Writing a 'no send' letter to those who have hurt you

Permission to: let it rip.

Have you heard of writing a ‘no send’ letter? A no send letter is a letter you write to someone you are upset with, in which you write all the gumf and turmoil and hurt that you wish you could say to the person… but you don’t actually send the letter. Instead, you may read it out to a therapist, a trusted friend or let it burn baby burn.

It helps because:

• You afford yourself the time and emotional space to truly witness your pain.

• You get to speak the unspeakable, which gives you a chance to let it go.

• It can shift your perspective, and leave you with a sense of self-compassion and even gratitude.

• It doesn’t have negative repercussions in which you regret saying something that you can’t take back.

• If you keep them and re-read them later on, they can remind you of how far you have come.

As a bit of fun I thought I’d share these comical ‘no send’ letters that I have written on New Year’s Eve over the last few years. Sometimes we don’t need to express how we feel towards a person, but just our feelings about a situation.

The last few years have been so tumultuous with everything that is going on in the world. I wrote these as a little micro-process of all of that, and to give myself a bit of a laugh because humour is such a salve for the soul. We can have fear and humour, grief and joy. Feelings are not one dimensional and we can appreciate the fullness of our humanity by allowing them to mingle within us.

Just a bit of silliness to see the year out!

I’m not going to launch into a full on reflection of 2023. Not because I’m so cool that I just ‘live in the present man’, but because I have a perimenopausal brain that can’t remember what I went into the larder for, let alone the names of my children or all that happened this year.

I will offer a pause for thought though.

I heard someone say recently that it takes as much work to stand still as it does to progress. That resonated with me, about how busy I can be in a multitude of directions, but not actually progressing in the direction that I want to take.

I shared this idea with a friend yesterday, and she shared that actually, standing still, being in the ‘winter’ season is a lot harder. To sit in the stillness, in the liminal space, dropping the old coping strategies and being with yourself in all of your humanness is so, so much harder.

And that resonated with me too. And I don’t have that tied up in a neat bow for you, other than to say life is so much more interesting and rich when we live in the ‘yes, and’, in the allowing of all that is rather than the ‘either, or’ or ‘no, but’ , in our efforts to control; and it made me think of this saying that I wrote a while ago.

A window of opportunity to be with your being-ness will be during my writing workshop, which I wrote about last week. I’m so looking forward to running this Hope workshop on 11th January. It’ll be an opportunity to write a letter from your fear, to reflect on how your strengths have helped you in the past and can offer you hope with whatever you are dealing with right now.

Thank you to those of you who have already signed up and a BIG thanks to those who have shared about it to your own subscribers.

It’s free, so the only thing you need to invest is your time…

I’m holding you all in my heart today, thinking about what the next year will bring you, hoping that it is something that will make you feel ‘hashtag blessed’.

Thanks for being here.

That’s it for how,

‘Til next time.

Jacky x