The art of letting go.

Post Reply New Topic

I am feeling like I am on the brink of a major breakthrough in my recovery. Not sure if I should feel anxiety, fear, happiness, relief, or all of the above.

The art of letting go.

It was explained to me in terms that was easy for me to grasp earlier today. It used to annoy me when people told me to "let it go" when I talked about everything I lived through. It felt like my trauma was being minimized and ignored. It felt like I was being told to keep it under wraps and sweep it under the rug.

But that was not what they meant at all.

The art of letting go is the art of giving the degree of f***s that the people who hurt me in the past deserve. Which is an absolute zero.

I have kept hatred in my heart for most of my life. It is hard to imagine life without it at this point. It was always my most faithful of companions.

But I do not need it at this point in my life.

When I am wallowing in resentment, it leads me into wallowing in entitlement. Entitlement to pick up a bottle. Entitlement to smoke an obscene amount of Mary Jane. Entitlement to be an as*hole to the people around me. Entitlement to dismiss my responsibilities as a working adult.

I am guzzling poison, hoping that the ones that hurt me will die.

(Not literally.)

I need to knock this s**t off.

Forgiveness is out of my depth at this point. Letting go is easier to handle. I have only today. The past is the past, the future is not promised. I can work on the foundation for a better future, but the choices I make every second I breathe will shape that. The choices I make in the present moment should be at the top of my mind.

I hope this feeling becomes consistently present in your life.

Like a psychic once explained to me, the people who hurt you don't deserve jack s**t from the one they abused. You don't have to think about them, you shouldn't dwell on what they did to you. If you keep that hate and resentment in your heart, they win. And they don't deserve to win.

It is difficult

I am finding that prayer is helping me out with this. I just take it out of my hands, and put it in the hands of God. Then I don't have to worry about it anymore. Resentments are gone until I choose to pick them up again. But I can always pass them on up whenever I want to, as well.

This might all be mental masturbation, as I theoretically do not know if there is a God or not, but faith in something higher than myself, even if it might be fictional, is effective in this respect.

Thank you for sharing your revelation. It's a beautiful sentiment, and it's very true that one has the power to free oneself from the (very natural and understandable) resentment and anger that are the result of abuse. It's not something that you HAVE to carry around with you for ever, and it serves the abusers better than it serves oneself and one's own state of mind to hold on to old wounds like that. Freedom from those resentments is a gift one can gift oneself, but you have to be ready to do it, you have to go through the work of understanding what happened to you and where the responsibility for it lies (solely with the abusers).

I am glad you have worked through your experiences so that you feel you can find a measure of peace in letting things go. It's hopeful and reassuring to others that may be going through similar pains, that they might be able to find some peace too. I had a similar revelation years ago and it changed my life for the better and allowed for me to learn to love myself and to take better care of myself than I had in the past. It's a skill like riding a bicycle--once you learn it, you never forget it and you can continue to use it for the rest of your life, and with practice you get better at it.

I find this concept good but the actual doing of it very difficult. I am wondering if it has to do with the aspie perseverations. In my case, I was deeply hurt by someone i love very much at a time when we were both under a lot of stress. I have tried my very hardest to forget and as long as nothing happened to remind me of the hurt, i was content to let it be "water under the bridge." But a situation came up this week that brought back the memories so strongly that I had debilitating panic attacks and multiple meltdowns over a period of several days.

I wrote it all down for my therapist to read as i have a hard time speaking it. I am waiting on my appt coming up and we will discuss it then.

An aside to OP's reference to prayer helping: I too believe in God and i don't disbelieve in Him just because i have a hard time with this. I do have a hard time with the Christian teaching on forgiveness as a lot of it is based on this "letting go" and one is told it is sin NOT to "let go."

But when your brain chemistry clings to something that you desperately want to "let go" and desperately want to forget as you know the person loves you very much and never meant to hurt you...then what? This is where i have a difficult time. I think there is more to it than a simplistic "if you don't let go of your pain, you are willfully sinning." Seems like there should be some grace extended to those of us with issues of perseveration where it pertains to forgiveness and letting go of hurts. Not trying to get into a PPR discussion as i know this topic is not in that forum...so all religious stuff aside, how does one "let go" when one's brain is stuck in perseveration?

I applaud your hard work to get yourself to a better place, KagamineLen. It is a hard uphill climb some days but you sound like you are definitely on the right track.