You know you need to let go. You’ve told yourself to let go. You may have read a dozen articles, listened to every podcast, and still it’s there. The memory. The regret. The thing you can’t stop turning over in your mind.
Here’s something I want to say that most advice on this topic skips over: letting go is not a decision you make once. It’s a practice. And for most people, it’s one of the hardest things they’ll ever do.
So let’s talk about it honestly not with the breezy ‘just release it!’ energy, but with real attention to why it’s hard, and what actually helps.
Why Letting Go Is So Hard (And Why That’s Normal)
The past lives in us physiologically not just psychologically. Significant experiences, especially painful ones, leave actual traces in the nervous system. The body remembers. That’s not a metaphor.
Beyond the body, there are psychological reasons we hold on:
- Grief needs time — and can’t be rushed
- Identity is wrapped up in our stories about the past
- Letting go can feel like betrayal — of yourself, of someone you loved
- Forgiveness (of others or yourself) feels dangerous or like condoning what happened
- The past feels safer than an uncertain future
Understanding why you’re holding on isn’t just interesting it points you toward what actually needs to happen in order to release it.
What ‘Letting Go’ Actually Means
One reason people struggle to let go is that they have the wrong idea of what it means. Letting go does NOT mean:
- Forgetting what happened
- Deciding it didn’t matter
- Excusing someone who hurt you
- Pretending you’re over it before you are
Letting go means that you stop allowing the past to have power over your present. It means carrying the experience without being controlled by it. It means choosing, again and again, to live forward rather than backward.
Letting go doesn’t mean the past didn’t matter. It means you matter too much to stay there.
Practical Steps That Actually Help
1. Feel it fully before you try to release it
This sounds counterintuitive, but trying to let go before you’ve fully felt something doesn’t work. The emotion just goes underground. Give yourself permission to grieve, to be angry, to feel whatever is there not indefinitely, but thoroughly.
2. Tell a new story about it
The story we tell about our past shapes how much power it has over us. ‘That experience broke me’ and ‘that experience made me who I am’ can both be true but only one of them serves you going forward. Work with a therapist, a journal, or a trusted friend to find the version of your story that holds truth without holding you hostage.
3. Practice forgiveness — for your sake, not theirs
Forgiveness is frequently misunderstood. It’s not a gift you give to someone who hurt you. It’s a gift you give yourself. It’s the decision to stop letting what they did occupy rent-free space in your mind and body.
You can forgive and still have boundaries. You can forgive and still know that what happened was wrong. Forgiveness is for your freedom, not their absolution.
4. Do something physical
Because trauma and pain live in the body, body-based practices can be remarkably effective at processing what purely cognitive approaches can’t reach: movement, dance, yoga, swimming, running, somatic therapy. Don’t underestimate this.
5. Fill the space with something intentional
Nature abhors a vacuum. When you release something from your mental and emotional space, fill it deliberately with something that supports the life you’re building a new practice, a creative project, relationships that nourish you.
6. Be patient — and keep choosing forward
Letting go is rarely a single moment. It’s a thousand small choices, made over months and sometimes years. There will be days when the past rises up as fresh as if it just happened. On those days, you don’t have to have it all resolved you just have to choose forward one more time.
On Regret Specifically
Regret is one of the heaviest things to carry. The ‘what ifs,’ the roads not taken, the choices you’d undo if you could.
Here’s what I’ve come to believe about regret: it’s useful in small doses and destructive in large ones. A little regret tells us what we value and helps us make different choices going forward. Endless regret is just self-punishment.
You made the decisions you made with the information, the maturity, and the emotional resources you had at the time. You would have needed to be a different person with different experiences, different knowledge to have chosen differently. Be fair to who you were then.
When the Past Is Trauma
Everything in this post applies to ordinary grief, regret, and letting go. But if what you’re carrying is trauma abuse, assault, significant loss, adverse childhood experiences please know that standard ‘letting go’ advice often isn’t enough.
Trauma needs professional support. Trauma-informed therapy, EMDR, somatic experiencing these are tools that can actually help at the neurological level in a way that journaling and mindset shifts alone cannot.
Seeking that support is not weakness. It’s wisdom.
The Past Is Part of You — It Doesn’t Have to Run You
You will never be someone who didn’t live through what you lived through. Those experiences are woven into you. And that’s okay. You don’t need to excise the past to move forward.
You just need to change its role in your story from driver to passenger. From the thing that defines you to the thing that helped shape you.
Your future is being written right now, in the choices you make today. What do you want it to say?
The past is a place of reference, not a place of residence.
Keep Reading
- The Ultimate Guide to Starting Over in Life
- Signs You’re Ready for a Fresh Start
- How to Stop People-Pleasing — because sometimes what we can’t let go of is who others needed us to be
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