A Study in 12 Steps: Letting Go and Allowing Life to Flow as God Intended
Steps 6 and 7 are the letting go steps. Letting go and allowing life to flow as God intended seems foreign to most of us when we enter recovery. That's because letting go is the opposite of control, and most of us have been champions of controlling life for years. I say "champions," but in fact, we have really been the biggest losers in the game of life.
Many of us, as children, learned the value of control. At the time, we needed to control the chaos around us to survive life. We were small and defenseless against the adult dysfunction that often swirled around us like a tornado.
We first learned to run from the chaos. We escaped to our bedrooms. Some of us even hid under our beds or in our closets. If staying in the house wasn’t safe enough, we may have fled across the neighborhood to a friend’s house. At times when we weren’t able to flee physically, we learned to flee emotionally. We learned to shut-down our feelings as a means of protecting ourselves from the dreaded fear that mom or dad did not love us; that we simply were not good enough to be loveable to anyone.
Control worked. We were able to survive, and being numbed-out was better than feeling bad-- or so we thought. As we grew older, we learned from adults to try and control most everything around us. We learned to manipulate reality. We realized we could control others to ensure that they did whatever would make us happy-- at least sometimes.
We worked hard at trying to control the reality of life, and we chose to do most anything to avoid further pain. We learned to lie, or expand on the truth; to used shame and guilt in the same ways they had been used against us. We may have learned to steal or take things without permission for fear of being told “No.” We also may have learned to please people to get what we wanted: Flattery, gifts, or doing things for them were among the many forms of manipulation we became masters of perpetrating.
Eventually, control took us to new levels of fighting reality. We wanted a certain person to be the love of our life, and we pulled every trick to try and make reality over so we could possess this person. People we cared about got seriously sick and so we took it on ourselves to try and control the situation by manipulating God to heal them. And if it didn’t work out the way we wanted, we feigned a loss of faith, when in fact what we were really grieving was a loss of our own perceived personal power.
If we faced the loss of a job, we may have tried to control the situation by playing the victim and blaming others for our failure. “Poor me. These things always happen to me” often became our way of escaping the pain of taking responsibility for our own lives, and the ultimate fact that we cannot successfully manipulate life.
In Steps 6 and 7 we learn to let go of our need to control reality. We take all of our failed control techniques-- which make up some of our worst character defects-- and we become ready to release them to our Higher Power.
We learn to accept whatever befalls us in life and to discern what we do have power to change from what we are truly powerless over. It takes time, but we eventually choose to release all of our character defects, letting go of them and surrendering them to our Higher Power. We then are able to humbly ask God to take away our need to control what we have no power over; trusting that God will do for us what we are powerless to do-- even if it means helping us to simply accept life on life’s terms. The miracle of letting go then helps us to breathe a big sigh of relief and it allows our souls to shine!
Many of us, as children, learned the value of control. At the time, we needed to control the chaos around us to survive life. We were small and defenseless against the adult dysfunction that often swirled around us like a tornado.
We first learned to run from the chaos. We escaped to our bedrooms. Some of us even hid under our beds or in our closets. If staying in the house wasn’t safe enough, we may have fled across the neighborhood to a friend’s house. At times when we weren’t able to flee physically, we learned to flee emotionally. We learned to shut-down our feelings as a means of protecting ourselves from the dreaded fear that mom or dad did not love us; that we simply were not good enough to be loveable to anyone.
Control worked. We were able to survive, and being numbed-out was better than feeling bad-- or so we thought. As we grew older, we learned from adults to try and control most everything around us. We learned to manipulate reality. We realized we could control others to ensure that they did whatever would make us happy-- at least sometimes.
We worked hard at trying to control the reality of life, and we chose to do most anything to avoid further pain. We learned to lie, or expand on the truth; to used shame and guilt in the same ways they had been used against us. We may have learned to steal or take things without permission for fear of being told “No.” We also may have learned to please people to get what we wanted: Flattery, gifts, or doing things for them were among the many forms of manipulation we became masters of perpetrating.
Eventually, control took us to new levels of fighting reality. We wanted a certain person to be the love of our life, and we pulled every trick to try and make reality over so we could possess this person. People we cared about got seriously sick and so we took it on ourselves to try and control the situation by manipulating God to heal them. And if it didn’t work out the way we wanted, we feigned a loss of faith, when in fact what we were really grieving was a loss of our own perceived personal power.
If we faced the loss of a job, we may have tried to control the situation by playing the victim and blaming others for our failure. “Poor me. These things always happen to me” often became our way of escaping the pain of taking responsibility for our own lives, and the ultimate fact that we cannot successfully manipulate life.
In Steps 6 and 7 we learn to let go of our need to control reality. We take all of our failed control techniques-- which make up some of our worst character defects-- and we become ready to release them to our Higher Power.
We learn to accept whatever befalls us in life and to discern what we do have power to change from what we are truly powerless over. It takes time, but we eventually choose to release all of our character defects, letting go of them and surrendering them to our Higher Power. We then are able to humbly ask God to take away our need to control what we have no power over; trusting that God will do for us what we are powerless to do-- even if it means helping us to simply accept life on life’s terms. The miracle of letting go then helps us to breathe a big sigh of relief and it allows our souls to shine!
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