Letting Go Quote by Stephen Bennett

Bennett’s line is doing more than drawing a rough analogy; it’s staging a moral triage. By calling a “lifestyle” comparable to drug addiction and alcoholism, he collapses identity into pathology, then smuggles in the conclusion: the humane, responsible stance is exit, not acceptance. The phrase “appropriately compared” is the tell. It preemptively defends the comparison as reasonable, not inflammatory, framing dissent as naïveté or political correctness. That single adverb is a shield.

The subtext is about permission and pressure. “Encouraged to seek help to leave” borrows the language of care, therapy, and recovery, but the goal is not harm reduction or well-being on the person’s terms; it’s departure from the lifestyle. “Never encouraged to stay in” is the hard edge: a refusal of accommodation. Even if offered with a pastoral tone, it positions affirmation as complicity, like handing a drink to an alcoholic. That’s rhetorically potent because it recruits a widely shared social script - intervention as love - and repurposes it as a mandate.

Contextually, this kind of sentence usually surfaces in debates where one side wants to reframe a contested identity or practice as self-harm (and therefore ethically corrigible), often in religious or culture-war settings. The intent isn’t just persuasion; it’s delegitimization. Once the “lifestyle” is classified as addiction, the conversation stops being about rights or dignity and becomes about treatment, authority, and who gets to define “help.”