Why is it so hard to Forgive and Let go?

Hey everyone, today I’m going to write about forgiveness and letting go, in counseling. The actual process of forgiving and letting go I’ll make a separate video about. Though I’ll go into the mindset of why it is so hard to Forgive and let go.

When we talk about mindsets, we talk about conditions that have been engrained in us over decades. Those conditions help us navigate and interact with the world as we know it. How we determine that navigation is dependent on our successes and failures. If we are successful at something, we will continue to do that thing. If we fail at something, either we stop doing that thing or find out what we did wrong and try again. To get into Forgiveness and letting go, these situations arise not due to our own successes and failures, but the success and failures of other people. When other people are concerned, we often either put ourselves against them or compare ourselves against them. The old school way of thinking goes into winners and losers. This can be seen, especially, when other people’s actions determine our success and/or failures. Losing tends to get lumped into forgiveness and letting go. Even if our failure wasn’t our fault, we still feel that loss. We hold onto that loss because the loss was not our fault. We did everything correctly and still came up short, because of the actions of someone else. Even though that failure isn’t our fault, we blame ourselves. In blaming ourselves, we get angry, mad, jealous, and frustrated. Who better to feel these emotions against, than the person that facilitated that loss. We can’t forgive and/or let go, because we want that other person to fix the situation, to say sorry, or what have you so that we can feel better. That’s the thing though, we’re still putting power into that other person. If us getting over our loss is dependent on the other person, we’re still handing that person power over us.

For example, you and a friend work at the same business and you both are working on a project. Your friend falsely takes credit for the entire project and gets promoted. Wanting your friend to say he is sorry, go to your boss and note that you both worked on the project together to get equal credit or what have you, places power over you in his hands. Your friend may or may not go and talk to the boss. Ultimately you are moving forward shouldn’t be conditional to what your friend does. When you forgive and let go, you get to keep that power. The reason being, you are relying on yourself and not someone else to move forward. Ultimately, that’s the reason why it is so hard because we don’t want to come to terms with our loss or failure. Coming to terms would cause us to face something that we do not want to about ourselves. Moving forward, we should not look at that as a loss or a failure. We should look at that as a lesson to help better ourselves and move forward, without letting the past weigh us down. When we do that, we stay in control and forgiving and letting go will become easier to do.