Thank you so much for joining me for this Lessons From the Playroom podcast. We’re going to talk a bit about surrendering and letting go. Surrendering and letting go is not the easiest of things to embrace.
It often puts us in situations that feel overwhelming and scary. The thought sometimes of surrendering and letting go can feel downright painful. Maybe what we’re talking about is something in our own personal lives.
Maybe we have an aspect of life that isn’t going the way that we thought that it was supposed to go. Maybe there is a relationship that did not or isn’t turning out the way we thought it should go. Maybe there are circumstances that we are currently in that feel uncomfortable and we’re having a hard time surrendering and letting go into what is.
Maybe it has to do with an experience in the playroom. Maybe we’re working with a child and the family and they’re really struggling and it’s hard to let go and surrender into trusting that there’s something that is happening that’s helpful. Maybe it is surrendering into making that shift if we needed to, from in person to teletherapy.
Maybe it’s making the shift back from teletherapy to in person. Maybe we have to find a new office, a new place to work with children. Whatever it may be, life has thrown us something different than how we thought it should be.
And that right there is the crux of why it is so hard to let go and to surrender when life happens. Not according to our plans, not according to how we envisioned it would be, how we wanted it to be, how we thought it should be. We feel disappointed, we feel mad, we can feel anxious, we can even feel hopeless.
Even feelings of despair can set in, in these moments because life is not performing the way that we ultimately want it to be. For many of you who have done trainings with me or have studied with me, you know that I talk a lot about the four threats of the brain, the four primary things that in my perception, how I’ve been able to conceptualize the brain, the things that we’re scanning for as we move through our lives. And the fourth one that I talk about has to do with shoulds and unmet expectations.
And this topic goes hand in hand with that particular threat or challenge of the brain. We have a hard time letting go because of attachment. That’s really the root of it.
We’re attached. We’re attached to our story, we’re attached to our identity. We’re attached to the fantasy, we’re attached to our belief system.
We’re attached. And when things don’t go according to plan, we’re sometimes forced. Sometimes it feels like what we’re attached to is being ripped away.
And we’re left now in the second thread of the brain, which is the unknown going, oh my gosh, who am I? What does this mean? What’s going to happen to me? What are the possibilities here? And that’s really the place when we’re going to talk about how do you work with this? How do we learn how to be in this? I think this is actually one of the most important conversations we can have just around simply being human. And if we’re going to be supporting other humans on their journeys, whether these humans are little people or big people, it’s important that we recognize and see the humanness in the struggle around letting go and surrendering. And that also there are some things that we can consider that might be useful and might be able to help us not lose ourselves quite so much.
I have noticed in my 20 plus years as a therapist that transitions, change, seem to be one of, if not the most challenging experience for us. And attached to that again is this idea of it wasn’t supposed to be that way, it wasn’t supposed to go that way. We want a sense of control because the sense of control gives us this false sense that somehow we can control and that everything is going to work out just fine and everything’s going to go according to our plan.
And ultimately that thinking provides us a sense of safety inside, a sense of comfort inside. But when we are forced to let go and surrender, when we’re forced to deal with the disappointment, the sadness, the anger, the frustration, the despair, when we’re forced to now come back and sit in the unknown, it doesn’t feel safe. Now we’re back to being on shaky ground.
When we are forced into this moment, these moments of the unknown, I want to remind us that it’s not actually the unknown itself that’s so scary. I think that’s so important for us to remind ourselves over and over and over again. The unknown simply means new.
That’s what that means. It just means new. It’s what we do in the unknown.
And what we do is we try to make sense of the new. We try to make sense, we try to create meaning in the new. And in order to do that, we look at consciously and unconsciously past experiences that we’ve had and we project them into the unknown and then we make assumptions that I’m about to experience whatever this thing is again, or I’m about to experience something that’s going to feel really painful inside.
Part of that perception of pain is what makes it hard to just surrender and to let go. Our body doesn’t want to surrender and let go because our body feels afraid. Our body feels scared of the possibility of feeling pain.
Our body feels scared of the possibility of sitting in deep levels of emotion and memory. And it’s scary sometimes to go there. I’m going to give a personal story here just to help just make some more meaning in this conversation.
So my mother passed away a couple of years ago suddenly. And I found this part of me struggling to surrender and to let go. I found this part of me that didn’t want to transition and move into the new that was or the unknown that was now very present because my mom had just passed away.
I didn’t want to have to go into those feelings, into those sensations. It felt scary, it felt overwhelming to be able to surrender and to let go. And what I have learned and what I know is that it’s actually the fighting of the surrendering and letting go into what is.
That’s the piece I want us to really get here. The reason why it’s painful is because we are fighting with reality and the fight against the reality. The fight what’s authentic, what’s real, what’s actually happening, who we actually are in any given moment.
How life actually is versus the fantasy, the belief. How it should be, how it shouldn’t have been. She shouldn’t have died.
Whatever the story was I had in my head at that time, it’s actually the fight against reality. That’s actually where the pain is most painful. I’ll say that again, it’s actually our own fight against reality.
The not wanting to feel it, the avoidance, the not wanting to go towards that actually makes the process of letting go and surrendering super, super painful and challenging. Now that’s not to say that as we surrender and let go that there aren’t feelings that we have to work through. Do we have to learn how to sit in anxiety? Potentially? Yes.
Do we need to learn how to feel through our anger? Yes. Do we need to learn how to feel through our disappointment? Yes. But again, those feelings are arising because we are battling reality, we’re battling what is.
And we’re holding on to this fantasy that it should have been different. But the reality is that it’s not different. It is what it is.
When we encounter a situation where we are forced to surrender, let go and we’re stepping into the unknown, I mentioned that part of what happens in our mind is we reach back, we look back into past experiences and we project them into the unknown to try to make meaning, to try to make sense. And sometimes those experiences that we project have a sense of pain attached to them. We don’t want to go through that again.
We don’t want to have to feel that again. We don’t want to, whatever it is, again. And part of why that is also so hard is because we haven’t yet seen how those circumstances actually served us.
That might be an interesting thing to hear, but when we have an experience in our lives and we struggle to make meaning out of it, we struggle to find wisdom in it. We struggle to see how the experience has served us, has shaped us, has evolved us, has helped us set boundaries, helped us get closer to certain people, move away from other people, create our sense of calling and purpose in life, et cetera, et cetera. When we can’t make sense of it, we become inherently afraid of experiencing those things again.
I’m going to invite you to pause and take a breath with me here. We’re going to talk here in a minute about how do we move into the place of surrendering and letting go. I’m starting to allude to one piece of it, which is that as life happens, what is our orientation? Are we coming from a place of, oh, my gosh, this is happening, I can’t believe this is happening to me, or do we come from an orientation of, okay, this feels really painful, this feels really hard.
How can I hold the possibility that this is actually happening? For me, the more we can find meaning, the more we can let go of our attachment to how we thought it was supposed to be and rest in the possibility that the way it’s occurring, the way that it happened, the way that it is happening, is actually the way it’s supposed to be happening. That there’s a lesson that’s being learned. There’s an experience that is attempting to be lived through.
One of my absolute favorite quotes is from The Little Prince, and it says that nothing goes away until we’ve learned everything that we need to learn from it. And part of that we can also link over into this conversation. If, for example, I’m having a hard time letting go of a memory, well, I’m holding on to it for a reason.
What is there still there for me to learn? What about that memory? What meaning have I not made yet in that memory? What have I not yet seen or discovered about myself through that experience? There’s a reason why we’re not letting it go. So sometimes the challenge of letting go and surrendering, in addition to being afraid of feeling the feelings that we would need to feel in order to do so, sometimes we’re holding on to the fantasy or the belief or the identity because there’s still something there for us to consider. It’s not going away quite yet because we’re not yet seeing everything that we need to see from it.
So sometimes that’s part of the process of letting go and surrendering is pausing and really asking this experience that’s occurring or that did occur, how can I orient to it in a different way? How can I start to think of it from the perspective of how did this happen for me? Even if I perceived it as painful, how is this developing me? How is this potentially serving me in some way? I find that the more we can find the meaning in it, it actually supports the process of letting go. It’s easier to let go because we’re not having to hold on because there’s something that still needs to be learned or lived through. So that’s a piece that can really help us another piece that can really help us as we’re surrendering and letting go is to actually move into a posture of surrendering and letting go.
And I want to explain what I mean by that. Part of what can happen is we can get caught in our own head, in the woulda, shoulda, couldas, and in the this shouldn’t have happened or it wasn’t supposed to be this way. And we can move into a place of mentally replaying and going through things over and over and over and over again, which, by the way, is also a strategy to not let go and surrender, even though we think that we’re processing it in order to let go.
And surrender can actually be a strategy to hold on. And sometimes what can be helpful is to switch into from the head into the body. So after my mom passed, when I would notice feelings come up in me around my own resistance to surrendering into the reality of her passing or surrendering into the reality of what life was then looking like on the other side, because there was a lot that got set into motion from my mom passing.
Lot of changes, lot of disorientation that happened, a lot of chaos, if you will, on the other side, and the parts of me that were resistant to moving into that or going towards that. One of the things I found helpful was to actually get on the floor. And sometimes I would be on my knees, sometimes I would actually lay down belly on the floor, and I would actually extend my arms out and I would open my hands in a gesture of surrendering and letting go.
And I would allow my body to embody the letting go or surrender when my mind didn’t want to. It was very, very powerful. It’s one of the things that I have, um, since taught and supported many of my clients through is when we feel the attachment, when we feel the part of us that’s that’s addicted to the fantasy that’s fighting reality.
Can we open our hands? Can we take on a posture? Can we allow the body to actually help us out? Because sometimes the mind is just too scared to go into it. And then the last thing that I will say about this is what I’ve been alluding to and talking about throughout the conversation so far, is just this piece around that sometimes the most painful part of it is simply our resistance to it. And then when we allow ourselves to slowly begin to feel into the new and feel into the different fears, feel into the overwhelm, feel into the helplessness, feel into whatever is trying to be felt, that oftentimes we find that, yes, it’s uncomfortable, but there’s also a space that opens up in us where we can start to feel a little bit more of the letting go.
In synergetic play therapy, this is where we mindfully move into surrendering rather than collapsing in the surrendering. And as we mindfully move into the surrendering and letting go, which could be the posture, which could be asking some more thoughtful questions like I’ve presented, which could be allowing ourselves to feel the feeling just a little bit more. When we bring the mindful component into it, we’re simultaneously bringing in a sense of safety.
We’re bringing in access to our regulatory system. We’re bringing in access to higher centers in our brain. We’re bringing in an observer, a witness within our own experience, where part of us is witnessing as we are feeling.
And that is what is required for integration. That is what is required for us to thoroughly move through. There’s a difference between just moving through not mindfully, which is not really moving through.
That’s usually more building up new protective patterns or relying on old protective patterns. And usually there’s some avoidance in that versus mindfully saying, okay, it’s not how I thought it was going to be. Okay, what if it never changes? Okay, what if this is how it is? Okay, let me take a breath and breathe into that.
If this is reality, what’s the wisdom? How is this for me? If this is reality, how can I open my hands? How can I embody a posture of surrendering recognizing that there’s a part of me that’s deeply scared? If this is reality, if this is how it is, how do I let go and allow myself to feel a little bit more and then just a little bit more and then just a little bit more and then just a little bit more? I’m going to end the conversation on that for us. My hope is that there’s something in there that felt useful for you, whether you have something happening in your personal life or for you as a play therapist. Part of what we’re also doing in the playroom is just this with the kids, we’re providing them a place where they can surrender, where they can let go, where they can connect with themselves and touch in on the part of them that can move through it, rather than needing to stay away from it, whatever the it is.
So on our journeys. Everyone of letting go and surrendering. Because this is an ongoing experience we have as human beings on the planet.
Sending you a big hug, sending you deep breaths. And remember, you are the most important toy in the playroom. Until next time.
