Necessary Endings: The Employees, Businesses, and Relationships That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Move Forward

by Henry Cloud

If you have emotional and other energy invested in something, when you pull that out, and let go, you are going to feel it. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, so if you make a move to end something you are invested in, there will be an impact. And if you do not deal with those feelings, you are going to have to do some funny things to get around them. So why does that matter? Pure and simple: energy and investment. Whatever you are going to build in your life or your business, it is going to come through investment of energy by you and your people in the new fill-in-the-blank. And the only energy you can invest is available energy. To make it available, you have to withdraw it from something else. The technical word for that in psychology is to decathect. Cathexis is the investment of mental or emotional energy in a person, an object, or an idea. So decathexis is the process of taking it back. The only way to do that is to grieve for what has been invested in before so you can move forward.