The truth is many people struggle with letting old relationships go. And they also struggle with letting painful past experiences go as well. Whether you have gone through a difficult breakup or a painful life experience, you must learn to let it go. And the key to that is seeing the gift in the suffering!
What does that mean? Well, it simply means you take in the messages you need to from your experience. You learn the lessons meant for you in that struggle, and you use what you learned to move forward and ahead with your life. The "gifts" in your struggle are the messages God wants you to learn for you to grow as an individual and reach your highest potential on this earth. Your suffering is actually your greatest gift, because through that suffering you become a different person. You come out stronger than you were before, but that's ONLY if you were able to find the gifts in the struggle. If you don't, you're more likely to repeat the same mistakes and patterns and continue having negative feelings about your difficult experience, whether it was a break up or other personal challenge.
So how do you know when you're ready to move on from a relationship? How do you know when you're truly over it? How do you know when you're ready to put a personal struggle behind you?
Your list of gifts or positive messages from your bad experience significantly outweighs the list of bad things that have happened to you as a result of your difficult life experience. Go ahead, ask yourself what are the gifts in this difficult situation? And proceed to write down the positive things that have resulted because of your breakup, or the things you've learned to help you move forward with your life.
For example, your list could include something like, "I learned it's much better to slow down and get to know my date before rushing intimacy," or "I've learned what type of man I want in my life, generosity and faithfulness are something he must have," or "Because of my breakup, I freed up a lot of my energy, pursued my MBA and now my career has sky rocketed. I would never have been able to accomplish that if I was still stuck in a miserable, dead end relationship." On the other side write down the bad or negative things that have resulted because of your break up. You know you're over your past relationship or your personal struggle when you can see your gifts clearly, and when your list of positive messages is longer or more significant than your negative list.
Remember, in any struggle there's always a message to be taken in, a lesson to be learned. Those messages nestled in any difficult situation are GIFTS, invaluable gifts to help you move forward with your life. The smart person is the one who can effectively extract those messages from difficult or painful situations and use them to move forward with his/her life.
Ask yourself have you seen God's gifts in your breakup? In your personal situation? We are in that situation, going through that experience on purpose. God wants us to learn from the experience, grow as individuals and move forward with our lives.
If we fail to see these gifts or messages we miss out on something so important. Something so valuable. Something intrinsically and inherently beautiful and true. And then we are prone to repeating the same mistakes. That's why sometimes we are in a different relationship, but it's the same old pain. Or when we continue struggling with a certain life challenge and can't seem to get to a better place. It's okay. It's part of the process. It takes time to really take in God's gifts, his messages. We must listen. We must really slow down and ask ourselves, "What am I meant to learn from this experience?" The pain, struggle, despair, loneliness will end once we are able to learn from our situation. If we don't take in the message, we'll be repeating the same cycle over and over until we finally get it. Don't rush it. But the quicker you can see those gifts and internalize those messages, the quicker you can move forward with your life, and the more peaceful and happy you'll become.
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