For the last few days on The Anxious Morning we’ve been examining the idea that much of our response to anxiety can be reduced to the fact that we’re just hanging on as a response to fear. We’ve looked at how the path to lasting recovery is in learning that we can actually let go. When we loosen our death grip and allow reality to show us that we’ve always been OK, good things happen over time.
I understand that letting go, loosening your grip, is a very tall order. Allowing the chips to fall where they may probably sounds terrifying, especially if those chips have words like “death” or “psychosis” stamped on them.
Like much of the recovery process, we can look at the act of letting go as a practice. This is a skill we first become aware of, then we embrace it, then we practice it so we may get better at it. Letting go is not an automatic thing for most people, especially most anxious people. This is a thing we must work at. Like all new things, we stumble, we get it wrong, and we learn and grow stronger as part of the process. Part of recovery is taking your “letting go” muscles to the gym to build them up.
How can we do this? How can we practice letting go?
The answer, as usual, is that we take small steps in the direction we wish to go, then we repeat those steps. Understand why you are learning to let go, accept that it will be a difficult thing to do, embrace the process of learning as itself valuable, then start taking your steps. This is how we learn to do the things that move us down the path to recovery. Learning to let go is no exception to this. This is how we learn to let go. Little by little.
The idea of allowing nature to take its course without intervention may seem completely ridiculous or even reckless to you, but that’s because you are only considering the worst case scenarios where anxiety and panic are overwhelming you and you feel an intense sense of danger. If I ask you to instantly let go in those situations, you would struggle. But if I ask you to start letting go of little things that you may not even be aware you are holding on to, the process starts to seem a little less intimidating.
Letting go is a big deal, but we can learn to do it by starting small. Tomorrow we’ll wrap up our discussion of holding on and letting go by looking at real world ways to begin your practice.
Have you listened to this week’s episode of The Anxious Truth podcast? Check it out out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, or my website and YouTube channel.
29. The Practice Of Letting Go