Why We Can't Move On

I heard a version of the same thing from several people in my session room this week. Different stories, different relationships, different losses. But the same thread running through all of them: why can't I just move through this faster?

Grief, transition, the end of something that mattered. We want to be on the other side of it. We are impatient with ourselves, uncomfortable in the in-between, and quietly ashamed of how long it's taking.

So we push. We get busy. We rationalise. We try to think our way forward.

And we stay stuck.

Grief takes time. It really, really does. And the more you push it aside, the more it just sits there and waits.

Endings ask something of us that often gets underestimated. It is not just the wrapping up. It is the subsiding. The quiet internal reckoning of: what was this, and what does it mean now that it's over?

There is grief folded into every ending, even when what's ending was painful. Maybe especially then. Because we don't only grieve good things. We grieve the hope that was inside a hard thing. The version of the future we were quietly building toward. The love we extended, even when it wasn't met the way we needed.

We have to meet that grief in order for the heart to open again.

To feel, and to know, that we loved.

That it mattered.

That something real was there.

And then comes the part that is even more tender.

The actual letting go.

Letting go requires a kind of trust that the self won't dissolve when the investment releases.

Letting go of the intensity, the preoccupation, the constant background hum of that person or dynamic, is not indifference. It is actually a mature act of coming back to yourself. But if someone has learned that holding on is how they stay safe, or how they stay loved, or how they stay real, then releasing can feel like disappearing.

Sometimes what looks like holding onto a relationship is actually holding onto an identity. A role that only makes sense in relation to that person. The question underneath: if I let go, who am I?

So I find myself asking, with clients who can't move on: what is it you're actually holding onto? Because it rarely turns out to be just the person. Underneath, there is often something older. A self that was built around this attachment. A way of being known. A sense of purpose or place that now has nowhere to live.

And the texture of that holding is different for everyone. For some it is grief. For others, fear. Sometimes it is anger that has nowhere to go, or hope that hasn't quite given up yet. Whatever it is, it deserves to be met, not managed.

The body carries all of this. It braces. It tightens. It holds what the mind tries to skip past. And it will keep holding, quietly, until you give it permission to actually feel what's there.

This is not a flaw in you. It is how you are built. The nervous system doesn't release on demand. It releases when it feels safe enough to. When it has been met, rather than managed.

What helps is not trying harder or thinking differently. What helps is setting aside real time, and real space, to be with what you're carrying. To breathe into the places that have been bracing. To let the body untangle. To move, to open, to let what needs to come out, come out.

On the other side of that withdrawal, there is something waiting. A fertile void. Space that used to be full of that person, that relationship, that longing, now available for something new to grow in.

But that space only feels nourishing if you have a self to bring into it. And building that self back is exactly the work of grief, done slowly, with honesty, and without rushing.

You don't move on by pushing through. You move on by actually going through.

If you find yourself in that in-between place, you don't have to hurry. But you do have to feel it.

That is how the heart opens again.

With love, Narla