How to Release Stress

People make mistakes. Sometimes very serious ones. The mistakes aren’t deliberate or personal. Sometimes people just don’t know what they are doing. This means that if, in the past, people have behaved badly towards you, it wasn’t necessarily because they meant to be horrid, but because they were as naïve, as foolish, as human as the rest of us. They made mistakes in the way they brought you up or finished a relationship with you or whatever, not because they wanted to do it that way, but because they didn’t know any different. If you want to, you can let go of any feelings of resentment, of regret, of anger. You can accept that you are a fabulous human being because of all the bad things that have happened to you, not in spite of them. What is done is done and you need to just get on with things. Don’t use the labels ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Yes, I know some of it is indeed bad but it is how we let it affect us that is the ‘real bad’. You could let all these things get you down, fizzle away internally like some emotional acid making you ill and resentful and stuck. But you will let them go, embrace them as character forming and in general as positive rather than negative.
On paper, I had a seriously dysfunctional childhood and for a while was resentful. I blame my bizarre upbringing for all that was weak or dispirited or badly formed in me. It’s so easy to do. But once I accepted that what was done was done, and that I could choose to forgive and get on with my life, things improved enormously. For at least one of my siblings, this was not the route they choose, and they carried on building up the resentment until it overwhelmed them.
For me, it was essential, if I wanted more out of my life, to embrace all the bad things as being an important part of me and to move on. In fact, I wanted them to fuel me into my future, to become positive to such an extent that I couldn’t imagine being me without them. Now, if given the choice, I wouldn’t change a thing. Yes, looking...