Living Well

The Living Well Archive will grow each month into an online resource containing; reflections, thoughts and simple self-help ideas. Click below for more pages from the archive:

An emotional storm - Beginnings - Running Free - The Hazelnut Shell - Letting Go
The Scratched Diamond - Help! I've Lost The Plot - Joots - The Flashback - Food... For thought

Letting Go

I watched a television programme recently, in which an extended family came together to spend a weekend in a hotel to get to know each other better, and to settle their differences.   Over the years many events had happened in this family, some people had not talked to each other for more than 20 years because of a festering and unresolved resentment.  However, one event in the programme stood out for me.

When two of the brothers had been young boys, they had been fooling around one summer as boys will, and there had been an awful accident – and it was purely an accident – where the younger boy lost an eye.  For years and years the older brother had not talked about the effect that his brother’s injury had had on him. No one at the time ever asked the older child how he was feeling after seeing his brother so badly hurt. Naturally at that time his younger brother had all the care and attention in the family and at school. Over the years, the older child’s shock and horror had silently grown into a deep sense of guilt and remorse. The two boys had grown up with neither of them ever talking about what happened. What a heavy burden to carry alone.

In the programme, the older brother now in his late 40’s, was at last able to tell his brother how scared he had been, and how terribly guilty he had felt whenever he saw the artificial eye. It was as if a torrent of dammed up feelings at last poured out. His younger brother assured him that he had never blamed his brother for the accident. You could see the older man’s face soften, and his body relax. The relief was tangible. At last he had released the feelings from the deep secret guilt he had carried for so many years.

I talked with ‘Abigail’ who when driving, had accidentally killed a child who had run out into the road. Although she was in no way to blame for the accident, Abigail had suffered for years from a crippling sense of guilt and dread that it could happen to her again. As she talked about her hidden feelings, the ‘grown-up Abigail’ as she is now, was able to forgive the younger self of her past that was driving that day. She felt huge relief as she let go of the feelings of painful guilt and learnt to comfort her hurt and lonely inner self. Later, she could forgive the child who she had silently resented for causing the accident. Abigail found that she had let go of something that had held her tight inside for years.

Perhaps the most difficult event to speak about comes from deep mental wounding that happens when a child or an adult is forced by another person to deliberately hurt and injure someone - in order to save their own emotional or even physical life. Many people bravely carry deeply hidden secret distresses inside their hearts and minds for many years. But it doesn’t have to stay this way. If you would like to have help to let go of some of your own very private hurts, you are welcome to contact me. Here is a thoughtful quote to end on:

Our past is in our present
And unless we heal what is
unhealed in our present,
We will take it into our future