Letting Go of Disappointments and Painful Losses (3 page)

God has made everything
beautiful
in its time. Even the empty spaces. Even the holes. I admit that it’s a hard concept for me to believe when I’m frantically grasping the last few strands of whatever is trying to escape my clutches. The pain involved in letting go doesn’t feel “beautiful” to me; it feels downright miserable.

Yet in God’s economy, new life springs forth from death. Jesus tried to help His followers understand this. His disciples had seen His triumphs. They had witnessed His miracles and experienced His power in their midst. They thought He was going to establish His kingdom on earth. Then one afternoon Jesus sat down on a hillside and told them that the time had come for Him to be glorified, but not in the manner in which they expected. Instead, it was to be by His death. And with tenderness and feeling, Jesus comforted them with an illustration:

Jesus bids us turn our eyes on the fields and observe the mature grain ready for harvest. He explains the process: no loss, no gain; no death, no new life. For Christ the analogy was very personal: His death was to become the gateway to life. Without His death, there would be no resurrection—for any of us.

The message is for you and me as well. It’s a message of hope when life steals from us and leaves us with empty arms. It’s a message of strength when we’ve been stripped bare and feel as though we’re facing the future empty-handed. It’s a message of substance that can fill the holes in our soul with a promise. God says to us:

These are the promises we have to hang on to when we are doing the hard work of letting go. Did you catch that? Letting go is hard work. It is often very bewildering. To break away from someone or something we have been bonded to rips at our emotions. It goes against our natural instincts. The parting cannot happen without inward bleeding. The greater the bond, the greater the pain.

Our head and our heart are usually in conflict. Our head says,
I need to do this for my own good. I need to let go because it’s right. I need to let go because God is telling me to let go. I need to
let go for the sake of my kids or my spouse or my friendship or my own growth and development.
But our heart says,
Oh, no you don’t! It hurts too much. I can’t do it. I won’t do it!
Our logic and our emotions war with each other.

But there are some things we can do to cooperate with God in the process of letting go. We can take certain steps to help us move down life’s path with a sense of curiosity and adventure, minus the claw marks. In the next chapter we will look at some of these steps.

C
HAPTER
T
WO

LETTING GO IS A PROCESS, NOT AN INSTANTANEOUS EVENT.
It starts with an awareness of a difficult reality, and as our awareness increases, so does our pain. I once saw a poster that described the process perfectly. It was a cartoon of a woman whose head and arms were being squeezed through the wringers of an old washing machine. Beneath her anguished face the caption read, “The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable.”

Facing the truth can be very difficult. Like surgery, acknowledging our disappointments and losses may hurt, but it can help move us toward wholeness. If we deny, block, stuff, or numb the pain, we end up camping out in our grief and never progressing beyond it. We cut ourselves off from the treasures God has hidden for us in the empty spaces, and we lock ourselves up emotionally.

As a counselor, I see this regularly in people like you and me. I’m talking about typical, get-up-in-the-morning-and-go-to-work, raise-the-kids kinds of people. Moms who help
with PTA. Dads who coach Little League. Brothers. Sisters. Aunts. Uncles. Folks who seem normal on the outside but who are locked up on the inside.

Among them was Lori, a forty-six-year-old woman who told me about Matthew, the baby she had lost fourteen years earlier in stillbirth. “It’s over,” her family told her. “Forget it. Don’t talk about it. We have to move on.” And that’s exactly what she did. She moved on, stayed busy, got involved in things, and kept her mind occupied. But Lori didn’t move on emotionally. Her heart was tightly wedged in an incident long past. She was frozen in time, arrested in grief.

Matthew’s name hadn’t been mentioned since the day Lori left the hospital. There was no funeral, no memorial, no pictures, no discussion. Lori and her family treated the incident as if it had never happened. Cards sent by friends were burned unopened. The family thought that erasing the evidence would erase the pain.

But it didn’t. It couldn’t.

So now there were fourteen years of stockpiled pain. This was the way Lori handled other losses too. No wonder she was depressed. No wonder she felt as if she were about to burst.
The human heart was never designed to bury feelings alive.

When Lori came to see me, she found the courage to recognize and face reality for the first time in fourteen years. Behind closed doors she gave herself permission to recognize her loss and talk about it—an important step in her healing. The denial was broken, and so was the power of the pain.
¹

Then there was Marissa, who was skilled at keeping secrets—not because she wanted to, but because it was how she had learned to survive. Her father had sexually abused her from the time she was a little girl, and she didn’t dare tell anyone. If she did, her father said, he would put her in jail and kill her mother. Little girls believe their big, strong daddies. In Marissa’s innocent mind, there were no options. She had to be a good little girl. And part of being good was keeping the secret.

But the terrible secret, buried for so many years and landscaped with neat shrubbery and little flowers, became like a hidden toxic-waste dump. The poison seeped into the very soil of her life, gradually numbing and warping her soul, even the good parts. I saw evidence of the hidden toxins in her words:

Again, we weren’t built to bury our feelings alive. We weren’t designed to deny our pain or to live by a “no talking” rule. The mind has limitations built into its defense system. If we block the bad, we also block the good. The result?

The good news is that there are keys to unlocking our pain, and they are right in our pocket. The first key is to recognize that what is,
is.
It is the essence of being brutally honest with ourselves and looking our painful truths in the face.

Sarah is a wonderful example of someone who courageously acknowledged her losses and let them go. Sarah came to our sessions impeccably dressed in the latest vogue, her makeup applied to perfection. But the eyes that stared at me were as cold and hard as chiseled marble. Sarah had struggled with an eating disorder for nearly twenty years, and she was one of the most bitter and controlling people I had ever worked with.

As we talked, I expected to uncover the source of Sarah’s
bitterness. But the account of her childhood was rather typical and uneventful. No great traumas. No major heartbreaks. Her parents had a good marriage, and she spoke of a close relationship with both them and her two brothers. She butted heads with the boys now and then, as most kids do in the healthiest of families, but there was nothing out of the ordinary. Besides being blessed with parents who loved each other, she had the support of grandparents who lived next door. Her grandmother was like a second mom and confidante, especially during Sarah’s teen years.

I was puzzled.

Sarah’s family dynamics didn’t fit the common profiles of patients with eating disorders. They weren’t even close—no divorce, no abuse, no drugs or alcohol. Neither parent was intensely rigid, perfectionistic, or driven. They were church-going folk who took life in stride.

A piece of the puzzle was missing. It
had
to be.

Sarah recounted her years in high school and college in vivid detail. Cheerleading. Dance. Church choir. Gymnastics. Perfect grades. Scholarships. Sports awards. Titles. Then, in her third year of college, everything changed: Her grandmother died, and Sarah was raped. When she reached that point in her story, Sarah’s reflections became blurred, and her account became fragmented.