Happy Friday, people. Today I want to talk about one of the frustrating facts of life

that things won't always go your own way. But disappointment and its extremes like grief

and anger takes a lot of mental strength, which is why people ask me to talk about things like

forgiveness, letting go of the past,

moving on, letting go of resentment and anger. And although everyone's different, every situation is

different and needs dealing with in your own way, I do think a lot of these things boil down

to acceptance. Acceptance that something has happened. Acceptance that it

hasn't and can't. Accepting of other people and their mistakes. If our brain expects everything

to go according to expectations, it's going to create an emotional response when it doesn't.

The fight or flight response, anxiety,

anger. And it can be hard to let things go, even though the only one hurting over it is you.

And I think one of the reasons we hold on to these sorts of things is because we sometimes think that in accepting things,

we're also condoning it, encouraging it and forgiving someone for something. And forgiveness is

proper hard, nigh on impossible in some instances, isn't it? We can't forgive everyone that has ever hurt us.

I don't know what you've been through,

but if my consulting room is anything like the rest of the world,

some of you have been seriously hurt, abused and neglected by someone.

So if we don't forgive, then how can we let go of the emotion that our

experience is created? Well, that's where acceptance comes in. People make the mistake of thinking

that it makes them weak or naive to accept and let go of something.

But I see it as quite the opposite, in fact.

It's really hard.

...