Kiddipedia
If I could meet myself as I was 2 years ago and, just starting out on the single mum journey I would have said to myself ‘where your energy goes is where your attention flows”. Obviously, hindsight doesn’t really help much but it does at least see where we have been and where we are now and this can be a real eye-opener, moving forward on my single mum journey.
We have all felt the sting of betrayal, being misled, heartache and dreams shattered. I’m not here to do the woe is me thing, I did that two years ago and it didn’t help back then, so it won’t help now! What I am going to do is offer my response to moving to forgiveness as a way to move on from any situation, experience or circumstance.
The anger and pain I felt in the beginning of my single mum journey ended up becoming feelings of bitterness because I had trouble letting go. Anger at myself, guilt for leaving, confusion about what to do next, heartache about a dream broken, frustration with my ex- partner and fear about what would happen legally etc – It was a scary, exhausting and challenging time those first few months. I was so busy trying to put on a brave face for my children, my family and my friends that I didn’t take time to process and everything that happened compounded and turned into bitterness. Bitterness is like an acid that eats away at whatever is holding it. It will do more harm to you than the person who hurt you. I know this now because I lived it but the only way to get through it was to let it go in order to create something better for myself and my children.
My situation isn’t unique. We all feel hurt by other people’s words and actions from time to time and sometimes we cause our own pain by thinking bad things about ourselves. We blame ourselves, we treat ourselves badly and we cause our own pain by thinking bad things about ourselves. So, what I want you to understand is that any feelings of bitterness, resentment, frustration, and guilt you may have are never created by what someone did to you or what you did to yourself or someone else. They are created by your thoughts, you’re thinking, about the situation. In other words, it’s your thoughts that keep the hurt, anger, guilt and bitterness alive, not the actual incident. The incident has happened, it’s done and it’s in the past.
What’s in the now is the thinking about the incident, situation or experience that happened back then. And this is really at the root cause of our pain. It took me a long time to truly understand that. I thought that it was crazy initially but 2 years in and through some deep personal development mindset work, its crystal clear to me and makes complete sense.
The single most freeing thing I did was to forgive myself. Then forgive the other person. Holding onto the past in the now only give him power by me giving it emotion he was still hurting me, by me holding onto it. I had to let myself be free and let it go. It was actually all about me! Not what happened.
I am not saying, by any means, saying you should open yourself up to those who hurt you or giving them the opportunity to do it again. Forgiveness has nothing to do with the person who harmed or hurt you. It’s all about what you’re thinking and feeling about what happened in the past. You see, you cannot hold bad thought in your mind and move in a positive direction. And in life, you are either growing or disintegrating moving forward or moving backward. I wanted to grow, it seemed crazy to me, to not work through it and to be the one holding myself back, by choice. I didn’t want these things to be the burden of my children and become part of their belief system, that seemed very unfair and a bad mothering choice. So, I let go of the negative thoughts and feelings by consciously replacing over time through repetition the bad thoughts and negative feelings with a beautiful idea.
Ideas such as living a life without feeling the pain, the anger or grief. Picturing seeing myself smile and dance and feel free, truly free. Even saying things, like it feels so good to be free and to be able to have this power to choose my feelings and not let them control me anymore. I did this often. I made a habit out of saying, I am so grateful for my kids. J am so grateful for my healthy body. I feel lucky to be able to spend so much time with my kids. I only focused on the good. I guess I convinced myself of something better and ended up believing it.
Doing this exercise daily was incredibly powerful because it wasn’t about him, it was only about me and the vibe, thoughts and energy I put out onto the world, my kids and in my life. Why? Well, if your putting out anger, revenge or resentment, or any negative vibrational feelings, you’ll get it back instantly. The feelings will bury you.
However, the minute you put out loving, joyous, fun, light energy that’s what you’ll get back. And if you do it often and make it a habit, it will have an enormous impact on your life. See, I’ve learnt that forgiveness can do more good things for me than anything else I know of. I was so used to being treated badly that being good to myself was very foreign, but I noticed massive differences quickly with how life responded to me. I still do this; every single day and my life now is totally unrecognisable from what it was 2 years ago and so am I.
My advice, my takeaway, my lesson I want to share is that if you make it a practice to love and respect yourself enough not to carry bad thoughts about anyone (including yourself) or anything and you let it all go and replace feelings of frustration, bitterness, and guilt with thoughts of beauty, love and abundance it will leave you open to something beautiful. At the end of the day, the choice is to accept what it is, either you control the situation, it is controls you.
You may also like to read:
10 Useful rules for a single parent household
My experience of being a solo parent
