Some of the most challenging changes we make involve saying good-bye to relationships.  If you are going through a break up or a divorce, or leaving a job, or moving somewhere new, it involves saying good bye to a person or people or who have been significant to you.  Endings are hard and you’re usually filled with complex emotions at the time they happen.  But often the way we end a relationship colors the way we feel about that person for a very long time, as well as how the person thinks about us.  Putting energy into creating a thoughtful  ending can help you move forward and sustain positive feelings about yourself and your relationships well into the future.

Endings involve ambivalent feelings.  We once were dedicated to someone or something, and now we have to let go.  If we dwell on all the great things we will be losing, we would be stuck and never move on.  But sometimes we go to an extreme.  In order to make the separation, we get angry, seeing only the bad experiences in order to motivate us to let go.  Ever hear someone talk about their “Ex” with such disdain, it’s hard to imagine they were ever in love?  It’s easy to jump on the negativity bandwagon.  It frees you up from taking a deeper look at a complex dynamic and owning your part of what can feel like a failure.  Just as teenagers often need to judge their parents harshly in order to separate, we all have a tendency to become a bit superior as a defense against the pain of loss.

But be careful.  Leaving a job or a relationship in such a negative state can have consequences for you.  Research shows we tend to remember the things that happen most recently (aptly called the recency effect”).  So even if you have loved your job and the people you worked with for a long time, if things end badly, that is what you and your co-workers will remember.  Years of cooperation and mutual respect can be washed away with a bad taste of “they never appreciated me,” or “she always thought she was better than us” types of feelings that linger.

Especially when we feel a lack of control in a situation, it is tempting to end things with a bang.  But relationships don’t truly ever end.  Even if we never encounter the person again, the relationship lives on in our mind.  If we are careful and open to the process of ending, we can preserve good memories and people who are dear to us.  Rather than forming a reserve of bitterness we operate from, it helps to think of creating a treasure chest, where we store the valued aspects of our relationships, both good and challenging.  These relationships are part of our history and our identity.  They represent who we were and how we have grown.  Rather than burning bridges, by working through the painful emotions of endings, we can hold onto the love that was once created.