Let Go | Start Fresh | Relationships | Friendships | Boundaries | Positive Relationships |
How refreshing does it feel when your whole house is clean? Your bed is made, books on your shelf aligned, documents sorted, carpet vacuumed, tiles mopped and the bathroom dis-infected? Although the cleaning can take time and doing it is not always enjoyable, the finished product usually makes people feel changed in someway, cleaning our external environment can feel like we are also cleansing something inside.
Just like you need to regularly clean your homes, it's important to cleanse the people you have in your life and conciously let go of those who no longer serves a purpose in your life. There may be people in your life who makes you feel good about yourself, makes you laugh, supports you, encourages you to pursue your dreams and who celebrates your successes. However there may also be others who may criticises you or stresses you out.
Sometimes it's necessary to re-evaluate certain relationships you have in your life so that you can conciously choose to spend more time with people who are more of a positive influence on your life.
What You Can Do
First of all start off by making a list of people who you feel you want to spend less time with. You don't have to delete them from your contact list or unfriend them from social medial. At this point, all you have to do is just intentionally think about how they make your feel. Next, write down the emotion you feel when you are around this person, try to avoid writing "uncomfortable" and really hone in on the specific emotion you experience when you are around them. Remember you are allowed to experience more than one emotion at once. People can make you feel frustrated, annoyed, dissapointented, guilty, ashamed, sad, scared and angry these same people can be the ones that makes us laugh and smile at times and make us feel good about ourselves. That is why letting go is so hard.
It is not until you begin to see you can experience a whole range of emotions when you're around certain people that you can truly begin to analyse whether this person is adding any real value in your life. For those relationships where the bad outweighs the good, simply try to distance yourself from them and notice if you can see a difference in your overall mental health.
Remember lettting go of people doesn't mean avoiding them, it's about confronting your own feelings about that person and making concious choices to who you want to be spending more time with.
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