Opening Insights: Letting Go
We have all heard the advice:
“Let Go and let GOD” “Oh, just let it go…” “Forget it and move on“
“Don’t think about it – just distract yourself” “Get over it… get on with your life already“
Informational Insights: Well for most of us… that really doesn’t work
It doesn’t work because there are two critical phases of letting go:
- Logical Resolution
- Emotional Acceptance
Logical Resolution – That means it has to make sense. We have to understand, why me? What did I do to deserve this? If we don’t answer these basic questions, we can’t even start the emotional process of letting go.
For example – many times others hurt us and we can’t understand why they did it… they said things that were not only cruel but not true. No matter how hard we try we can’t make sense out of nonsense. For many of us we were in situation that we were only a stand in for someone else. We (as a person) were not involved in the transaction.
Many people try to let it stop there, but there is a little more to it than that…
Emotional Acceptance: Once we understand it we can begin the PROCESS of letting go. Now the real work begins… We pass through a staged process of:
- Denial – It doesn’t bother me and I am going on with my life.
- Bargaining – We feel out of control of our life and try to get into control of our life.
- Anger – We find ourselves feeling betrayed, used, tricked and hostile at everyone.
- Hopeless – We feel defeated and depressed… Angry inwardly but like a victim outwardly.
- Acceptance – We come to accept life is a process of give and take and that the next gift awaits around the corner. To get it we have to have a perspective of equality and we reap what we sow.
- Discover – We come to find Intrinsic Value in our loss and experience the discovery, opportunity and possibility that unfolds as a result of our willingness to be open to a new way.
- Experience – We come to experience that life is about what we have to give and we seek ways to give back and thus, experience the value we have discovered.
When it comes to The Letting Go Process, a key piece to realize and remember is that when we get to Stage 4 and we experience Hopelessness, while we may experience the situation as Hopeless (and it may very well be), we are not Helpless. Once we reach this stage of Hopelessness we have the opportunity to come to Acceptance by discovering the value in what we have lost. When we find the value in the loss we experienced, we can then move from our belief structure to our value system – learn and let go. Once in our value system we can shift our anger at to anger about… and so the cycle goes.
Developing
Emotional Maturity
Letting Go is a natural process that requires Emotional Maturity consisting of five stages. When someone takes a decision away from us, we revert back to childhood and we must work through the Letting Go Process to rebuild our emotional maturity.
We are all in a state of change. Change is what life is all about.
Yet, many people have difficulty with change. Why is this?
At Pocket Wisdom Insights, we believe that we all must go through 5 basic stages of emotional development to become a mature adult. During each stage we learn to fulfill each of our five basic needs. As we learn to fulfill each basic need, our emotional maturity grows.
The following represents the respective stages of development, the fulfillment of needs and emotional maturity. The conclusion is an adult with the ability to have a sense of self and shared authority. With this ability the person can have healthy relationships and contribute/participate as a team player.
There are many things that can cause us to lose our interdependent adult status that is based on relationships, teamwork and shared authority. This directly affects and infects our self-identity and self-esteem.
- Sometimes, when things change we can look and see what happened to us and make a new decision, pick ourselves up and go on with our life.
- Other times, we seem to fall into a hole that we can’t seem to get out of and we keep going over and over the same thing saying, “It isn’t fair” and “Why is this happening to me?”
First Reason
Losing Emotional Authority
There are two reasons why we can’t simply make a new decision, let go and move on:
First, when we are being controlled and manipulated by others, the decisions are being made for us. When this happens, we lose our sense of self-accountability, self-responsibility and self-authority.
- Many times, others make decisions for us because they have power over us and we must accept their decisions.
- Other times, we find ourselves in a place of forced choice. Others limit or control the choices available to us. We are forced to choose something that we did not want or agree with. In essence, our sense of self-authority was taken away.
- There are also times there are no choices. An example of this could be the death of a loved one. That is just the way life is.
- Even worse, we accept the decisions of others because they are the “experts.” They are the doctors, the psychologists, the counselors, the ministers they put labels – their diagnostic opinion – on us. They define our identity in terms of our gender, behavior, and attitude. Our perspective of self becomes based on their personal opinion that we have accepted as our own.
- Last, is the inability to separate reality from fantasy. When life is unacceptable to us and we feel we are powerless to change anything, we then create fantasies or illusions. After a while, we begin to believe them.
The bottom line is…
If we are not involved in the decisions about our life,
we become emotionally powerless to make any new decisions.
Instead, others must make the decision for us, or at least,
we feel the need for others to validate our new decision.
Losing Emotional Authority
Second, our own ego doesn’t want to admit we made a mistake and
we keep trying over and over to make our old decision work.
As a Result, We Emotionally Switch From Adult Back To Child
This collapse causes us to enter a STATE of FEAR that causes us to assume the position of either the helpless child victim or the ego-based adolescent.
HELPLESS VICTIM CHILD
We become the helpless victim when we see ALL the power coming from outside of self. We are the effect of the problem and never the cause. There is no sense of:
- Self-Authority – The ability to make our own decisions, because we see no choices
- Self-Responsibility – The ability to take action, because we don’t know what or how to do anything
- Self-Accountability – The ability to ask and accept feedback, because we don’t know what we have done to ourselves and/or others
The result is that Self-Identity disappears and fear grows. Once we have regressed back to childhood, we then resort to old learned behaviors and attempt to create a false ego to regain our status of equality.
EGO-BASED ADOLESCENT
By resorting to a false ego as a replacement for self-identity and true self-esteem, we substitute fantasy for reality. We begin a process of trying to prove we are okay by controlling what is on the outside… how we look and how we act. Remember, it is our false ego that tells us that if we lose this control of outside events, we will be less than we are now. We still do not have a sense of self identity. Without self-identity we cannot have self esteem. The fear continues to grow.
THE NATURE OF OUR CULTURE
We live in a world that has defined feeling afraid, bad, or sad as wrong. As a result we shut off our feelings by either taking a pill, a drink, having sex, going shopping, spending money, or getting angry. When we don’t resolve and let go of feelings, they accumulate and take over our life. Thus, the solution to the problem inside ourselves is falsely found outside ourselves.
We stay stuck in emotional immaturity, sometimes for our entire life, unless we let go completely.