What Will You Let Go of In the New Year?

We’ve all been hurt. There isn’t an adult alive today who hasn’t experienced some kind of emotional pain. If you’re ready to let go of the past so you don’t keep reliving the pain, now is a great time to ask the question:  What will you let go of in the New Year?

How you handle the past is often more important than what actually happened that caused the hurt in the first place. Holding onto your grievances indefinitely will most likely hurt you more than it hurts the offending party.

You may blame others for the pain you experience from past hurts. You want someone to acknowledge that what they did was wrong and apologize to you. Unfortunately, while you’re waiting for an apology, you are giving others power over you. It can leave you feeling powerless if others choose not to admit they were wrong or offer an apology. It creates a painful cycle that perpetuates your unhappy feelings.

You have a choice. You can be an active participant in your life, or you can remain stuck in reliving the pain of the past.

“We do not heal the past by dwelling there; we heal the past by living fully in the present.” ~Marianne Williamson

Why Letting Go is Hard

I’ve struggled with letting go and moving on from anger, guilt, shame, resentment, grief, and hurt. I’ve struggled with freeing myself from past mistakes and failed relationships. I’ve tried writing letters, talking about it, or just trying to forget. When I’ve done these things without completely letting go, it has occasionally provided a temporary fix. But those lingering attachments to the hurt have caused me to feel stuck in limbo between my past and my future.

Even when I’ve been fully aware of the importance of letting go and moving on, I’ve experienced times in my life when an attachment to a past hurt has caused me to needlessly suffer. Holding on to what I don’t want has blocked me from attracting what I do want in my life.

Letting go is essential. But, it’s not always easy. The only way you can accept new joy and happiness in your life is to make space for it. If you are consumed by pain, anger and hurt, there isn’t room for anything new.

I’ll share some things that have helped me to let go and move on.

Five Tested Tips to Help You Let Go and Move On

1. Acknowledge your pain.

Express what you’re feeling, whether it’s directly to the person who hurt you, or by venting to a friend, writing your thoughts and feelings in a journal, or writing a letter you never send to the other person. Doing this will help you understand specifically what your hurt is about. Don’t sugar-coat this. It’s important that you allow yourself to be raw and vulnerable during the process of purging your thoughts and feelings.

You cannot focus on the problem while finding the solution…because the solution is never found at the same level where the problem lies. That’s why you need to shift focus.

Before you can shift focus, you must first acknowledge and accept what is. For example, if you want to let go of guilt, start by first accepting that you’re feeling guilty. Don’t argue with your thoughts and feelings or resist them – no “shoulding” on yourself! Don’t try to suppress them. Instead, simply give them permission to exist.

Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it. — Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

To accept your feelings of guilt over something that happened in the past, tell yourself, “Yes, I’m guilty.”

This doesn’t mean that what you’re saying is true. This is a simple technique to control negative thoughts and emotions so they don’t control you. By agreeing with them, the battle between you and your thoughts ends. When there’s nothing more to argue about, your thoughts lose their power over you.

If you’ve held onto something for a long time, it may feel like an old familiar friend, but these are not good friends to hold onto. Instead of trying harder to let go, accept fully where you are. Embrace your negative thoughts and feelings completely. Embrace all of it so you can release yourself from their grip and end the battle.

2. Make the decision to let it go and forgive.

If you don’t make a conscious choice to let go, you could end up getting stuck and not moving on from your past hurt. Letting go includes forgiving the other person and yourself.

“Not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die.” -Anne Lamott

Forgiving does not mean that you forget another person’s bad behaviors, or that you condone what the other person did. Forgiveness is an important part of letting go of something in the past that cannot be changed.

Forgiving yourself is also important. You may blame yourself for something. While you’ve had some part to play in the past, there’s no reason you need to keep beating yourself up over it. Forgiving yourself will help you to live in future peace and happiness.

3. Stop being the victim and blaming others.

Being the victim can feel good … like being on the winning team of yourself against the world. No amount of blaming has ever fixed a problem. So why choose to invest so much thought and energy toward someone who has wronged you?

You have a choice — to continue to feel bad about someone else’s actions or to start feeling good about your life right now. This requires that you take 100% responsibility for your own life and happiness, rather than giving such power to others and being the victim.

It’s also important to acknowledge your responsibility for whatever happened. While you may not have had the same amount of responsibility for causing the hurt you experienced, there may have been a small part that you are responsible for.

If you were to rewind time and do it over, what different choices would you have made? Would you have been a more active participant rather than a passive victim? How have you allowed the pain from a past experience to become your identity?

Stop telling yourself that same old story where you are the victim of another person’s actions or behavior. Instead, acknowledge and complete the past by learning from it … an important part of the process of letting go and moving on in a positive way. This will help you avoid repeating negative patterns.

4. Choose what you’ll focus on.

Our thoughts and feelings emit a vibrational energy that we send out into the world. What we send out comes back.

“I was once asked why I don’t participate in anti-war demonstrations. I said that I will never do that, but as soon as you have a pro-peace rally, I’ll be there.” –Mother Teresa

Whatever we give our attention to — wanted or unwanted – will grow. If you focus on peace, love, joy, and happiness, you’ll experience more of that. If you focus on hate, bitterness, pain, regret, and guilt, you’ll experience more of that.

The same goes for letting go. Unless you’re able to truly let something go — meaning that you no longer give any attention to it — you’re more likely to focus on what you don’t want and you’ll attract more of that into your life.

It’s important that you first acknowledge that you have the choice to either to hold onto the pain or to move into the future without it. Part of letting go includes acknowledging that you have a choice.

When you leave something behind and don’t know what to replace it with, you leave space for the unknown, which can trigger fear. Change is scary, especially when you don’t know what’s next. That’s why you might find yourself clinging to the unwanted, since that’s what’s familiar and known to you.

To make sure that doesn’t happen, consciously decide what’s coming next. Rather than pushing away the unwanted, invite the wanted. For example, if you want to let go of anxiety and self-doubt, invite peace and confidence. Consciously make choices that will help you attract what you want into your life.

5. Focus on joy in the present moment.

You can’t undo the past, but you can choose to make today the best day of your life.

When you focus on the present moment, it’s impossible to think about the past. When past memories creep into your consciousness, acknowledge them and then make a conscious choice to welcome joy and happiness into your life. Tell yourself, “It’s okay. That was the past, and now I’m focused on my own happiness and choosing _____.”

It’s time to invite what you desire. Imagine, visualize, and fantasize about what you’d love to have instead in your life. Focus on the wanted, not the unwanted.

Are you ready to let go?

Your life no longer needs to be defined by your pain. It’s not healthy, it adds to your stress, it hurts your ability to focus on what’s important to you, and it impacts every other relationship you have. Every day you choose to hold on to the pain is another day everybody around you has to live with that decision and deal with the fallout.

Do yourself – and everybody around you — a favor: Let go of the past and choose to be fully present in the here and now.

If you’re ready to let go of the past, let’s schedule a no-cost, no-pressure Discovery Call today. It’s time to welcome happiness into your life.

Additional Resources:

• Blog: Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life!
• Blog: Find Happiness and Success Will Follow – Part 2
• Blog: Is Fear Running Your Life?
• Guide: Cultivating Happiness: Living Life on Your Terms
• Guide: Reclaim Your Power: How to Deal with Toxic People in Your Life & Business

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