I recently had a big disappointment when my daughter’s number one college choice proved to be prohibitively expensive—three times more than the average college. After my wife and I gathered ourselves, we looked at each other and agreed: “It was not meant to be.”
This brought instant relief. It wasn’t that we didn’t still wish our daughter could go to the school she was so passionate about. Rather, we let go of our attempts to force reality to comply with our wishes.
How to let go
This, according to the Deconstructing Anxiety program, is a seminal principle in any path to peace and healing.
We’ve all heard the dictum to let go and accept what is. Easier said than done. Letting go has to do with adjusting our expectations.
All expectations have their light and shadow sides. They start out as beautiful expressions of what would create fulfillment. But they all too easily get co-opted to become a trigger for exercising control.
So, the effort to obtain control is the real problem.
Why? Because it is part of human being-ness to try to get control over eliminating what we don’t want and grabbing hold of what we do want.
Nevertheless, reality has its own agenda and doesn’t really care about our wishes.
The healthy kind of control
Does that mean we are to let go of control altogether? Absolutely not, and trying to do so will only lead to more suffering.*
The problem is not in the exercise of control but in the fear and defense motivating it. Fear says we must have what we want (leading to expectations) and we use defenses to try to obtain it. This is the strategy that ultimately backfires, creating the strain against reality that says “I cannot accept when things disappoint my expectations.”
When we adjust our expectations to flow with what reality offers, with what is actually in front of us and not what we wish were, there are always abundant opportunities for finding a way to fulfillment.
Certainly, it may not look like what we had first hoped for or “expected,” but in the end, learning to dance gracefully with things as they are is so much more satisfying than the age-old and futile fight to control what simply cannot be controlled.
This is the healthy kind of control.
“Doing the opposite”
The art of letting go, of dealing with disappointed expectations, is a matter of seeing the defenses at work when we try to gain control. Realizing they are, in fact, the problem, we can then practice “doing the opposite” of the defenses. When we do this, we’re likely to discover that not only was our disappointment based on an illusion of how things should be, but there is a far greater fulfillment in opening to what is available right in front of us.
References
*Such an extreme move would be the same defense in reverse. Extreme moves are usually an indication of defenses in action.
Pressman, T. (2019). Deconstructing Anxiety: The Journey from Fear to Fulfillment. Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield.