appearance over social media, tagging her in posts that humiliate her. Tears welling, she swipes past each notification without replying. “Let them,” she thinks, hoping silence will spare her further pain. But her quietness doesn’t improve her situation. Instead, it empowers the tormentors, leaving her feeling isolated with the aggression unchallenged.
Mel Robbins preaches that when people hurt, frustrate, or disappoint us, the smarter path is not the instinctual confrontation, but instead the route of disengagement. “When you ‘Let Them’ do whatever it is that they want to do, it creates more control and emotional peace for you,” Robbins said in The Mel Robbins Podcast. This claim, which appears to promote empathy through her coined, catchy phrase, has won her over 37 million monthly downloads of her podcast and 1.2 million copies of her Let Them Theory book sold, according to SiriusXM Media.
But what sounds like a method of emotional release is, in effect, the perfect way to abandon accountability and deter conflict. To treat disconnecting with actions affecting you as a virtue is to empower harm and promote surrender of one’s personal power. Robin’s “Let Them Theory” encourages apathy by teaching people to ignore harmful behavior instead of confronting it, creating a society where injustice and mistreatment inevitably go unchallenged.
The theory’s appeal is real. People are exhausted by conflict, especially today, where people take to social media to easily voice their negative thoughts. Yet psychologists have been clear that systematic disengagement is an avoidance strategy, and avoidance tends to magnify problems, not solve them. A decade-long study of more than 1,200 adults published in the National Library of Medicine found that those who relied more heavily on avoidance coping reported increased life stress and showed a trend of worsening depressive symptoms over time.
These harmful side effects of the aversion glorified by Robbins’ Let Them Theory extend to personal relationships, where avoidance corrodes trust and support networks. The American Psychological Association states that emotional withdrawal is a core feature of trauma responses and that persistent avoidance maintains distress rather than relieving it. When a mantra elevates withdrawal as a default response, it risks validating a habit psychologists try to help people unlearn. The short-term relief of not speaking up can become long-term anxiety about everything someone leaves unsaid.
Robbins is aware of some caveats, noting that “Let Them” is not necessarily permission for dangerous or discriminatory conduct and that self-advocacy still matters. That nuance is clearly important; however, the problem is what happens when a nuanced theory becomes a trend. Psychologists interviewed by ABC about the viral phrase warned that the version often portrayed by social media risks teaching people to tolerate patterns that should be addressed.
There is also the civic cost of normalization, exemplified by the well-documented social science theme of the bystander effect, which explains that intervention towards an issue plummets when people assume someone else will handle the problem. If everyone “lets them,” no one helps.
History makes this point at an even larger scale, as change has come from people who refused to simply let things be: workers did not win protections by accepting exploitation, women did not gain suffrage by deciding that confrontation was stressful and therefore optional, and civil rights did not expand because bystanders chose inner peace.
There are moments when letting go is actually the right decision. It is important to ask whether the issue is a one-off or a pattern, whether harm is minor or increasing, and whether silence keeps your dignity or prevents future wrongdoing. If the answer points to working to mend a problem, choose engagement. If the answer points to unnecessary bickering over a simple mistake, choose to “let them.”
This editorial reflects the views of the Editorial Board and was written by Maddie Shoop-Gardner. The Editorial Board voted 9 in agreement, 6 somewhat in agreement, and 2 refrained from voting.
