If you are searching for how to let go of someone you love, you are probably not short of advice. You have been told to delete the photographs, to keep busy, to give it time. Yet the person, or the version of life you built around them, still occupies the room. This piece shares what I taught 86 people in a live online workshop on letting go: why the heart keeps holding, what the holding quietly costs, and the exercises that help release begin.
Here is the honest answer first. You do not let go of someone you love by trying to stop loving them, and you do not do it in a single moment of decision. You let go of the weight you have wrapped around them: the unanswered questions, the debt you feel is still owed, the guilt, the argument with what happened. That weight can be located, named, examined and put down, in a particular order, and the order is what most people miss.
What 86 People Brought Into One Online Room
On Sunday, 25 October 2026, I ran a two-and-a-half-hour live workshop called The Psychology of Letting Go: Endings, Grudges, and the Weight You Still Carry. Eighty-six people joined. It went well, and I want to record what we covered while it is still fresh, partly for those who were there and partly for anyone who could not be.
I had built the afternoon around the weights I expected most people to bring: a relationship that ended on paper but not inside them, a betrayal that never received an apology, and the death of someone they loved. Every exercise was private. Cameras were optional, nothing had to be shared aloud, and I said clearly at the outset that this was education, not therapy.
Why the Heart Keeps the File Open
We began with a question nearly everyone asks: why can I not just move on?
The answer starts with a cafe in the 1920s, where the psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik observed that waiters remembered unpaid orders in detail and forgot them once the bill was settled. Her work gave us the Zeigarnik effect, the mind’s tendency to keep unfinished business active until it feels complete. A breakup with no real explanation, or a goodbye that never happened, registers as unfinished business. So the mind keeps returning to it.
That return has a name too: rumination, the repetitive replaying of a past event. It feels like processing, but it is closer to rehearsal, because the loop revisits the pain without revising it. I have written about this loop in the context of how to stop overthinking, and the mechanism is the same. Nothing new enters, so nothing can close.
Then I turned to the idea at the centre of the afternoon for many people: every ending is two losses. The first is the past you lived, which the world can see and allows you to grieve. The second is the future you planned: the anniversaries, the conversations saved for later, the person you were going to become beside them. Nobody sends flowers for that second loss, and it is often the heavier one.
The Carrying Cost of Holding On
I call the price of all this the carrying cost: the daily charge, in energy, attention and peace, for holding on to what is already over. Like a storage unit that bills you every month for boxes you never open, it is collected whether you think about the past or not.
The cost reaches the body. In a well-known study, Charlotte van Oyen Witvliet and colleagues asked people to recall someone who had hurt them. When participants rehearsed the grudge, their heart rate, blood pressure and facial muscle tension rose more than when they imagined forgiving, and several of those effects lingered after the exercise ended. Johns Hopkins Medicine similarly links chronic anger to a body held in fight-or-flight, with implications for the heart, sleep and mood.
Pause here, privately, before reading on. Whose name still changes the way you breathe? What would you do with the hours your mind currently spends on them? And which loss are you actually grieving: the person, or the future you had planned?
What Letting Go Is Not, Especially in Grief
Release becomes far easier once its impostors are cleared away. Letting go is not forgetting; memory is not the problem. It is not excusing; you can release a wrong without ever calling it right. It is not suppressing; pushing something down is only holding it with your eyes closed. And it is not losing, because you cannot lose what has already ended.
For the bereaved, I added something I consider essential. Psychology once assumed that healthy grief meant detaching from the person who died. Research on continuing bonds, the ongoing inner relationship we keep with someone after their death, has complicated that view. A 2023 systematic review by Hewson and colleagues concluded that such bonds have real adaptive potential. So I told the room plainly: you are not being asked to let go of them. What we release is the guilt, the unsaid words, and the endless sentence “it should not have happened”.
You do not let go of the person. You let go of the weight you have wrapped around them.
The Open Hand Method: Four Moves We Practised Together
The heart of the afternoon was the Open Hand Method, four moves practised live rather than discussed.
Find the grip. We began with an exercise I call the Inventory: three minutes completing the sentence “I am still carrying…” as many times as it needed finishing. Each participant then circled the heaviest item and took it into a guided body scan, noticing where that weight lived: the jaw, the throat, the chest, the stomach. The body often keeps an account the calendar has forgotten.
Face the debt. Beneath most weights sits something we believe we are still owed: an apology, an explanation, justice, a better goodbye, or simply one more day. You cannot cancel a debt you have never itemised. So we wrote the Unsent Letter, six minutes addressed to the person at the centre of the weight, never to be posted. This draws on decades of expressive writing research, beginning with James Pennebaker’s finding that writing about painful experiences was linked to better health months later.
Harvest the lesson. Release feels like loss until the wisdom is kept. Three questions guided this: what did this teach me about people and about love; what boundary do I now hold; and what strength did I discover that I would never have chosen. Keep the wisdom. Return the weight.
Open the hand. Finally, the release itself, through the body. Each person made a fist around what they had chosen to put down and, over six slow breaths, let it open until the palm rested upwards: “Thank you for what you taught me. I am putting the weight down now.”
Three Weights, Three Different Keys
The method is one, but the weights differ, so we closed with specific keys.
For an ending, I spoke about unfinished tenancy: a past love that keeps occupying the present without paying rent. Closure is not something the other person hands you. It is a decision you make and then mark, perhaps by reading the unsent letter aloud once and retiring it. Anniversaries test this, which is why I wrote separately about getting through your ex’s birthday.
For a grudge, forgiveness means a private decision to stop collecting on a debt that was never going to be paid. It does not mean approval or reconciliation. As I told the room: you are not letting them off the hook; you are taking yourself off it. Where the grudge is turned inward, I recommend my piece on guilt and self-blame after betrayal.
For a loss, we worked with a line often shared among the bereaved, that grief is love with nowhere to go. So we give it somewhere to go: speaking their name, keeping their rituals, writing to them on the hard days, and allowing joy to return without guilt. Laughter does not betray the person you lost.
I also said something I say in every room of this kind. If a loss is very fresh, or the weight feels larger than any exercise, a therapist or grief counsellor is not a failure of strength. It is one of its purest forms.
A Sixty-Second Practice to Take Home
Everyone left with one daily habit. Each morning, before reaching for the phone: name what you are carrying today, breathe out slowly three times as the fist loosens, and open the palm on the last breath. Letting go is rarely a single event. We release the way we breathe, again and again, and returning to the practice when the grip comes back is not failure. It is the practice, and it is often where my one-to-one life coaching work begins.
The deeper principles behind this sit in my earlier essay on how to let go of the past. But if there is one thing I hope those 86 people carry out of that room, it is this: the open hand is not empty. It is free.
If you recognise your own weight in these pages and would rather not put it down alone, you are welcome to book a free fifteen-minute conversation with me, and we can look at it together.
