Why letting things go is so hard (and how to finally do it)

“I can’t stop thinking about it.” “I keep replaying it in my mind.” “I just want to let it go.”

These are things Nicole Johnson, LPC, author of Reparenting Your Inner Child frequently hears in her therapy practice. Whether someone has been wronged by a friend, made a huge mistake at work, or is grieving a loss, they can’t “let go” of what once was or what could’ve been.

But “letting go” sounds simpler than it usually is. You can’t force your brain to move on when it’s stuck on a piece of the past. You have to figure out why it’s stuck in the first place.

“So often, our focus is ‘How do I let it go?’ and not ‘Why am I holding on?'” Johnson explains. “And the answer isn’t to sweep something under the rug or turn your back on it. The answer is to face it.”

Here’s how to tell if you’re struggling to let go, why the process is uniquely difficult, and how to free yourself from whatever’s weighing you down or holding you back.

Signs You Might Be Struggling to Let Go

Johnson typically files can’t-let-go situations into four categories, and each type can affect you emotionally, mentally, and physically:

1. You’ve been hurt: You were bullied, betrayed, or overlooked, for example.
2. You’ve lost something: You were laid off, missed an opportunity, or declined in health.
3. An ending: A friendship or romantic relationship is over, or you went no contact with a family member. Or maybe they cut ties with you.
4. A finality: Someone or something is gone, with no hope of returning.

In any of these scenarios, experts say you may:

• Replay, rehearse, or overthink a past conversation or event
• Catastrophize (or imagine the worst outcome of) a past conversation or event
• Recall a story or situation over and over again to loved ones
• Use “should” statements when talking about an experience (“I/they should have…”)
• Feel bitter, angry, or resentful about how a conversation or event unfolded
• Feel irritable or emotionally reactive with loved ones
• Have difficulty trusting people or moving forward in relationships
• Need more reassurance than you typically would
• Have trouble falling and staying asleep
• Feel symptoms of physical stress like muscle tension, sweating, and a racing heart when thinking or talking about a past conversation or event

Why Is It So Hard to Let Things Go?

There are two main reasons:

1. Your brain is trying to resolve what it interprets as a problem.
2. Your brain is trying to protect you from making a mistake that could threaten your mental, emotional, or physical well-being.

“Evolutionarily, we’re supposed to remember the things we shouldn’t do again,” says Jessi Gold, MD, associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center and author of How Do You Feel? If your partner is unfaithful, for example, your brain may fixate on the signs of infidelity you missed and then obsessively watch for those signs in a future relationship.

Johnson echoes this point: “Your brain only cares about your safety. When you’ve had a painful, stressful, or traumatic experience, it tries to understand all the variations that led up to that experience so it can anticipate them in the future.”

Your brain also wants to answer questions and solve problems. So when your partner cheats, you may replay memories of your relationship and hold onto the emotions they made you feel (both good and bad) because you’re trying to make sense of the betrayal. And if you have a deep, internal belief that you’re unlovable (say, because you’ve been rejected a lot), you may stay stuck because you fear your partner’s actions have proved that’s true.

By the same token, your brain is wired to crave closure, says Caitlin Opland, a licensed clinical social worker at Thriveworks. “We have this romantic idea of saying, ‘I’ve closed this piece of my life,’ but life isn’t neat. Letting go doesn’t really work like that.”

How to Let Things Go: A Mini Guide

To truly let go, you need to get to the core of what’s bothering you: Identify it, process it, and release it. Johnson calls this “an act of internal surrender.”

“Many times, it’s unprocessed emotions that we’re not allowing ourselves to feel,” she explains. Certain thoughts need to surface or conversations need to be had. “You have to work through what’s going on,” she says. “Work with your brain, your body. The result of that is release.”

Here’s how therapists recommend starting:

1. Recognize what’s in your control.

“We can’t control anything that happens outside of us,” Johnson says. You can’t make an ex explain why they ended things or force a friend to apologize for bailing on you. “Letting go isn’t about whether you have a conversation with a person, they take accountability, or you forgive them. It’s fully internal work.” Acknowledge that you only have power over your own thoughts, emotions, and actions.

2. Ask yourself hard questions.

Now it’s time to break down what happened, Gold says. What’s the whole story? Where are these feelings coming from? What’s your body telling you? Observe your story and lead with curiosity and self-compassion—don’t speak to yourself in a way you wouldn’t speak to a friend, she says.

Honest self-reflection is crucial, but not exactly easy to do. However, you can practice on your own (talking out loud) or with a safe person (like a trusted friend or a therapist), Johnson says.

Try this exercise: State how you feel, ask yourself why you feel that way, answer the question, and ask yourself “why” again. Here’s how this might go:

• I’m very angry. Why?
• This whole situation is unfair. Why?
• Because they lied to me. Why?
• I don’t know. But it hurt me. Why?
• Because I trusted them.

Keep asking yourself “why”—like peeling back the layers of an onion—until you feel a strong emotion or reaction hit. That’s a clue to what’s going on inside you. “The ‘why’ question is a great way to get to know yourself on a deeper level,” Johnson says. In the example above, you start by thinking you’re trying to let go of anger, but you discover what you’re really holding onto (and need to work through) is the broken trust and how that’s still affecting you.

3. Let it out in a journal or letter.

Journaling can help you identify, describe, and validate your thoughts and emotions. “Write about what happened. Say everything you want to about the situation. Write about what letting go means and why that’s important to you,” Gold says. If you try the exercise above and hit a mental wall at a particular “why”, that’s a great time to bring in journaling, too, Johnson adds.

If you’d prefer a focused prompt, Opland recommends writing a letter, either to yourself or the person at the center of what you can’t let go of. She often finds that people write about their anger or resentment and how their boundaries were crossed. “Or, for example, if they’re having a hard time letting go of the death of a pet or a family member and they’re steeped in grief, sometimes they don’t want to say the things they’re really sad about out loud.”

Once you’ve gotten all the words down, you should feel physically lighter. “You’ll see people’s diaphragms open more. They’ll breathe more. The tension leaves their neck,” Opland says.

4. Pay attention to physical sensations.

Sometimes you can’t let go emotionally because your body is holding on physically. “A lot of memories live in our body,” Opland explains. “If you’ve ever had a memory of a maternal figure baking cookies with you when you were 10, I guarantee you can smell the cookies.”

The same goes for not-so-pleasant memories. If you get physically riled up when you think or talk about a past conversation or event—your heart starts racing, jaw clenches, and breath gets shallow—your body’s trying to signal that it’s stressed.

In her practice, Opland asks clients to pay attention to these physical cues and use coping mechanisms to activate the parasympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for calming your body down. This may include a mix of breathwork, mindfulness practices, vagus nerve exercises, and other nervous system techniques. Opland is also a fan of practicing progressive muscle relaxation, or tensing and releasing muscle groups one by one, before bedtime. The goal is to become more aware of how physically letting go can coincide with emotionally letting go.

5. Consider professional support.

While you can try these methods on your own, most people benefit from the guidance of a trusted therapist. It’s hard to unpack emotions and thoughts you’ve tried to bury. It’s also tough to hold yourself accountable—sometimes you can’t see how your own behavior has influenced your circumstances until a safe person gently connects the dots for you.

A therapist can also help you start small, so you don’t get overwhelmed and abandon progress you’ve made. Maybe you chat about the driver who cut you off versus something heavier. “We can start there, just practicing this process of not being stuck on things,” Johnson says.

Once you work up to the bigger things you’d like to let go of, your therapist can ask tougher questions like, “How is this problem serving me right now, and what would it look like for me not to have this problem?” or, “How heavy is this for me to carry right now, and what would it look like to put it down and walk away?” Opland says. They’ll help keep you honest, push you mentally when you need it, and help you build an emotional toolkit (like journal prompts or grounding techniques) to work on outside of your sessions.

6. Be patient with yourself.

There’s no deadline for grief or trauma, in particular, Gold says. Sometimes you’ll be unexpectedly hit with uncomfortable emotions, and learning to cope with them is part of the process. “Give yourself time and cut yourself some slack,” she says.

Letting Go: A Therapist’s Perspective

Johnson has a client in her 50s who initially started therapy for depression that stemmed from medical issues–we’ll call her Mary. Soon, Mary started telling Johnson about the recurring dreams she was having. They were always centered on the fallout with her best friend, which had happened many years ago.

“I can’t get over it. I dream about it all the time. I want to reach out to her. I just want to be done with it,” Johnson recalled Mary telling her.

They talked through the whole story, including the dynamics of the friendship and how the fallout happened. “That brought up a lot for her, because she hadn’t even let herself go back to the memory,” Johnson recalls. As Mary talked through why the friendship was important to her and why its end still mattered, she had a lightbulb moment.

“She held a belief that she’s discardable. She felt like her friend of 40 years had proved this, and the pain of that being true in her mind was what she was caught on,” Johnson says. “That was a letting-go moment. When she realized that she’d never dealt with that belief, she was able to see the situation through a different lens. She saw that the friendship wasn’t healthy. She was able to reach out to that friend and say her piece. She released the entire thing to the point where she is sad that she lost her friend, but she’s reconciled it.” (Yes, the recurring dreams went away.)

The Bottom Line

Letting go isn’t just “moving on” or “getting over it.” Often, holding onto something (or someone) means you haven’t fully processed an experience.

“We’re not getting over anything,” Johnson says. “We’re working through things so they become a part of our story, or maybe a part of who we are, but it doesn’t have power over us anymore.”