First thing that came to mind was "when you’re ready." That has been my experience anyway. You let go when you are ready. Not when your friends say it’s time. Not even when your mother tells you to lose the jerk. To leave and be gone for good, you have to be ready. For the lucky few that can happen in a flash but for most of us, it takes longer. I think it’s because every letting go carries with it a deep lesson that must be faced and owned. The more difficult lesson to accept is the one that has to do with you, not the person you need to walk away from and that’s why it sometimes takes years to work up to the physical separation and lifetimes to sweep out the internal residue.
Take the battered wife who surrenders to a burst of courage that grants her temporary deliverance from her domestic hell after years of pain and abuse. She is drunk with freedom for about a minute before she feels completely overwhelmed by it–lost. Years and years of letting herself be hurt inside and out does this to her. It doesn’t take long before her cheek begins to look for the fist and her shriveled stone-soul craves the warped comfort derived from its tormentor.
It’s not that she doesn’t know she made the wrong choice. It’s not that she doesn’t see the monster before her. She knows it. What she hasn’t learned is that she is worth more than that; that she is a precious, special, beautiful woman who must claim that very part of her to save herself. Until she gets it, she will keep going back to the sharp, abusive tongue and continue to weather the violence of her shrunken life.
Until we open ourselves to what is making itself known, we won’t be ready to make that painful leap. We might be able to walk away from one person only to go back to a different version of him a few years down the road, at least until we’re ready to face not only what it was about him or her that so wounded and destroyed us, but also the part we played in it. Until then, we’re not really free.
As for never looking back, I’m not sure that’s a good thing. I’d like to think that once we gather the strength and resolve (and imbibe all their inherent lessons)to walk away from something that is no longer good for and to us, we walk away whole, completely unthreatened by what was left behind. There is value in looking back if only to appreciate the distance you’ve covered; to take stock of your journey. I don’t encourage dwelling on what might have been or resting too long on the bench of regret. If the undertow from the past pulls too fiercely, it probably means something important was left untended. I would look within to diffuse that thing and strip it of the power it holds over me.
Letting go of someone also means recognizing and reclaiming a big part of ourselves and that, for most women, seems to be the greater challenge. The minute we share our lives with boyfriend, lover, husband and children, it becomes a struggle to keep that woman-before-anything-else part of us alive and kicking. It is so easy for us to expand and spill over into everybody’s world, so that without them, we have no idea who and where we are. That’s why it’s so hard to leave. It’s hard to be alone, to listen to thoughts you are no longer sure are yours; to make decisions just for yourself, not the spouse or the children or the household. What a frightening prospect.
I know women who have left from sheer exhaustion; from being completely emptied out, but I think there is a danger there–the danger of leaving without knowing what it was you sought release from. How can you really move on if you haven’t figured out what you’re really getting out of? If you don’t know what you’re running from, how do you know you’re not going to run straight into it again?
You can only truly let go when you’re ready. When you’re ready to face your demons and see what it was inside you that may have invited this man (or woman) into your life in the first place. When you’re ready to see how you may have contributed to the demise of the union and accept that there are issues inside you that probably need to be addressed. When you’re ready to stop blaming someone else for everything that goes wrong in your life. When you’re ready to admit you were wrong. Or right. When you’re ready to do the inner work. When you’re ready to look at the very thing about yourself you’d rather avoid.
I believe that when you’ve accepted and owned the lesson and have enough of your real self to take along with you, you can truly let go. Once there, you can look back with the kind of detachment and fearlessness that comes with wisdom; from seeing exactly where you’ve been, where you want to go and knowing that you have everything you need to get there.