Letting Go Sometimes Means Facing Things You Don't Want to Face

Now I know the old adage is true “when you let go of your past it make space for something in the future”. But those inspirational insta quotes don’t half cover the messier parts of letting go. Don’t you think?

I personally think it kind of puts a huge amount of gloss and filtre over the essential gritty slog of letting go. I mean you can’t just slap a filtre on the process and jump to the finish line. Even though there are times when I really, really want to!

Especially when the thing you are struggeling to let go of is your own anger at yourself for accepting, putting yourself in or not getting yourself out of a situation that was hurting you.

I have been stuggeling alot with this recently. As someone who lived through domestic violence and mental abuse, honesty I spent alot of time judging my past self for not getting out of what I can now see was a degrading and downright dangerous situation.

And as a coach I know the only way to deal with it is to face it, accept it and forgive myself.

*Despite my inner child shouting “I don’t wannnaaaa!” and stamping her feet!(

It’s hella scary. It’s scary to open those doors to memories I am so ashamed of. It is tough to see the bad choices I made and their consequences. Even just opening that door a little brings up some of the most intense feelings of shame, it was overwhelming.

And I have to be honest this is a work in progress for me right now.

And although it hurts. And it does. Alot.

This process of facing it is helping me, step by step, to let go.

With all the messiness, tears snot and more that it entails. (Like seriously who knew I had that amount of snot in my body).

I see this act of facing it as an act of self love. This process of acceptance, facing my past, accepting it and forgiving myself as a journey of self-love for my future self.

To let go of the shame, and the tears, and the snot, so that she can truly accept and love herself.

Great news is, that it’s starting to work !

Now I spent alot of time researching to learn how to do this. And I used to find these self/love, acceptance/forgiveness (and sorry) woo woo insta filtered articles. They had some great fluffy bits and inspirtational quote feel to them but nothing that would deal with my hot mess of opening that door to the past.

So I did it myself.

And to save you the bother of looking through endless pages of woo-woo and fuzzy wuzzies that aren’t going to get you anywhere I thought I would share the 4 top things that are helping me along the way to letting go.

And just to give you a heads up alot of this letting go is about feeling the feels out.

Get help- Proffessional help

Seriously you need it. I don’t know the pain of you past, although I am truly sorry it is there; the point is you need someone to support you while you face it. To verbalise. To allow you to feel, validate, accept the sadness, that guilt, whatever it is that is all consuming. And it needs to be a proffesional. And I would go as far as to say that even though I am a life coach I reccomend 100% taking it to a theraphist first. Coaching is perfect for recovery, not for the facing it part. It is worth the investment. Just be clear on what you want to get out of it and what kind of person you want to work with. You don’t have to take the first one. Look to find one that works for you.

Love Letter Technique

This is seriously my go to whenever I need to process something painful or involving conflict. It was created my John Gray of Men of From Mars Women are from Venus fame, as a tool for resolving conflict with a partner. I have found it is great for EVERY type of emotional processing. The technique is a step by step guide to releasing emotions. And often I find that before I can face something and see it clearly I need to process those emotions and feel it out. Which is luckily health for you, albeit not attractive. Here is a greate article about the love leter technique that you can use to create your own.

EFT- Tapping for release

Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT), also known as Tapping, is a evidence-based stress-relief technique that has been proven to effectively help with releasing. As a brain-based somatic release technique it tackles stress, fear and trauma where it is produced – in the brain. Stress also gets locked into the body, so being a somatic approach it releases the stress from the body too. I was always non convinced. Until I tried it. And wow for me it works. I don’t have a preferetial technique I just found some videos on youtube found one that worked for me and away I went. It’s my go to on those days when I am processing something that is taking a while to shift and can sometimes attack me with a day of randomised crying and vunerability.

Ho’oponopono- how to forgive

An, at least for me an unpronouncable process, evolved from the ancient Hawaiian prayer of Ho’oponopono, consists in mindfully repeating four simple phrases to allow yourself to forgive and reasure yourself. It creates trust and it is surprising how little people remember how important building trust with yourself is on a self-love and healing journey. The four sentances are:

“I’m sorry, Please forgive me, Thank you, I love you.”

And you can say them in any order. And I reccomend doing it for a minimum of five minutes a max of 20 mins to really allow the message to sink it.

If you are going to use Ho’oponopono then I highly reccomend finding out more about it first. Here is the best guide I have found online.

Letting go is not an easy journey but I am right there with you my friend. It is not a fuzzy wuzzy self-love practice. It is deep self-love and healing. It is something to be done with intention. And when you feel ready to say I am sick and tired of these feelings taking up so much space in my mind, body and soul, that is when you know you are ready to start the journey.

And you are so very welcome to reach out if you feel that I might be able to help on your journey via the website or by DM-ing me on Insta.

I have been working on my self-love journey for a long time and I have gathered some of my favourite tools into this downloadable e-workbook so you can start to really begin to train your self-love muscles and fly!