Adapting to the absence of people you thought would always be by your side is a hard concept to grasp for many of us. The reality is that friends relocate or grow apart, husbands and wives divorce while children grow up and leave home. The question is: “what do you do when the people you need the most leave?”
Here are 4 tips to let go of someone you love:
1. You are complete all by yourself. Even though people play an important role in our personal growth and development, you should never allow anyone to determine your self-worth. This is the sense of your own value or worth, and it does not change based on who is present or absent. Dr Lisa Firestone takes this even further, suggesting that self-worth is about who you are, not what you do or who you’re in a relationship with. That means mother or no mother, husband or no husband, you are complete all by yourself, and your value does not go down because of who left.
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2. You are not always at fault. When people leave us, we tend to automatically think that it is our fault. For example, as a child I blamed myself for the breakdown of my parents’ relationship, even though it had nothing to do with me. I thought that if I was a better child, they would have stayed together. But as I grew older, I realised that when people are determined to leave, there is nothing you can do to make them stay. The best thing you can do is to free yourself from unnecessary guilt and realise that their decisions are not yours.
3. You have different people for different seasons. Recognise that people come into your life for a reason and season. When some leave, it is because their season in your life has come to an end, and there is nothing wrong with that. There is no law prescribing that you must have the same best friend for all your life. People are free to move as and where life takes them. Appreciate them for how they were a part of your life, and release them to play that role in someone else’s life when the time comes.
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4. You have the power to decide what happens next. Remember that what happens to you is not as important as what you decide to do about it. The beautiful thing about life is that we are writers of the story of our own lives, and how the next chapter unfolds is up to you.
