Letting Go Of The Ghosts Of Your Past

“The truth is, unless you let go, unless you forgive yourself, unless you forgive the situation, unless you realize that the situation is over, you cannot move forward.”

 Steve Maraboli

In the wake of a messy breakup, your mind is spinning. Your heart is racing. Your thoughts are splattered with “could-haves,’ ‘should-haves,’ and ‘what-ifs. You want to move on but your heart is one big gooey mess.

Trying to forget, letting go and all that “good stuff” sounds easy, but when you’re stuck in the thick of it, it’s not at all easy. Our life seems to be an endless “trigger” from the past. Everything reminds us of “him”, “her”, it…

Letting Go And Moving On

The problem lies with the fact that the past is now over. Many of us won’t accept that even though we are educated enough to know that history, well, it’s just that. Still that memory comes to haunt us and we struggle to let go. In fact, we keep feeding the pain of that memory, suffering, often in silence.

“He did this to me”, she did that to me”, “I never should have said what I did”.

The truth is. Although it’s invisible, our past can actually stop us living in the present, let along the future. We can often feel “stuck”. The memory is too painful. It’s almost as if we want to keep punishing ourselves.

We are being constantly reminded of the pain of the past, these are called “triggers” It could be a song that comes on the radio, it could be a movie you once went to with your ex, these triggers are painful, in fact they are as painful as the shot from a gun, the trigger is the gun, it’s the pain that’s driving you insane.

Getting Your Ghosts Exorcised

So, how can we let go of these ghosts. Because this is all they are. They only exist in your mind, they are painful memories stopping you from moving on.

Snippets from “Letting Go” by Rebecca Collins

Confusing the past with the present

Do you feel let down by a friend that you trusted? If so, is the pain really proportional to what they did or does it go back to the time when your parents forgot to pick you up from school or when you didn’t get what you wanted for Christmas? Could it be that, deep inside, you find it hard to handle disappointments or that you have deeply-embedded trust issues?

Being mad at your friend for letting you down is a reasonable reaction, although that pang of pain could be linked to something entirely different that happened years ago. As we keep adding pieces to our patchwork quilt, it gets heavier and heavier, becoming so large that it literally weighs us down and we cannot move. 

We tell ourselves we are angry with someone for one thing when, in reality, we are upset about something entirely different. To overcome that emotional response, it’s vital that we let go of the past.

If your partner leaves you, those feelings of rejection can pile up on top of unresolved experiences of abandonment from your childhood. You will continue the narrative of being unworthy of love (because that is how you felt way back when you were younger). All that really happened was that your partner decided to leave an adult relationship that wasn’t working for them anymore, for whatever reason. If you are able to forgive the parents or carers who ‘abandoned’ you when young, it will be much easier to cope with your partner’s decision to leave. 

End.

Forgiving someone for something they did doesn’t mean you have to speak to them again, become their friend or in fact ever see them again, BUT, most importantly, it lets you go. You are freeing yourself.

And if you want forgiveness for something you said or did that was wrong. Forgive yourself. We are all human and we all make mistakes. This doesn’t make us a bad person, it just means we can’t do the right thing all of the time. We can’t.

Give yourself a break. Accept the past but don’t stay there. It’s over.

Bad people sometimes do good things, good people sometimes do bad things, it’s human nature. Once you stop bringing those painful memories along with you, you will break the chain and let go. Life is too short to let the past dictate your future.

“Letting go doesn’t mean that you don’t care about someone anymore. It’s just realizing that the only person you really have control over is yourself.”

 Deborah Reber

Have a great day.

Don’t forget to leave a comment below..

Keith

P.S This is Rebecca Collins’s latest book, “Letting Go”