Copying / Pasting , Duplicating things in Flash

Wow, this is really driving me up the wall. I’m new to Flash, and no matter what I do it seems whenever I want to copy and paste or duplicate something it never just leaves the original alone. It creates an instance so i cant edit one independently from the other. How can i just simply easily copy and paste a symbol movie clip ect. and have it be completely independent from the original?
I figure there must be an easy way to do this?