Are You Grieving Losses or Giving Your Power Away to Those Who Have Hurt You?

There are times when I catch myself renting out too much space in my mind to my disappointment and hurt concerning another person. It's necessary to grieve when we have been rejected, deceived or hurt by someone. We need to allow the various healing feelings (from betrayal, to a sense of loss, to hurt, to anger, to sadness) to work their ways through us so we can reach a point of attaining wisdom from what happened, acceptance of what happened, the ability to forgive what happened and move on with life.

Proper grieving requires that we seek help. We need to be able to talk with trusted persons  (including therapists) about our disappointment and hurt, and we need to be able to surrender the entire situation to our Higher Power. We may also need to have a conciliatory talk with the person who hurt us and attempt to work-out our differences, or at least bring the relationship to proper closure. 

Once we've reached a place of being at peace with what happened, we should be able to move forward, having taken our personal power back from the person who hurt us. But sometimes, in our thoughts, we end up trapped in what happened all over again. We think we've worked it all out, and then suddenly we are being plagued with either a false hope for things to return to the way they used to be with that person, or we are allowing thoughts of them to fill us with emotional pain by replaying the situations that caused the rift between us.

There is a fine line between grieving disappointments and hurts, and giving our personal power away to the person who has disappointed or hurt us. When we continue to dwell on the hurt or our (toxic) need for that person, we give our personal power over our happiness away to them all over again.

If, after our initial grieving period ended, we came to the understanding that this person was actually toxic for us (and that we were probably toxic for them), we need to be able to let go of our toxic hunger for the person. We can only let go through working Step One and reminding ourselves that we are powerless over this person and our toxic need for them. We need to once again ask our Higher Power to please remove that toxic need. And then we need to accept reality.

Accepting reality is accepting that there is no future with this person, or that the future with them will always be different from the past, and will never be what we originally hoped for. We may be able to remain friends, but things will be forever different from the past in terms of trust and closeness.

The choice to rent out too much space in our head to the person who has hurt us is just that: A CHOICE. We can continue to allow our thoughts to wander in that direction and to return to a place of sadness when we are choosing to relive the past. Or we can choose to dismiss those thoughts (regrets, false hopes) about that person and to evict them from our minds as gently as possible. We no longer have to rent-out space to that person in our heads, but we also don't have to evict them with bitterness. We want to evict them by detaching with love.

Detaching with love requires that we see that (toxic) person as a teacher in our lives. They taught us a tough lesson that we needed to learn. But we must detach in thanksgiving for that lesson, gratitude for the fact that we have grown from it, and empathy with the fact that they may have hurt us, but they were broken and hurting inside themselves. Once we stop renting out space to them in our heads, we stop choosing to be their victim.