How To Let Go Of Someone You Love (10 Tips)

Letting go of someone you love can be one of the hardest things you ever do. But you must. As much as we hate to do it, when we let go of someone, we free ourselves of the binds that hold us to the past.

It’s not about giving up, nor is it about forgetting.

Letting go of someone we love is about accepting the fact that we can’t change the past or bring them back.

It’s about making peace with the fact that people we love will enter and leave our lives.

Whether someone dies, breaks up with you, leaves for another country, or is just no longer in your life, you will have to mourn the end of that relationship.

Mourning is painful, but it is necessary in order to process and accept any kind of loss.

With that being said, here are 10 tips on how to let go of someone you love that actually work.

Tips On Letting Go Of Someone You Care About

1. End Contact With Them

Trying to keep in touch with someone who has left your life, especially voluntarily, is like rubbing salt on a wound.

If I know within my heart that there’s no way forward, no reconciliation, and it would not benefit either of us, then I cut all communication with that individual.

You have to think about self-preservation, especially after a breakup.

You may feel emotionally charged and want to reach out to the one you still love, but it will do more harm than good.

The first and most crucial step to letting go of someone you love is to cut all contact and remove them from your social network accounts.

2. Focus On Yourself

During this time, your mind and heart are going to fixate on the person who is no longer in your life.

I get it. That’s okay. You can and obviously need to think about them, but that doesn’t mean you need to sacrifice your own well-being.

On the contrary, spend some time thinking about how you can come out of this on the other side.

What do you want? How do you feel? Where do you want to go from here? Dial the focus on yourself.

3. Don’t Act On Your Explosive Emotions

I wear my heart on my sleeve, and this often gets me into situations that are often avoidable if I were to just take a moment to relax.

This has especially come back to bite me during a breakup.

Some days are better than others. It’s during those other days that I can do things that are not conducive to healing.

Thankfully, I learn from my mistakes, even if I make them a few times.

Now, if I ever find myself far too emotionally charged up, I force myself to wait until the next day before taking action.

I can’t begin to tell you how many times this has saved me from embarrassing and hurting myself.

Employ the next-day rule in your life.

4. Spend Time Reflecting On What Bothers You

The longer you take to address painful things, the longer you suffer. Imagine waxing, but instead of ripping the wax strip off with force, you gently pull the strip with little force.

Not only do you suffer for longer, but the end result is nowhere near being as clean as compared to when you pulled the strip off with force and purpose.

Avoidance is the best way to slow death.

Rather, spend this time reflecting on everything that bothers you.

Address it head-on and go through the motions.

You can only make progress by taking a step forward. The longer you wait, the longer it will take you to heal and let go.

5. Don’t Rush Or Obsess About Moving On

This may sound counterintuitive, but take as long as you need to let go of someone you love.

As much as you may want to be completely over them within a month, the heart and mind don’t work that way.

It could be a slow or quick process.

There’s really no way of telling, but you can obviously speed up the process by following the tips in this article.

My advice to you is this: take as much time as needed to let go of someone once and for all rather than come back in a year with unresolved issues.

Time is an essential component.

No matter how horrible you feel right now, time moves forward, and this feeling of dread will not remain.

You’ll have easier days with time, and your heart will find a way to heal.

6. Reach Out To People Who Care About You

When you’ve just suffered a loss in your life, it can be easy to resign yourself into a bubble.

That desire to go out and have fun seems like a lifetime away.

But there’s a healing effect to surrounding yourself with people who you love and who love you too.

Allow this painful experience to help you grow as a person.

Let it reunite you with the other people in your life who are important. From family to friends, hit them up after you’ve spent some time alone working through your issues.

7. Feel It To Completely Heal It

There’s no way around it. Heartache and heartbreak only heal once they’ve been endured and felt at their worst.

If you can work through your emotions without trying to drown them out with numbing agents like alcohol, drugs, or hookups, you’ll find yourself developing a stronger mindset.

This will translate very well into your future.

The lessons you learn during the healing process can transform you into a better person.

8. Count Your Blessings Daily

Whenever I found myself drowning in self-pity and heartbreak, it would be during those days when I was not cognizant of all the wonderful blessings in my life.

What you focus on becomes the focus of your life.

You control it.

It may not seem like anything significant the first few times you try counting your blessings, but weeks from now, when your mind starts zoning in on things to be grateful for, that’s when you’ll really appreciate this action.

I’m spiritual, so I try to count my blessings when I pray every day.

Focus on everything you can think of from any period of your life. Appreciation and blessings are not just fixed to our current time.

When you are able to identify blessings from the past, that’s when you start to look back and focus on those things rather than that which you have lost.

9. Try New Things

One of the scariest things to deal with in life is change, especially if you’ve built a bubble of comfort encapsulated by a routine.

Rather than panic and fall into disarray, try new and exciting things.

Take ownership of your life and your fear by tackling new things with vigor.

Remind yourself that the world has so much to offer, and you can tell so many different stories by just putting yourself out there.

The end of a chapter leads directly into the beginning of another. Don’t lose sight of that, no matter what.

10. Map Out An Adjusted Future For Yourself

To end this off, you should sit down, pull up a page, and describe the kind of future you want for yourself.

I do this after every breakup to give myself something to work towards, especially when I feel like everything is bleak.

Don’t be shy or afraid to list even the most preposterous of things.

This is your future. It belongs to you and nobody else.