How to Let Go of Someone You Still Love

Hello beautiful hearts,

Welcome back to my videos.

If you've ever tried to let go of someone and found yourself wondering why it still hurts so much,

Even when you know it's the right decision,

This video is for you.

Not for the version of you that has it figured out already,

But for the version of you that is still in it,

Still checking their profile at midnight,

Still replaying conversations,

Looking for the moment things might have gone differently,

Still loving someone you know you cannot hold on to anymore.

In this video,

We're not going to talk about timelines or stages or how to get over it faster.

We're going to go somewhere more real than that.

We're going to talk about what is actually happening inside you when you grieve someone you love.

Why letting go feels like such an impossible contradiction,

And how to move through it in a way that doesn't require you to harden or pretend or leave pieces of yourself behind.

And at the end,

I'll share what I believe is waiting for you on the other side.

Not as a promise that it won't hurt,

But as a reminder that the hurt is not the whole story.

So if you're ready,

Or even if you're not quite ready,

But you are here anyway,

Let's begin.

I want to start by saying something that bothered me when I was healing from heartbreak.

There are many videos or relationship advice that tell you letting go is just a decision you make.

Like you wake up one morning,

You feel the feeling,

You do the work,

And then you're free.

Like it's a door you walk through,

And it closes behind you,

And you never have to touch it again.

Oh,

That's a red flag.

Run.

Oh,

This relationship isn't the right one for you.

Let it go.

But that's not what it feels like,

Is it?

I know that wasn't what it felt for me.

Even when I ended that one toxic relationship I had,

It was not a clean cut.

Not even close,

If I'm honest.

What it actually feels like is more like this.

You're doing okay.

You're making coffee in the morning,

And the music playing is soft and soothing,

And everything is just right.

And for a whole minute,

You forget.

And then something small happens.

A song changes,

Or the familiar smell of your coffee,

And it's like your chest caves in all over again.

And there you are,

Coffee still in your hand,

Thinking,

I thought I was past this.

Why am I not past this?

And that thought,

That judgment you're placing on yourself,

Might actually be the thing that's making all of this so much harder than it needs to be.

So let's start there.

Let's start with what's actually happening inside you.

Because it took me far too long,

And far too much pain to understand it.

And I hope you can suffer less,

And enjoy more.

When you love someone,

And you lose them,

Whether that's through a breakup,

Through growing apart,

Through choosing to leave,

Even when the love is still real,

Something genuinely profound happens in your body and your brain.

And this isn't a metaphor.

The same neural pathways that process physical pain,

Activate when we experience social loss.

When researchers scan the brains of people who had recently gone through a breakup,

And show them photos of their former partners,

The area that lit up were the same regions associated with addiction and withdrawal.

So you're not being dramatic.

You are not weak.

You are literally going through withdrawal from another human being.

And that's incredibly hard.

Think about what that means for a moment.

You build a whole world with this person,

Or at least a world that had them in it.

Certain songs you sang or listened to together.

Certain restaurants carry the memory of their loving gaze across the table.

Certain hours of the day when you drove home from work.

Certain activities you always did together.

All of that was colored by their presence.

And now it isn't.

Now those same hours are just yours again,

Hollow in a way they weren't before.

The grief of this is real.

And I think it deserves to be named and acknowledged,

Not rushed through.

Because here's what happened when we rushed through it.

We don't actually move through the grief.

We bury it.

And buried things have a way of growing roots.

There's a particular cruelty in loving someone you can't be with,

Or someone who isn't good for you,

Or someone who simply chose a different path.

Because the love doesn't consult your logic.

You can know in the clearest and most rational part of yourself that this relationship wasn't right.

You can know they hurt you.

You can know you were shrinking inside it,

Or that the timing was impossible,

Or that you simply wanted different things.

You can know all of that and still reach for your phone to tell them something funny that just happened.

Still feel in your most unguarded moments that they are there with you.

That's a part that nobody quite prepares you for.

That loving someone and knowing it can't work are not opposites.

There are two things that can exist in you simultaneously.

Pressing against each other,

Making you feel like you are somehow broken for feeling both.

But you're not broken.

You're just human.

And being human means your heart doesn't file things away neatly based on what makes sense.

So let's talk about what letting go actually is.

Because I think most of us have been taught a version of it that is honestly a little cruel.

We've been taught that letting go means not loving them anymore.

That it means you look back and feel nothing.

Or better yet,

That you don't even look back at all.

That it means replacing them or getting over them.

Or my personal least favorite,

Moving on by carrying only the worst parts you remember about them.

But that's not it.

That's not it at all.

Letting go isn't about not loving them.

It's about choosing yourself even when it hurts.

It's about saying this love is real and I still choose my own life.

It's about learning to hold the love tenderly like something that happened mattered and shaped you without letting it hold you hostage.

That distinction matters more than I can say.

So how do you actually do it?

How do you get from where you are now,

Which might be raw and recent,

Or might be long,

Festering,

And quietly exhausting,

To somewhere that feels like ground beneath your feet again?

I want to be honest with you.

There isn't a shortcut.

I won't pretend there is one.

It took me personally a whole year.

But there's a process and understanding the process even imperfectly can make it feel less like you're drowning and more like you're swimming in deep water.

Still very hard but purposeful,

Moving,

And hopefully won't take as long.

The first thing,

And I learned this the hard way because it felt counterintuitive,

The first thing is to stop fighting the love.

A lot of people in pain try to fast track their grief by trying to stop loving that person.

They try to find reasons to hate them,

To rewrite history,

To convince themselves the love was never real to begin with.

And sometimes this works as a temporary survival mechanism.

But it also often delays the real work because what you're doing is fighting a feeling rather than metabolizing.

Feelings that we fight tend to grow stronger.

Feelings that we allow and we turn toward,

Sit with,

And observe,

Those feelings tend to move,

Not disappear,

They move.

So the invitation here is to give yourself permission to still love them while also letting yourself grieve.

To say,

Yes,

I love this person,

And this chapter is closed.

Both of these things are true,

And I'm going to accept both for as long as it needs to be.

And don't get me wrong here,

This is harder than it sounds because it requires a kind of radical honesty with yourself.

It requires sitting in discomfort instead of distracting yourself out of it.

This is like feeling all your pain without taking any painkillers,

But it's the only way through that doesn't require you to cut off a piece of yourself in the process.

The second part of the process is something I think of as reclaiming your narrative.

When we lose someone we love,

There's often a story we tell ourselves about why,

And that story often centers us as insufficient.

We're not enough,

We were too much.

If only we had said this differently,

Done that differently,

Been a slightly different version of ourselves,

It would have worked out.

But I want you to hear this loud and clear,

That story is almost never the whole truth,

And it's always a trap.

Because you see,

What that story does is locate the source of the pain entirely inside you.

It's a flaw,

A failure,

A deficiency,

And if the problem is you,

Then the solution must be to become someone other than who you truly are,

Right?

And that is something cruel to do to yourself.

The truth is almost always more complex than putting the entire blame on yourself,

Or on them.

Relationships end because of timing,

Because of incompatibility,

Because of wounds people carry that have nothing to do with just you,

Because of circumstances that simply don't bend to love.

No matter how genuine that love is,

Sometimes people are deeply,

Truly,

Honestly wrong for each other,

And also genuinely love each other.

Those things do co-exist sometimes.

So one of the most important things you can do in this process is to get rigorous about the stories you're telling yourself.

Not to rewrite history so that you bear no responsibility for anything,

But to refuse the vision of events where the lesson is that you are fundamentally unlovable or unworthy.

That lesson is a lie,

Okay?

And you can grieve the loss without letting it become a verdict on who you are.

So take out your journal,

Start writing down the stories you've been carrying.

Don't censor it.

Don't judge it.

Just let it unfold,

One honest thought at a time.

The third part,

And this is where it starts to feel slowly like sunlight,

Is beginning to turn your attention towards yourself.

Not in a performative self-care way,

Not in a treat yourself way.

I mean,

It's still nice and lovely to take yourself out for a solo date or a nice spa,

But the most important thing is to treat yourself in a deep and genuine way.

The kind that asks,

Who am I outside of this relationship?

What do I truly want?

What did I let go of about myself when I was in that relationship that I'd like to find again?

This part of the process often feels strange at first,

Especially if you've been shaped by someone's presence for a long time.

Your own outline can feel blurry without them.

You might not immediately know what you're like when it's just you.

You might find yourself reaching for preferences that were actually theirs,

Not yours.

This is normal,

And it's also an invitation to deeply reconnect with yourself.

There's something extraordinary that can happen in the aftermath of loss if you let it.

The things that distracted you are suddenly gone.

The emotional energy you were pouring into managing a relationship,

The hope,

The worry,

The negotiation,

The wondering,

Is suddenly available for something else,

And that something else can be you,

Your actual life,

The things you've been meaning to do,

The person you've been meaning to become,

And the quiet inner stillness you've been avoiding.

I'm not saying this to make loss sound like a gift,

Because a loss is a loss,

But inside real loss,

There's also always an opening if you're willing to move toward it.

And now let's talk about the hardest part that most people don't talk about,

Which is that letting go is not linear.

You will have days where you feel genuinely free,

Where you wake up and think about them and feel warmth instead of ache,

Where you are excited about your life,

Where you catch a glimpse briefly and beautifully of who you've become.

And then you'll have days,

Sometimes triggered by something specific,

Sometimes by nothing at all,

Where you feel like you're right back at the beginning,

Where it feels as fresh and impossible as it did in the very first week.

This is not a sign that you're doing it wrong.

This is exactly how grief works.

It doesn't move in a straight line,

Out of darkness and into light.

It moves in waves.

It moves in spirals.

You revisit the same feelings at different depth,

Each time understanding them a little more,

Each time carrying them with a slightly lighter weight,

Even when it doesn't feel that way.

What changes though,

Even if slowly,

Is the duration.

The waves start to peak,

But then go away faster.

The spirals become less disorienting because you start to recognize them.

You start to know,

Ah,

Here's another grief wave.

I've been here before and I know it will pass.

And that knowing,

That accumulation of having been through your own feelings becomes a kind of stability,

A quiet confidence that you will be okay.

Not because the pain is gone,

But because you have proven to yourself that you can hold it.

Now that you understand the process of letting go,

There's something really important,

Something I didn't do during my own healing for a very long time,

That I want to gently remind you of.

You are not alone in this,

Okay?

There are people in your life right now who want to help you through this.

Sometimes they might say the wrong things.

They'll tell you that you're better off without this person,

When what you need is someone to just acknowledge how much you love them.

They might encourage you to start dating again,

When what you actually need is to sit still.

Or they might even minimize the loss,

Because watching someone they love in pain is uncomfortable.

And minimizing is the quickest way to make the visible pain stop.

But let them love you anyway.

Let them be imperfect at it,

Because isolation is one of the great risks of grief.

We think our pain is too much,

Too specific,

Too complicated for others to hold with us.

So we go quiet.

And quiet while you're hurting can slowly create distance that lingers.

You don't have to be okay to be around people.

You don't have to perform your healing.

And you certainly don't have to take their advice.

It's especially important while you're vulnerable to discern who's in it for gossip,

And who's truly there for you.

But you just need to allow yourself to be seen and to be loved.

And now you might be wondering,

So what does it look like on the other side of all of this?

Hopefully by now you no longer try to rush there.

But when you are in the dark,

It helps to know that there is light somewhere beyond it.

And this is what I want to share with you based on my own experience,

Just as a reference.

On the other side,

It doesn't always mean you stop loving them.

Some people you love permanently.

Some love will never leave.

It becomes part of who you are.

Quiet,

Incorporated,

No longer painful,

But there.

Like a room in your house you don't go into very often,

But that you know is there,

That holds things that once mattered enormously.

On the other side,

You find that you have become,

In some ways you didn't expect,

More yourself.

The loss strips something away,

A dependency,

A story,

A version of yourself that existed only in relation to them.

And what remains is more solid,

More real,

More distinctly you.

On the other side,

New things become possible,

New connections,

New desires,

New versions of what love could look like for you.

Not replacements,

But evolutions.

Because everything you loved and lost taught you something about what you need,

About what nourishes you,

About what you will and won't settle for next time.

And on the other side,

When you look back,

And you probably will do that many times,

Because that's just what humans do,

And you find that you can finally look at this relationship with grace.

Not without sadness,

Maybe,

But without the burning,

Without the feeling that your life somehow ended there.

It didn't end there.

It shaped you into a new version of you that you come to love.

If you're still having a hard time believing that you can get through this,

Try and recall any of your past relationships.

You got to the other side then,

And you will again this time.

And I want to close with this,

Because I think it's the most important thing I've said.

Choosing yourself when you still love someone is not a betrayal of the love.

It is,

In a strange and sacred way,

The fullest expression of it.

Because when you truly love someone,

You want good things for them.

Their growth,

Their happiness,

Their wholeness.

And sometimes the most loving thing you can do is to release the hold.

To stop trying to make something work that has stopped working.

To trust that you both deserve lives that are actually meant for you,

Even if that means those lives don't include each other.

And to fully love yourself,

Even when it's hard,

Even when it hurts,

Even when love for yourself feels like the most foreign and unfamiliar concept you've ever encountered,

Is to say,

I matter too.

My life is worth something.

My future is worth protecting,

And I'm allowed to choose it,

Even while I'm grieving.

That is what letting go really is.

It's choosing yourself.

One quiet,

Aching,

Great day at a time.

And I promise you,

I really do.

You are capable of it.

You didn't stumble onto this video by accident.

You are here because some part of you is ready,

Even if the rest of you is still catching up.

And that readiness,

That courage to keep showing up for yourself,

Even on the hard days,

That is everything.

Thank you,

Genuinely,

For spending this time with me.

It means more than you know to be trusted with something this tender.

If this resonated with you,

Please share it with someone who might need it.

Because sometimes the most loving thing we can do is hand someone the words they couldn't find themselves.

So come back.

I'll be here.

And until then,

Be patient with yourself.

You're doing better than you think.

Now,

Go be yourself.