Sometimes we just have to let go. It doesn’t exactly seem right to us but sometimes you have to let a person find there own way or you yourself have to find your own way.
As parents raising children we become so bonded that we almost never want to let go. They are ours forever we think. And we are their parents forever, but not to own, but to let go. We have been making choices for them all through their growing up years and think we have to continue making choices. But we have to draw a line somewhere. Children need to grow up even when they seem to be grown up. We have to allow them to finish their growing up process which is the beginning of Letting Go.
The best way to let go with your almost grown-up teenager is to send them off to college. And then allowing them some freedom to make their own choices while in college. Always be there for them when they phone or need help but still allow them their freedom. Usually once through college they will want to be off on their own and it won’t take too much for you to do
If you have a teenager who just graduated from high school and is directly going into a job, give them every encouragement and maybe suggest ways for them to leave and get out there on their own. A good movie that talks about this subject is called “Failure to Launch.” It is about a young man with a good job who is still living at home with his parents. They want him to get out on his own, so they hire a young woman to pretend she is in love with him so that he’ll want to have his own place, but the plot backfires and they fall in love with each other and he still wants to live at home. It is not always easy to let go with someone you love.
Another good way to let go of your grown-up child is to encourage their dating. Allow them freedom in dating so that they will meet someone they will want to marry. They will usually want to then have their own home and family. But then letting go of them after they are married might be hard, but you will just have to find your own things to do and stop thinking that the children need you that much. They just don’t anymore, but that doesn’t mean they don’t love you. It just means they’ve grown-up.
A good way to think of letting go of the grown-up child that you love, is to try to think like the wild animals do. Almost all animals raise up their young and then throw them out of the den to be off on their own. We of course do not like to think of ourselves as animals, but we actually are animals. Animals that can think. Maybe thinking gets in the way of what is natural sometimes but since we are human animals we have to deal with that aspect of ourselves and try to use our thinking capacity in a way that benefits us all.
You might love your spouse, your grown-up child, your parent and they might be indulging in an activity that is not good for them such as alcohol and drug addiction. What do you do? Enable the bad behavior thus contributing to it. You must let go. And enabling this behavior and putting up with it is not good for you either.
So how do you do this if they are indulging in this very bad behavior. Sometimes you might have to be a little harsh, but they need to grow up and recognize their bad behavior and come to terms with it. You didn’t stop loving your loved person. You are actually helping them by letting them go. They have to find their own way. You won’t be able to do it for them.
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Some grown-up children indulge in all sorts of tricks to get you to keep enabling them, such as being the victim. They cry and cry and tell you about their horrible victimization, but what they are really doing is manipulating and controlling you for their own purposes. The person who plays the victim has a lot of power over those he plays this game with – usually totally unsuspecting people like their parents.
To find your own way, you might have to leave this person go. Trying to solve this person’s problems is a drain on your own life and energy. We all have the right to live and not be manipulated and controlled by other people, which might include the ones we love the most. This makes the hard part. We love them so much we want to indulge their every whim no matter what.
Maybe your situation requires that you do not let this person go. You don’t always have to let a loved one go to solve the situation.
Maybe it is your aging parent. Do you put the parent in a nursing home or care for him in your home? What do you do? It depends on you and the kind of time you have to devote to this person. A good idea is the grandparent house – a little house next to your house. And there are many alternatives to nursing home care, such as in-home care, that are much less expensive than the nursing home. So you don’t have to let go of a loved one.
Sometimes with a spouse it can be very difficult. You love your husband but he has just molested your child. What do you do? In this case probably divorce is the best. You have to understand that your spouse no matter how much you love him did something very bad. Even though you love him, you must let go, so you file for divorce. Your child is more important. You can get counseling for yourself, your husband, and your child and stay in your situation, but that will not be easy to do to save your child. And even if you do divorce, you and your child will still need counseling, so it is best to move on. Love is always just around the corner. It doesn’t just happen once; and anyway a man or woman who molests his own child doesn’t know the first thing about love. He needs total and complete re-education. So let him go. You are hurting anyway. The letting go won’t make the hurt worse. In the end you will be better for it.
So what else is there? What else do we do to let go? We prepare ourselves. We think about it. We plan it. We read books about it. Maybe talk to a counselor or minister or other professional knowledgeable about what we are up against. Then we make the move.
Once the loved person is on his own, we begin to rebuild our lives in case they may have been shattered badly by domestic violence, abuse, divorce, etc. If it is a matter of just getting the children out on their own we develop new things to do. We indulge ourselves. Remember we are people too. And we count. We need to care for and love ourselves as much as we care for and love our loved ones.
