Letting Go – Day 24
Letting Go – Day 24
By Jenny Griffin
Letting Go through Crisis: The End of a Relationship
This is another one of those events that can trigger huge changes in your perspective and your life. The longer a relationship has been a part of how you define yourself, the harder it can be. If there are children involved, and/or shared property and resources, these just keep adding to the difficulty of moving on.
Anything we let go of leaves a space, and sometimes it is so wrapped up in other things that we feel more of a bomb crater than a space. As we set out on the road to coupledom, we start to leave parts of ourselves behind, putting them aside perhaps for shared dreams and shared understandings of who ‘we’ are as a unit, not who each of us is as an individual. Resources become entangled as we invest in homes, businesses, cars and lives together. Children, or pets, come along and wangle their way into our hearts as part of that definition of ‘us.’ So when it happens that a relationship has run its course, or partners are separated through crisis, letting go feels like more of a complicated untangling than a simple surrender.
How do you let go of a partner when for five, fifteen or thirty years you’ve called yourself ‘wife,’ ‘partner,’ or ‘husband,’ the words becoming as much a part of your self-definition as others’ definitions of you? It’s a long, slow process, and can be especially painful as you work back through the threads and find ways that your own patterns and behaviors contributed to the unfolding. Accepting responsibility is a way to let go without all the ties that keep you in repetitive patterns of relating, and it’s key in bringing in new perspectives.
So much gets tied up in our relationships, and we base so much of our happiness, self-worth and understanding of who we are in the world, on them. Many of our patterns and beliefs spring from our own experiences in our Family of Origin. We take these perspectives of ourselves and who we are into the world and reflect them out, unconsciously sending out the message that what we seek is something that mirrors those beliefs. So then when we find a relationship, and through it see our deepest fears and secrets reflected back at us, we either shift the energy and make changes, or we play into it and perpetuate the cyclical patterns. If we do this, then we may have more than one relationship that tries to help us grow through these same sticking points.
Relating with others around us is always about our growth, and finding ways to navigate whatever we reflect in each other. Letting go of the ties we’ve built sometimes brings up the old unfinished business, or pinpoints ways in which we’ve allowed our own wants and needs to be swallowed up in the ‘whole’ of the partnership. Letting go reminds us that we cannot be everything to everyone and it may be time to find the parts of ourselves we’ve lost to be fully incorporated individuals again. Wholeness, happiness, self-worth; none of these can be found outside of yourself, and when relationships end, it is because you are being asked to let go of the belief that without the other you are in some way not enough. As you shift your perspective, it opens up the possibility for something even better to enter.
Letting go begins with remembering that you were once an individual and that by staying tied to your partner, emotionally, mentally or spiritually, you are blocking your own journey back to wholeness. The material part of existence that is inevitably tied in with partnership is a mere complication in the grand scheme of things. Step back from the need to hold on to external ideas of who and what you are in the world. Allow for your true power and innate sense to step up and show you the way back to centre. Allow for new perspectives to flood in as you shed outworn ideas of what is and what used to be.
Send gratitude for the fact that you have the capacity to feel such depths of love, for yourself and for others, and let go.
Jenny Griffin
Also known as ‘The Catharsis Coach,’ Jenny loves exploring life’s twists and turns through the lens of transformation. Her own journey through catharsis, a deep, deep letting go of ingrained patterns and beliefs, resulted in a feeling of connectedness, with the world around her and with that wise and wonderful voice within. Jenny has learned to engage with her life and experiences in a way that allows her to use the knowledge gained through them to serve others. When she’s not writing, she’s coming up with new ways to help people move through change with grace and ease.
You can find her at: http://thepowerofchange.me/what-is-the-power-of-change-3/
