Everyone tells you to "let go." Your therapist says it. Your best friend says it. That Instagram account with the sunset quotes says it approximately 47 times a day.
But nobody tells you HOW to let go, or even exactly what you're actually letting go of.
That's the problem.
In divorce, you're not just releasing one thing. You're releasing the entire architecture of your life. And until you name what you're grieving, you can't actually grieve it OR let it go.
You're Letting Go Of More Than Just A Person.
Obviously, when you get a divorce, you need to let go of the person you married. Doing that involves significant sadness and grief.
That’s true whether you initiated the divorce or were blindsided by it. Nobody walks down the aisle thinking, I hope this ends in legal paperwork and splitting up the furniture.
The marriage may have already been over long before the papers were filed, but the loss is still real.
What's less obvious are all the other things you need to let go of that the relationship was propping up, like:
Your Identity.
"Married person" isn't just a tax status. It's a whole self-concept. For many people, especially those who've been partnered for years or decades, "spouse" has become part of the answer to the question who am I? Divorce forces you to rethink and reinvent who you really are on a multitude of levels.
Your Social World.
Divorce is a sieve. Some friendships survive it; many don't. Mutual friends feel pressure to choose sides. Couples you socialized with as a pair suddenly go quiet. In-laws who felt like family (and maybe even some who were family) disappear from your life without so much as a goodbye. For a lot of people, losing your social circle is as painful as losing your marriage itself.
The Myth You Were Living Inside.
When you're married, you carry a story about your future. You know what retirement looks like. You know where the holidays will be. You have a co-author for every chapter of your life. Divorce doesn't just change the story. It rips out the pages and hands you a blank notebook. That's eventually freeing, but first it’s terrifying.
Why People Get Stuck [HINT: It's Not Weakness]
The letting go stage is where most people stall out. It’s not that they're weak or broken. But before you feel comfortable letting go you need something else to grab onto. Think about a trapeze artist: they don't release the bar until their hands are reaching for the next one.
Letting go into nothing isn't brave. It's free-falling.
For most of us, that’s terrifying.
That’s why trying to shortcut grief - skipping the messy middle, white-knuckling through your emotions, avoiding feeling anything at all by throwing yourself into work or dating or keeping busy, usually backfires. You can't let go of something until you’ve grieved the loss of it.
Another trap is mistaking “letting go” for “forgiving” or “forgetting”. Letting go doesn't mean your marriage was a farce or that your pain wasn't real. It doesn't mean you're erasing your history. It means you're choosing to stop letting that history have veto power over your future.
There's a Difference Between Processing and Spiraling.
Feeling your feelings is necessary. Camping in them indefinitely is not.
You can’t move on until you’ve worked through your feelings – especially the ugly ones. You’ve got to allow yourself to feel the sadness, the grief, the anger, the confusion, and all the other feelings that going through a divorce triggers. But, at the same time, wallowing in those feelings indefinitely is guaranteed to keep you stuck in the muck.
How do you know if you’re actually processing your emotions or just spinning in circles?
You have to be honest with yourself. Ask yourself: Am I moving through this? Am I feeling a tiny bit better every day? Or am I using my feelings to get other people to feel sorry for me, or to avoid actually moving forward in life?
There's no shame in your answers. The goal isn't to eliminate your feelings. It's to stop letting those feelings be the whole story for the rest of your life.
How Do You Know You’re Really Letting Go?
Letting go doesn’t look dramatic. You don’t instantly feel relief or experience an overwhelming urge to jump on a dating app and get “back in the saddle” again.
Letting go is much more subtle than that.
It looks like responding to your ex’s hostile text with two sentences instead of two paragraphs.
It looks like building a Friday night at home alone doing what you actually enjoy rather than dreading being alone.
It looks like noticing what you want for dinner … not what your ex would want, not what your kids would want, but what you want.
It looks like waking up one morning and realizing you went a whole day without thinking about your divorce. Then two days. Then a week.
Letting go doesn’t come in a single sensational moment of release. It happens in a hundred small decisions to invest your attention somewhere new - in your own healing, your own identity, your own life.
That's the part nobody puts on an Instagram meme.
But it's where the real work is. And it's worth doing.
