Letting Go
Fall is my favorite season. This not a unique perspective in the least. Loving fall has nearly become a cliché personality trait. Most people love fall. And what’s not to love? Cooler mornings and nights. Pumpkins on porches and in coffee. Football and Halloween and all the beauty of the changing colors of the leaves. Fall is special.
There is this cheesy meme I see every fall that says, “The trees are about to teach us how lovely it is to let things go.” I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. What does it mean to truly let go? How do we let go? What do we let go?
Let go of guilt and shame. Guilt is the feeling you have when you believe you have done something wrong (even if you haven’t). You can still believe you are a good person who did a bad thing when you feel guilty. Shame differs from guilt in that you believe you are bad if you fail to live up to your own or others’ standards. You can let go of guilt by exploring whether you even need to feel guilty, taking responsibility for your wrongdoing, apologizing and making amends, and then adjusting your behavior accordingly. You can let go of shame by examining whether shame fits the facts of your situation and if the shame you feel is even yours to hold at all. Shame is often deeply rooted in generational family trauma. Being a cycle breaker means letting go of the shame you carry by appropriately assigning responsibility. I recommend doing this important work on shame with a mental health professional.
Let go of self-beliefs that no longer serve you. As children, you developed beliefs about yourself that made sense within the contexts of being a child, within your family, and within your environment. The problem is that these beliefs are often inaccurate or unhelpful or both, especially if you ever felt invalidated or were hurt by others. As you get older, you must challenge these beliefs both for accuracy and for their ability to help you grow. Far too often you bring these beliefs with you, like bricks piled in a backpack you can’t set down, and they keep you from having the relationships and happiness you deserve. You can let go of these self-beliefs by checking them against what you know to be true about yourself, what others you trust know to be true about you, and by working with a mental health professional if you are unable to sort through the noise in this process. The story you tell yourself about you affects all aspects of your life, so let’s make sure the story is honest, fair, kind, and compassionate.
Let go of people who don’t love you well. Relationships are complicated. They can’t be categorized as all good or all bad. If they could, you wouldn’t agonize about how close to be with your family, ending friendships, or breaking up with partners. As such, you are often confused about how to manage your relationships if they don’t feel as fulfilling as you’d like. Learning to set and hold boundaries that keep you safe within your relationships is a first step in deciding when and if to let go of someone. If someone repeatedly crosses or disrespects your boundaries, you get to choose if you re-draw the boundary to be more rigid or if you end the relationship. You can also put distance between yourself and those who don’t love you well by disconnecting your self-worth from how they treat you. You alone get to choose how much power you give others in terms of your value. This is a difficult but necessary process for you to be able to love yourself, which is the foundation of all other love. A mental health professional can also assist you in this work.
All this writing about letting go has firmly planted the Frozen theme song in my head. Now it’s in your head. You’re welcome. Elsa was onto something though. She sang, “Let it go, and I’ll rise like the break of dawn. Let it go, the perfect girl is gone.” Let go of guilt and shame, of self-beliefs that no longer serve you, and of people who don’t love you well. You can’t ever be perfect. Trust me, I’ve tried. And you can be well. And whole. And healthy. One step toward that end is to let go of what you no longer need. Like the trees preparing for winter, I hope your process of letting go prepares you for the next season of life. Happy Fall!
