The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fck

what we feel to be true in that moment. So when we have a great relationship
with our sister, we’ll interpret most of our memories about her in a positive
light. But when the relationship sours, we’ll often come to see those exact
same memories differently, reinventing them in such a way as to 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 Meredith’s highly stressful reporting job or her poor relationships
that were making her so unhappy; it must be something else, something
deeper.