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Relatives will shake their heads sadly and lecture you on compassion and growth, conveniently forgetting that accountability and decent behavior are also viable options. Suddenly, you're the cruel one for stubbornly refusing to seal up past hurts and bury them in a shiny box labeled forgive and forget.
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Take the woman whose birth parents collected her siblings from foster care while deliberately leaving her behind, like a disappointing item forgotten at grocery checkout. Years later, those siblings comfortably maintain their dislike without a hint of guilt, confident in their lifetime subscription to casual blame. Even her sister-in-law insists that compassion demands overlooking these charming family quirks, that somehow becoming the family doormat will fix everything.
Sometimes, resentment works wonders. Holding grudges won't win family-of-the-year awards, but neither will forgiving people who clearly don't deserve it. Life's too short to hand out forgiveness like expired Halloween candy to relatives who never learned basic decency.
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"AITA for saying my birth parents are awful people and my birth siblings are old enough to realize that?"
The image does not depict the actual subjects of the story. Subjects are models.
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The image does not depict the actual subjects of the story. Subjects are models.
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The image does not depict the actual subjects of the story. Subjects are models.
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‘They had gone to therapy and "worked on their issues" but willingly chose not to do the same for me’: Woman refuses to forgive birth family after bio-parents blamed her for their struggles and decided she was not worth taking
Society likes to sell forgiveness as the ultimate virtue, promising inner peace and moral superiority like it's some kind of magical emotional smoothie. Everyone insists that letting go of bitterness brings happiness, health, and probably clear skin. But here's an unpopular fact: holding grudges can be refreshingly satisfying. Forget emotional Zen—sometimes resentment is exactly the energy boost your soul needs.
Forgiveness is one of humanity's most cherished bad ideas. Society constantly teaches us to nod politely, smile agreeably, and ignore blatant disrespect whenever someone treats us terribly. We repeatedly hear that being the mature one involves calmly enduring poor treatment, as though emotional self-preservation is a silly optional extra reserved for overly sensitive types.
Some families are especially gifted at dispensing the forgiveness Kool-Aid. They genuinely expect you to shrug off years of awful parenting, blatant favoritism, neglect, and emotional abandonment purely because of shared genetic material.
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