Another step to attaining a better life is learning to accept and move on. You can spend your whole life blaming people and events for ruining your life, but if you do that, what kind of life are you going to live? You need to accept that there are things that you can’t change, and learn to move on.

For the longest time, I spent all my energy on hating people for the things that they had done to me. I grew up in a poor, abusive family where love and kindness were only the stuff of fairy tales. I blamed my mother, my family, and the people that I encountered every day. I blamed them for every lousy thing that had ever happened to me, and I blamed them for my inability to achieve anything better.

It took me a long time to realize that that way of thinking wasn’t getting me anywhere. Did blaming these people and hating them get me anywhere? No, it didn’t. It didn’t change the past, and it only made a negative impact on the present and the future. I was wasting precious energy on negative emotions, and it was getting me nowhere fast.

Learning to accept the things that have happened to you, and learning the lessons of those events is no easy task. You may ask yourself, why did this happen to me? Why did people hurt me? Why doesn’t anything good happen to me? Here’s the thing, we’re constantly living in a residual effect of everything that has come before.

Ok, let me try to explain that. What has happened to you all adds up to make you who you are. The choices that you have made and how you dealt with life’s trials and tribulations all add up to make the life you have now. You can’t change the past, but you can build a better residual situation to live in later.

As I said, I grew up in an emotionally abusive situation. That gave me self esteem issues, inferiority issues, and a slew of other problems. There came a point in my life when I had to accept that these things had happened, and nothing I could ever do was going to change that. I had to learn from those experiences, and move on.

What I learned from the abuse of my youth, and the negativity of the people in my later years, was that people are fundamentally flawed. People are imperfect, and too many people get wrapped up in anger, and holding onto the negativity of their own past. People hurt others because they have been hurt. They bring others down because they don’t know any other way to bring themselves up. Knowing this about others helped me to be a better person myself.

When you encounter negative people, you need to look at them, and see it as an example of what you do not want to be. You need to see the flaws of others, and endeavor not to succumb to the same pitfalls that they did.

In accepting that you can’t change your past, or the people around you, you free up an amazing amount of energy. When you let go of hate and regret, you can turn that free energy into better things. You can use it to improve yourself and your life.

Whenever you find yourself thinking about something, and feeling upset, you need to stop and analyze that thing you’re thinking about. Can you change it? If it is something or someone from your past, and you’re feeling anger or sadness, you need to accept that it has happened and cannot be changed, and divert your thoughts to something that you can change.

Letting go of the past can be tremendously difficult, especially for those of us who have had an abused youth or abusive relationships. When we have been poor, or ill, or suffered hardships, we find it hard to let go, but we really need to. Letting go will make you so much happier in the long run. Learn from the mistakes and pains of your past, and use that knowledge to make yourself into a better person.

Briana Blair

Briana Blair is an author and artisan. She has published more then 30 books and thousands of articles across multiple sites. After practicing Paganism and witchcraft for 25 years, she's now on a journey as an atheist and skeptic. She's eclectic, unpredictable, and always evolving. Facebook - Twitter