A friend once asked me ‘but how do I let him go?’ after she broke up with her boyfriend.  I tried to answer her question, but was at a lost myself.  How do you let go?  Not just of romantic relationships, but things you’ve been holding on to in general? First off, let’s talk about break ups. In this digital age, we sometimes break up with each other via text because we want to extract and receive as minimal pain as possible and yet we would not want the same to happen to us, so why do we do that to someone else?  Don’t complain about someone breaking up with you over text if you’ve also done it.  Instead, we should treat the person like how we want to be treated, because if we do, we can hold our heads up high after the separation and feel we did the best we could.  The person may resent you anyways, but after a cooling off period, they will see that you treated them with respect and understand that.  Break up shouldn’t be about minimizing immediate pain, but minimizing long-term guilt and self-doubt.

If you tell them ahead of time exactly what you intend to do if they do not change, reiterate these things when the time comes and there will be no surprises. Oftentimes, we carry what we feel and never let our partner know until it is too late.  If you can tell them, you will have something to stand on when you are separating from them.  And now comes the hard part-letting go.  Another of my friend asked ‘did you really break up with them if you never let them go?’  Even if you intend to reunite with them, if you don’t give them a substantial amount of time to see their errors and change, you’ll be walking into the same relationship again.  De ja vu all over again.  But letting go is sometimes harder than leaving.  You can physically leave, but you can’t cut off your feelings for them.  So what do we do?  We suppress these feelings and they come out in toxic ways such as overdrinking or over-sexualization.  These things can be fine, but not if you are doing them to punish yourself.  First off, just stay away.

Second, learn to love who you are by yourself. Love single you and relish in all that you are.  Think about what happened in the relationship and what you sacrificed.  Beware of rose-colored glasses as once you break up with them, for you only think of the good things that happened.  Keep a list of all the bad things that happened and once you start to romanticize the past again, break out this list and remind yourself of why you broke up.  Oh, yeah, that bastard made me walk two miles home one time!  Yeah, I kinda forgot about them when I was busy reminiscing about our happy times.  Talk through your feelings because it is healthy.  One thing I realized is that I was holding out for the person he could be one day when I realized I wasn’t with that person.  I was with the person he was today, not one day, and I deserved better than that.  Oftentimes, we live in the what-ifs of our relationships and don’t realize that these things are intangible.  Lasso yourself back to reality with coming to terms with who your partner really is.  They may change into the person you wanted  them to, but it is only because they left you and were forced to change.  You will have missed out on that person, but if you stayed, that wasn’t the person they were going to be.  Is that something you deserve?

Thirdly, as with any trauma that you hold on to, admit what you’re feeling. Tell the world that it hurt like a bitch and you never really fully recovered.  It’s okay to admit that you need help and it shattered you.  We are taught to be so strong all the time that we never think that we should admit to being weak, so we just hold it in and let it consume us from the inside.  Once you acknowledge the trauma and the hurt you went through, give yourself time to grieve.  Unfortunately, when someone close to us dies or we break up with them, we can never have closure, so we have this wound that continues to fester.  Write a letter to them expressing your feelings and how you were affected and then leave it somewhere.  You won’t believe what this can do for you emotionally.  The hardest part can be acknowledging the pain, but once you do and talk about it, you can really look back and see what you had to accomplish to reach where you are today.  When you see that, be proud of who you are and what you’ve done.  Know that you shouldn’t beat yourself up for taking longer than others to resolve these issues.  It doesn’t matter how long it took you to learn the lesson as long as the lesson is learned.  This is your journey and you are the one who can choose how you feel about it.

 

 

I remember watching Rihanna being interviewed back in 2009 by Diane Sawyer about Chris Brown beating her so severely that her face was swollen and bruised. It was an image of a broken woman.  A defeated woman.  A woman who couldn’t stand up for herself, and the public did not see her in this light.  And so, they asked how a strong woman as she could possible LET the abuse happen.  Because physical abuse only happens to the weak.  That was a question that always perturbed and stayed with me long after the story died down.  Perhaps it was because I also saw myself as extremely emotionally strong, so how could I let someone emotionally abuse me?  It was precisely because I thought I was strong that I didn’t see it as abuse.  I always defended myself after he accused me of something minor.  I verbally fought back and told him he was wrong when he tried to say I was wrong.  I gave him ultimatums to change, so I didn’t think I was weak.  I thought I was so strong that I COULD make the relationship work.  I was wrong.

Sometimes, being so strong can be your downfall, because you refuse to ask for help and to see yourself as a victim. He was slowly trying to break me down to make himself feel better because he didn’t like himself, and I knew this, but I held on the guilt of leaving a man who loved me and whom I loved.  It was not a healthy relationship, but the  guilt and emotional abuse clouded my judgment, so I made up excuses for what we had.  What we had was dysfunctional and I realize now that it was because I didn’t value my own happiness over the relationship.  I was a strong person, but I was sacrificing my personal happiness.  One day, I just made the decision to move.  I did feel defeated, weak, and broken, but it was not because of who I had become, but because I had fought so hard for this relationship.  Ultimately, it was a good thing, because those who are the strongest sometimes need to admit that they can also be weak and need help.  We hold on to all these things because we want to appear strong, right, or simply because we are stubborn.  This is not strength.   Strength is knowing you are strong enough to ask for help.

When I told him that I was going to break up with him if he didn’t change, it was because I thought it would make our relationship better. I eventually figured out that the only way they change is when they no longer have you and are forced to, but I also told him that that is how many relationships end: one party knows all along that they are going to break up, while the other is completely blindsided.  I told him it was because we are essentially cocoons of feelings onto ourselves, and we guard our true feelings from the one we are with because we don’t want to hurt them, but when we do, we end up hurting ourselves and even them in the long run.  People silently hold in all their emotional turmoil and gut feelings because this is a natural reaction they have to everything.  They feel something isn’t right, but for various reasons, keep them to themselves.  Because I was able to relay these feelings to my ex, the break up was much easier for me because I told him I had always been honest with him and was only following up on what I told him would happen.  He said he honestly thought I would never leave him.  He wasn’t a bad man, just a kid who I didn’t know I was enabling from growing up.

No one explains to us how we should cope with potentially traumatic situations, so we just don’t do anything about it. Perhaps we think the pain will eventually go away.  Or if we don’t think about it, it won’t be an issue.  We don’t know how to process our internal emotions and it eventually comes out in ways we don’t expect.  It is okay to realize that this is a natural reaction, but it is not the most healthy way to deal with it.  But we are a culture that focuses on success and happiness, so we try to fit this role by stuffing away our traumas to appear successful.  We don’t talk about our innermost feelings and thoughts even with those that we are closest with.  Thus, when we are in relationships, we have the most to lose, so we shield our partners from what we are really feeling to try to maintain the relationship.  In doing so, we lose out on a more meaningful and profound relationship with a partner we can understand with.  And that is how relationships can fall apart over seemingly nothing.

We are trying to find ourselves all the time and in the process, we find out our preferences, our dislikes, our longings, our hopes, and our dreams. It may take you a lifetime, but you will get there.  Sometimes, you may be 40 and finally realize you wanted to travel the world and divorce your spouse and children.  You can be in a marriage for years and finally come to the conclusion that you cannot deny your sexual orientation even though you are in a hetero relationship.  You may even come to find your voice and realize you are worth more than a  person who beats and berates you.  The journey in life is not to find a spouse, but to ultimately find who you are and your voice.  You deserve to be heard and the ones you are with deserve to know, even if it means the dissolution of that very relationship.  Relationships may end, but growth never does.  A few years after I left him, he actually thanked me because I was instrumental in helping him become the man he is today.  He was no longer my man, but he was a man he could finally be proud of, and I could be proud of that as well from a distance.