Letting Go to Move Forward

Many of us have experienced deep pain when a relationship ends, even if it was our own choice to end it. When we master the art of letting go we are able to live fully in the present. Then the people, feelings or qualities that we were holding onto, can come to us again.

What is letting go? What happens when we hold on?
What are the tools for letting go?

One of the best examples of letting go is parenting, which I have described as a life time of letting go. Gradually we hand over responsibility  to the child for its own life, all the way from feeding and dressing to letting our child go for their full independence. In my interview with Sue Allen on Managing Life Change, we explored what influences our ability to manage the many changes through the stages of life. Sue pointed out that accepting, or even welcoming, change as a natural aspect of life, allows us to move more comfortably through changes. However, 

“…if we avoid the pain or discomfort of  change, we are holding onto the past and our role in it,
and then we actually intensify the pain and its duration.”  Sue Allen

You can prove this to yourself. Next time you are feeling intense emotion about something that isn’t working in your life, that you feel you can’t control, set the intention to let it go. As peacefully and wholeheartedly as you can, say to yourself, “Ok, I let go of this.”

Anouskai by Annalou Oakland

You can strengthen your intention by seeing yourself holding your hand open and imagine what you have been holding onto flying away with your blessing. You will immediately feel a release in the strength of the emotion. Your muscles will relax and it feels as if you start breathing again. When we are holding on,  it is as if we holding our breath. We can’t move forward.

When we hold on, we not only intensify the pain, but we push away the very thing or person we are holding onto. We have all experienced stepping away, either physically or emotionally, from someone who is behaving dependent or controlling around us.

“Our needs are not our love”. Chuck Spezzano

Often if we try to help, we find that their hole doesn’t seem to get filled, or the respite is only temporary. What is happening, is that they can receive no benefit from our giving, because they are holding on so tight, either to us, their own needs or how they want it to be. Imagine it in our previous example, with tense muscles and breath held, what can reach us? Beneath the holding on is fear, their fear that we will leave or stop giving, if they stop holding on.

Underlying Beliefs

We may have an underlying belief that no one will ever love us,  support us, or be there for us. It’s an old belief formed in the past, but we are still holding onto it, and so we keep proving ourselves right. Is this true for you? If we believe that no one will or can help us, the power of our belief stops support coming to us. It’s like an umbrella that prevents the flow of love and support reaching us. Of course, some people will try to help, but after a time they will give up. How much loving and giving is it going to take to disprove our old belief? After all, we have been investing in it for a life time.

Taking ourselves lightly is a great way to let go. Once we can see a mistaken belief, formed in our child’s mind, we get to choose what we want to believe instead. Writing any intentions down always reinforces them. You can put your new belief on the fridge to remind yourself. You can turn it into an affirmation. ( Valerie Thompson interview on affirmations).

“The real voyage of  discovery consists not in seeking new lands
but seeing with new eyes.” Marcel Proust

Our needs are our responsibility, or response-ability. The measure of someone’s love is not how much they meet our needs. Picture a bird sitting in your upraised palm, free to fly if it chooses. How much pleasure does it give you? How much can you love and admire it. Imagine what happens when you close your fingers over it. You may have it, but now it is in pain, and you can’t even see it. Nobody is happy. Any time you are holding on, just imagine opening your palm, letting whatever you have been holding on to sit on your upturned hand. It will help to ease the pressure, may even make you laugh, and overtime will change your habit.

Letting Go is NOT Pushing Away

By Annalou Oakland

It’s important to know that letting go is not the same as pushing away. “I don’t need him/men/her/women,” has nobody fooled!!! We have left the pain and the needs unhealed and marched off into the distance – until the next time someone fails to meet our needs, when all of the pain will come up again

My co author in Life Manual, Master Trainer Jeff Allen, uses a wonderful example of this with the emotion of anger. Many of us don’t like to feel anger, having been taught that feeling anger is wrong. So, everytime the emotion of anger comes up, like yesterday’s newspapers, we take it out and store it in the garage. This can go on for quite some time, with our store of newspaper getting larger and larger, until something triggers us so hard we finally lose our temper. It’s like going out to the garage and dropping in a match. Pretty soon we are all burned out and everyone around us is suffering fire damage;-)

It’s the same with our needs, where we don’t accept them or deal with them ourselves, they store up. We are probably carrying a pretty big dose from childhood too. When the person or thing we have decided was sent to meet all our needs, stops servicing them, or walks out. Guess how we are left feeling?

Taking Care of OUR Needs

What we push away, only hurts us more. Now we are not only tensing our muscles and holding our breath, but we are putting all of energy into pushing. We are forcing ourselves to feel something that is not true for us.  Our needs, (and we all have them as long as we are human, even if we have learned to cover them over to avoid the pain) are our own. Learning how to lovingly meet them and handle them is part of our maturity as a human being. We can ask for help, we can ask for what we would like to have happen – but always with our palms open. The other person has the right to say no, or to be too busy, too tired because they are meeting their own needs. When can even be feeling upset with someone for not meeting our needs, when we haven’t even stated them aloud. People have differing needs, different priorities. What we consider a natural need may come as a complete surprise to someone else. This is a great clue I learned from Chuck Spezzano, which can take some pondering and meditation;

If you can see something is missing, then you are the person who has it to give.

Tools for Letting Go

Feeling our feelings fully is the most basic but powerful way of letting go. Owning our feelings, not spreading them around through blame, takes courage, particularly if our garage is stuffed full with unmet needs. It’s our feelings that are screaming at us, not our needs. It’s our feelings that want attention – to be heard, to be attended to. When we pay attention, recognise them as our own, we can burn through them. We can release them, so we can meet today’s needs, not all our yesterday’s. Then we can look at our options for taking care of ourselves, of being self loving, treating ourselves gently and lightly, because we recognise that the person who wasn’t taking care of us was ourself.

Acceptance is another great tool for letting go. When we can accept what is happening in our lives, a very important stage in recovering from grief after bereavement, then we can move on to our future. Accepting that our needs are not being met, that they are OURs to meet and that all humans have them, puts them into a perspective where we can deal with them. We can look for solutions rather than a person to fulfil them.

When we burn through our feelings, lean into them quietly, knowing that they will dissipate, we can hit new layers, or deeper levels of the pain of unmet needs. But the deeper we are willing to go, the more we are willing to let these old feelings leave, the deeper the level of healing, the deeper the peace we will find, and the deeper the benefit in our happiness and joy. After all, there is no point trying to get yesterday’s, and all our yesterday’s needs met – yesterday has gone. It is time to let them go.

We can be the change we wish to see

You can explore more tools for letting go in Parts Two and Three;

Next Month:  Letting Go and Commitment, The Balancing Act of Relationships.

January:  Letting Go to Move On, The Stages of Letting Go

ADDITIONAL SUPPORT:

If you are ‘negotiating’ around needs with a partner, child or the boss, you may find the Principles of Transformational Communication on Life Manual site, very useful.

More indepth exploration and exercises to Let go of the Past and Holding On can be found in Independence and the Power of Letting Go: Chapter 10 of Life Manual by Jeff Allen and Christine Herbert

Life Manual also has a FREE fortnightly series of newsletters on related topics of personal transformation, such as The Secret of Change, Facing Challenges, and Sample Exercises for Exploring Relationships, Beliefs and Emotions. Link for more information, click on the newsletters  listed in the right hand column for more information or you can subscribe to the FREE series and sample exercises here

I recommend strongly that everyone, and especially a child, who has suffered bereavement get support. In the UK we have a wonderful organisation called CRUSE Bereavement Care. They are often wrongly regarded as something for older people, but that is far from the truth. As I found, they have the best understanding of grief and the stages of grieving. There is a wealth of supportive and helpful publications, immediately downloadable on their website. They have trained counsellors around the UK and their Youth Involvement Project. I was blessed to have a friend who is one of their counsellors, and her extraordinary depth of empathy and knowledge of the grieving process, really helped me through. (My Story – Life is what happens …)

Please let us know of similar organisations in other countries.

And if this helps – Tell a Friend.