The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F_ck

explain our present-day anger toward her. That sweet gift
she gave us last Christmas is now remembered as
patronizing and condescending. That time she forgot to
invite us to her lake house is now seen not as an innocent
mistake but as horrible negligence.
Meredith’s fake abuse story makes far more sense when
we understand the values in which her beliefs arose. First of
all, Meredith had had a strained and difficult relationship
with her father throughout most of her life. Second,
Meredith had had a series of failed intimate relationships
with men, including a failed marriage.
So already, in terms of her values, “close relationships
with men” weren’t doing so hot.
Then, in the early 1980s, Meredith became a radical
feminist and began doing research into child abuse. She was
confronted with horrific story after horrific story of abuse,
and she dealt with incest survivors—usually little girls—for
years on end. She also reported extensively on a number of
inaccurate studies that came out around that time—studies
that it later turned out grossly overestimated the prevalence
of child molestation. (The most famous study reported that
a third of adult women had been sexually molested as
children, a number that has since been shown to be false.)
And on top of all of this, Meredith fell in love and began a
relationship with another woman, an incest survivor.
Meredith developed a codependent and toxic relationship
with her partner, one in which Meredith continually tried to
“save” the other woman from her traumatic past. Her
partner also used her traumatic past as a weapon of guilt to
earn Meredith’s affection (more on this and boundaries in
chapter 8). Meanwhile, Meredith’s relationship with her
father deteriorated even further (he wasn’t exactly thrilled
that she was now in a lesbian relationship), and she was
attending therapy at an almost compulsive rate. Her
therapists, who had their own values and beliefs driving
their behavior, regularly insisted that it couldn’t simply be