Letting Go Allows Life's Enchantment to Unfold
“The hardest thing for me was understanding that letting go didn’t mean letting go of people, places and things,” Darlene’s friend said. “It was letting go of my ideas about how life should go.” Melody Beattie, Choices Letting go is not about giving up on life or about abandoning people, places or things that we love. Letting go is about accepting everything about life that we have no power to control or change. It’s about accepting reality as it is, not as we want it to be, or how we think “life should go.” Reality is also about accepting people exactly the way they are and about discerning boundaries. Boundaries tell us where we end and others begin. People in recovery rarely enter with good boundaries. We are so enmeshed in others that we can’t separate our lives from theirs, or our problems from the problems of those we care about. Here is a good litmus test for setting boundaries in terms of what problems are ours to own and what problems are not: My problems direct...