There is often an event in our life that impacts upon us so deeply we never really move on from it. Many people will tell you to ‘get over it’, but it’s like a tattoo, it becomes a part of us and a part of our identity. Often this event in our life didn’t even feel that significant at the time it was taking place, but the event just keeps coming up in our mind and we re-live that situation again and again.
Coming to terms with our past relationships and what they presented to us is what we all try and do, but some ex-lovers leave a stain on the soul that just won’t shift. We can still think of a person we went to school with, or have more emotion for our ex of five years ago than for our current partner. Often when we can’t get over someone we feel a sense of real grief. The same kind of grief as when someone dies, but with the added dimension that we feel we can’t truly grieve if the person is still living. The grief we feel when someone dies is said to be a sadness caused by all of the things you wish you had said or done that never happened. We become sad about the future we will never have with them, we have a sense of failure and loss like we have lost an aspect of ourselves and can feel lost in the world. This grief has a very much stronger element but the long lasting emotions of grief at the end of a relationship can feel much the same.
We find it hardest to let go and move on from the memory of a relationship that caused us to least be like our real-true-selves. The situations where you didn’t say what you wanted to, but also when you put on an act to please someone else or to keep the peace.
For example, how many times have you been in a hostile situation and afterwards gone over and over it, wishing you had said or done something different in reaction to it? Because Fear had crept in and said “I better not”, or it overreacts and makes you say things out of character or honesty. Connection with our integrity and acting from the truth of who we are really is so important. Being in our truth and not in our ego is the only way to be; it means our relationships work, but also we don’t have the nightmare of living in regret.
Often in a bad relationship we are working in order to try and turn the relationship around and make it better. We think if we love hard enough or long enough, if we don’t say our needs and create who we think they want then they will stay. By creating this person we can often hide who we really are and swallow what we really want to say.
As children we often aren’t able to say what we want and express ourselves, and our childhoods may contain unresolved issues we go back to and replay in our minds. Relationships, situations and anything where we have left something unsaid, or anytime we weren’t authentic, leaves an imprint of unfinished business we just can’t seem to move on from. Undoing now is the key to letting go. The way to undo is through acceptance of you. Understanding the lesson, having gratitude for it and forgiving yourself. It is us who hurt at the end of the relationship if we weren’t real. This means ideally being the real you with everyone you meet all the time.
