With no disrespect to Mel Robbins but I keep seeing “Let Them” treated like the final word in emotional maturity—as if detachment equals wisdom and stepping back equals strength.Don't get me wrong, sometimes it does. But in reality, often it doesn’t.There’s a thin line between healthy boundaries and moral abdication, and we’ve started applauding people for crossing it with a self-care hashtag. “Let them” can be liberation when you’re dealing with what you truly cannot control. It becomes bankrupt when it turns into a permission slip to ignore patterns, tolerate harm, or disengage from the responsibilities of being an adult in a shared world.So I’m proposing a harder framework: Believe Them.Believe the patterns, not the performance.Believe the behaviour, not the biography.Believe what repeats, not what flatters.You might think this is cynical - I am regularly accused of that! And perhaps there is an element of truth there — but in reality this is pattern recognition, neuroscience, and a dose of old-fashioned integrity. The kind that asks us to protect ourselves, yes, but also to intervene when silence becomes complicity.In this piece I unpack why “let them” is often a sophisticated shrug, how habits actually form in the brain, and what real agency looks like when you stop confusing peace with passivity.I am proposing that we no longer stay too long, explain too much, or mistaken hope for evidence!

The provided source is an essay by Michelle de Havilland, CEO of BlackGate and founding partner of MD Coach (www.MDCoach.co.uk), that explores the concept of parentification—the premature assignment of adult emotional and practical responsibilities to children. De Havilland argues that parentification is an insidious form of psychological damage, explaining that children's brains lack the neurological capacity to manage complex adult issues like emotional regulation or financial crises, citing research that the prefrontal cortex is not fully developed until around age 25. The text thoroughly outlines both emotional and practical forms of parentification and details the lasting psychological impacts on adults, including anxiety, difficulty with boundaries, and impaired identity formation. Finally, the essay addresses the challenges parentified adults face when transitioning into appropriate elder care roles for their aging parents, providing coaching frameworks for establishing boundaries and separating past trauma from present adult responsibilities.

The MD Coach PlayBook article written by Michelle de Havilland and available to read for free on www.MDCoach.co.uk/Playbook provides an extensive analysis of "weaponised incompetence," which the author defines as the strategic claim of inability or the deliberate poor performance of a task to evade future responsibility. The text examines this phenomenon in both personal relationships, particularly marriages where it creates a parent-child dynamic and resentment, and professional settings, where it harms team performance and accountability. The author suggests that this behaviour is driven by factors including laziness, gender socialisation, ego protection, and power dynamics, and offers a coaching framework recommending readers stop rescuing and instead enforce clear boundaries and natural consequences to dismantle the manipulation. Ultimately, the piece argues that competence is a matter of dignity and choice, not just ability, and calls for societal changes to challenge the rewarding of helplessness.