Why saying goodbye is difficult – and necessary

“Saying goodbye is difficult, and most of us don’t do it enough.” (Brooke Castillo)

However, saying goodbye is part of life, and it is necessary:

If we wish to evolve and grow, if we want to make changes in our lives to move forward and make things better, we have to create space for the new:

We have to let go of what no longer serves us, what no longer fits into the life we want to have.

We need to say goodbye to the past

if we want to open the door to the present and welcome the future.

We need to say goodbye to relationships that are complete – relationships with things in our life, but also relationships with people, relationships with beliefs and thought patterns, and habits.

If we are holding on to something that’s no longer truly valuable to us, just because we had a relationship with it in the past, it will wear us down, slow us down, and it will suck up our energy.

Dragging stuff along that no longer serves us is a waste of energy – and we have a limited amount of energy.

Why do we find it difficult to say goodbye?

There are many reasons why saying goodbye is so hard.

A very big one is that saying goodbye means making decisions and initiating change. And that’s something our human brain doesn’t want us to do.

Our brain wants us to keep things as they are because it wants to keep us safe.

It wants us to avoid the unknown and the potential risk involved in letting new stuff into our lives. That’s why it’s easier to hold on to everything we have and avoid the decision to let go of what’s no longer needed and useful.

Also, we tend to associate loss with saying goodbye. We try to avoid saying goodbye because we don’t want to experience ‘negative’ feelings like sadness or grief.

Another reason for not making decisions and not saying goodbye is that we are afraid that we will feel regret or guilt about letting go of something that was valuable at some point in time.

If we have invested our time, energy, attention, or money into something, we often hesitate to let it go ‘for free’.

That’s why we keep so much stuff in our lives that’s still usable but no longer useful to us.

We think we should only sort out what is damaged, broken, and no longer working.

However, it’s not always necessary for something to be faulty to say goodbye to it.

If we don’t need, use, or love it anymore, it occupies undeserved space in our homes, minds, and hearts, and it sucks up our energy.

Space and energy that we need for new things, people, thoughts, etc. to come in.

How do we make goodbye decisions?

It’s good to know that our brain hates any changes and let-go decisions and will try its best to bring up thoughts and feelings that are supposed to keep us where we are and what we have in our life right now.

If we prepare ourselves for ‘negative’ thoughts and feelings, we can better confront them and deliberately decide what WE want to think and decide:

First, we take an inventory of what we currently have in our life:

• • our physical belongings (including paperwork and digital information),
  • our relationships with other people,
  • our thoughts and beliefs,
  • our habits, behaviours, and actions
  • our work, hobbies, interests, activities,
  • etc. 

Then, we ask ourselves questions – and we answer them honestly.

• • ‘Does it still serve me? – Do I need, use, love it? Really?’
  • ‘Does it move me toward what I want, or does it move me away from what I want to have in my life?’

If we can’t respond with a clear ‘yes’ to this type of question, it’s time to decide to let go and say goodbye.

It’s important that we make these decisions clearly and definitely, we have to commit to the goodbye and not look back.

Then, we can move forward, into our (uncluttered) future, toward what we want to have in our lives.

We now have the space and energy for new experiences, relationships, interests, activities, things, etc.