What we lose when we "let them"
Mel Robbins is right about the destination. She just doesn't give us the map.
A good friend of mine sent me a message recently that I keep coming back to.
She’d been away on a work trip, stuck in back-to-back meetings with a boss she found herself constantly triggered by, and who she could tell was equally triggered by her. Every conversation required careful navigation. She was exhausted by the end of each day.
She went for a walk, found a bookshop, and found “The Let Them Theory” by Mel Robbins. She’s not the type of person who usually goes in for self-help books, but, in her own words, times were desperate.
She got the audiobook and listened to it over the next two days. It gave her, she said, a toolkit to get through the week. A sense of empowerment when she felt she had very little. It was, she said, a life raft.
Having read the book and felt the immediate relief that those two simple words can bring, I connect with her story. I’m sharing it with her permission.
“The Let Them Theory” sold nine million copies in its first eleven months. Number one on the New York Times, Amazon, Audible, and the Sunday Times bestseller lists simultaneously. Named book of the year by Goodreads, Barnes and Noble, Publishers Weekly, and Amazon.
On Goodreads, readers describe the experience of reading it in almost identical terms. “I find myself lighter, more compassionate and already feeling the benefits.” Another: “I have learned that it is not my responsibility to manage people’s moods and feelings. It is my responsibility to manage me.”
People finish this book feeling lighter, and that feeling is real. And it is worth taking seriously. Because it points to something true.
The core of Mel Robbins’ argument is this: stop trying to control how other people behave, what they think of you, and what choices they make. When someone disappoints you, criticises you, or behaves in ways you don’t like, say “let them.” The second half is “let me”: redirect your energy to your own choices rather than burning it trying to manage theirs.
The destination she is pointing to is genuine. Although she’s talking about reactions in all areas of life, in the work context, we all want to be in a place where we don’t need our boss to validate us, we stop burning energy managing how colleagues perceive us, and we stop organising our behaviour around other people’s reactions.
The freedom she describes is available.
The problem is what the book says about how we get there.
Robbins treats the compulsion to control other people’s behaviour as a mindset problem. A habit. Something we can override with a two-word phrase.
I see it differently: the need to manage how others see us, behave toward us, or react to us is a wound.
It is what formed when we learned, early enough that we can’t consciously remember learning it, that other people’s moods and reactions determined whether we were safe. Whether we were loved. Whether we had a place.
That learning lives in the body. It runs faster than language. A phrase can’t reach it.
My friend knew this, somewhere. Her message ended with a line that struck me:
“I do really appreciate it as a mantra in the moment. But I think the ‘Let Me’ part is key. Let me get curious about what caused this trigger.”
That sentence is the whole map.
Because what she is describing, without using the language, is the trailhead.
Therapist and writer David Richo puts it this way:
Our goal is not to root out all our triggers but to find a trailhead from them into the psychological and spiritual work that has been so long awaiting us. This is how we turn our triggers into tools.
A lot of what drives our behaviour at work is invisible to us. The defences are too well-built. The patterns are too familiar, and the stories we tell about ourselves are too well rehearsed.
Most of the time, our shadow material stays exactly where it is, doing its work without ever being seen.
The moment I am triggered or feel the need to control somebody, or experience any kind of “outsized reaction” in response to somebody’s behaviour, something hidden has broken through to the surface.
That moment is a gift.
It’s one of the rare occasions when the normally invisible becomes visible, when the wound announces itself clearly enough that it can actually be worked with.
“Let Them” as a mantra gets you through the week. It is a genuine life raft. But a life raft is for survival, not navigation. The moment we feel stable enough to put it down, the more important question is waiting: what was that, and where does it lead?
There is a second, perhaps unexpected, gift hidden inside our reactions.
Sometimes we cannot “let them”, because what they are doing freely is something we have forbidden in ourselves.
I’m going to find it hard to observe my colleague being openly ambitious if, somewhere along the way, I learned that ambition is selfish, unseemly, too much.
I will struggle with my boss being unavailable if I learned that I always had to be available for others.
Jung called this the golden shadow: the disowned strengths, the suppressed qualities, the parts of ourselves we buried alongside the ones we were ashamed of. We project them outward onto the people who seem to have them. And then we resent those people for having what we gave away.
The irritation is pointing directly at something we lost. Inside the frustration is a quality waiting to be reclaimed. Wave the reaction away, and we lose the signpost. Stay with it, and we find our way back to something we didn’t even know we were missing.
My friend also mentioned something else in passing, almost as an aside.
She knew she was triggering her boss, too.
That detail is the mirror thesis in a single sentence. The activation was mutual. Which means the material was mutual. Two people, in a room, each showing the other something neither could see on their own.
“Let Them” helped my dear friend survive the week. That matters. I am not dismissing it.
But the week was also full of information. About her. About what is unfinished. About what has been waiting.
Saying “let them” and moving on costs us that. The discomfort of staying with the reaction is harder to bear, but it shows us something we could not have otherwise easily seen.
The wound was already there. The workplace is where it surfaces. The boss is the mirror. The reaction is the material.
That is where the actual work starts. And it begins by refusing to let the moment go.
If this landed, you might also want to read: Coming Out Sideways - on how the parts of us we have denied some out to the people around us.