Surrender Happens in Waves

Someone recently asked me what the magic pill of psychotherapy was, and at first I scratched my head and shrugged, starting into, “Well, there really isn’t…” and then stopped. “You know what, there actually is a magic pill: surrender.” We then went on to talk about that, what that means, but I realize I left one important thing out:

Surrender happens in waves.

First, what is surrender? Go ahead and take a minute, and ask yourself what the connotations of this word are to you. I’ll wait.

Ok, what did you come up with? Did the word have any negative overtones, or was it something you embraced whole heartedly? Most people I’ve known, myself included, have a lot more of the former than the latter. “Surrender is: weakness, losing, allowing oneself to be abused, failure.” There’s a lot of reasons for why this is, not insignificantly being the win-or-lose attitude of the American culture. But when investigated in one’s experience, what I’ve seen as the definition of true surrender is: relinquishing control.

Most people meet this definition by blanching, but with the project of overcoming anxiety and depression, what seems to be the inevitable fact is that excessive attempts to control one’s inner states results in suffering. And if this is the case, then surrender, the relinquishing of control, is the major cure.

BUT! It doesn’t (almost ever) come in one fell swoop. Surrender is something that comes in waves. You don’t surrender (i.e., relinquish control) once and are done with it. The desire and reward for a sense of control are deeply conditioned in the human body, mind and brain, and are not given up easily. We associate control with survival at a very deep level, so relinquishing it in substantial ways is often felt as a form of death.

So what seems to happen is that we start coming up against our own failures to control (what anyone I’ve ever met with chronic low moods can speak to) and eventually start seeing that it’s the attempt to control (rather than the failure to control) which is the problem. Then there’s generally a surrender (a relinquishment) which brings a sense of relief: “It’s such a burden to control what can’t be controlled!”

Then the part of the mind responsible for enacting control pops up and says, “Hey! That’s great! How can we control that?” Whence begins the project of attempting to control the act of surrender. Which is a contradiction in terms. Which creates a lot of frustration.

In other words, the Controller in our psyches is not easily or finally vanquished. It tries to secure anything deemed desirable and important, like a squirrel gathering nuts for the winter. And it’s tenacious about doing its job.

So in the path of surrender, of relinquishing control in a way that actually causes less suffering, one inevitably comes up against the power of the Controller, which even tries to grab onto its own negation, with the thought that that’s how happiness and/or survival is attained. More than anything the injunction is, “Stay in control.”

But over time, as one sees over and over the failure of control (or the Controller) to actually deliver up safety and happiness, the taste for controlling starts being lost. It becomes less of a struggle simply because its flavor, as it were, becomes more rancid, and we drop it more quickly until ultimately we stop picking it up at all.

But in the process, it’s important to keep this in mind, lest we judge ourselves or the process: Surrender comes in waves.