It’s never easy to let someone you loved go. You may not feel the pain at the beginning of a break-up. But when you hear his/her name from your friends, it makes your heart drop; you suddenly remember his/her tender when you see the couples at the cafe, or it makes you cry at a sleepless night. Then you realize how deep an emotional attachment to him you have. You found everything in your life is fulfilled with his/her tinges. You think you cannot live without him/her and you wouldn’t forget him/her anymore.

All your feelings are legitimate, we’ve all been hurt, and it sucks, I get that. But you cannot let the darkness from your past block the light of your life always. One day, you need to embrace your life and move on. The only way you can accept the new joy and happiness into your life is to let go and make peace with it. How do you let go of the past hurts? Let’s find out.

1. Cut off the contact

Many people hang on to the idea of friendship with their ex, which is completely not necessary. It just keeps the possibility of the relationship alive. Even if you decide to end things on good terms, you should do this at least for a little while. Healing through takes time, when your heart is still fresh wounded, being contact with him/her actually just makes things worse. .

So just delete his/her emails, texts, phone number and voice messages and don’t answer the phone or reply to the messages if she/he contacts. Remove her/him from your life, start getting used to the life without him/her and refresh yourself.

2. Accept it and stop blaming

Maybe it don’t work out the way you wanted, but accepting that the relationship was limited and over is very important. It may take a long time, but it is the process you have to go through.

It is natural to feel angry when someone does something hurtful to you. But it hurts yourself more to take the past angry experiences with us into the future. Keep blaming him/her would just keep yourself focused on negative emotions. Stop blaming everything and try to forgive him/her is the only way to achieve emotional freedom.

Learning to forgive and make peace with what happened in the past can happen more easily when you take your focus off of the specific events that occurred and instead try to see the perspective of the people involved. If you find yourself stewing in anger over something that another person did or didn’t do, try to pull back and remember the good qualities you saw in that person when you first met, and recognize that we all have flaws and we all make mistakes. We may not have to forget his/her bad behaviors, but virtually everybody deserves our forgiveness. Sometimes we get stuck in our pain and our stubbornness, we can’t even imagine forgiveness. But forgiveness isn’t saying, “I agree with what you did.” Instead, it’s saying, “I don’t agree with what you did, but I forgive you anyway.”

3. Focus on yourself and live your best life

If you always sit at home and wallow in your sorrows after breakup, you need to get distracted and do things that make you feel alive. For instance, take up a hobby, volunteer somewhere, or take a class and keep yourself busy. When you focus on yourself more and keep doing something, you have less time to think about the past. When the past memories creep into your consciousness (as they are bound to do from time to time), acknowledge them for a moment. And then bring yourself gently back into the present moment, implying yourself with “That was the past, and now I’m focused on my own happiness.”

4. Learn from it

Don’t afraid to recall it. Part of learning how to move on after a break-up is learning from your experience. Think about what was great about the relationship, what was bad and what led to the demise of the relationship. Write it all down and use these notes to help you improve your overall relationship skills, preventing what words or behaviors that you don’t wanna repeat in your next relationship.

5. Meet new people

If you haven’t gone out to a social event since the break-up, now is the time. Sometimes we can get tunnel vision of the person we loved and we believe that we’ll never find someone as good. But that simply isn’t true. There’s a whole world of people out there to meet and many of them will make great partners. But that doesn’t mean you should pick up a random cute guy you spot at a bar, but you’ll feel better if you get dressed up and put yourself out in the world to socialize and meet new people.

At last but not at least, the most important thing to do after a break-up is to stay positive. Knowing that getting over him/her will help you feel better about yourself and about your life. No relationship is perfect, but there are always some skills and techniques we can learn from.