Letting Go of Disappointments and Painful Losses Read online

  If you don’t slow down, you’ll break down.

  JUDITH ST. PIERRE

  Revisiting the basics is a good place to start. It’s amazing how symptoms of anxiety and depression are diminished by incorporating three simple ingredients into our routine: healthy meals, ample sleep, and regular exercise. They provide a firm foundation for successfully letting go. If we subtract one or more of these three components from the equation, we run the risk of arresting, or at least inhibiting, our forward movement in life.

  Think about it. Have you ever noticed that when you are in a time of transition, your eating, sleeping, and exercise habits tend to become somewhat erratic? Transitions are stressful. When stress increases, compulsions also increase, and routine tends to be less than consistent. We find ourselves eating more (or less) than necessary, grabbing junk food on the run, or skipping meals altogether. Our sleep patterns can become erratic. We may sleep more than usual, lay awake at night, or burn the candle at both ends. Likewise, we may cut back on exercise, skip it altogether, or become more compulsive about it.

  Let’s revisit these basics, one by one, and examine ways to manage them during the letting-go process.

  There are many helpful books that offer sound eating programs, so I don’t want to go into great detail here, but I do want to underline the importance of consistently eating nutritious food. For some, that means three balanced meals a day. For others, depending on their energy output and blood-sugar sensitivities, it may mean four or five small meals a day.

  During a season of letting go, what you eat can make a significant difference in your endurance. Letting go of disappointment and painful losses requires high-octane fuel. Diet soda and junk food aren’t going to give you what you need when you’re mentally and emotionally taxed by chronic stress. Some nutritional experts suggest increasing your protein intake at such times because protein is a stabilizing energy source that burns longer than carbohydrates. Adding a high-quality vitamin-mineral supplement can also bolster the body during prolonged periods of stress.

  In the year following Nathan’s birth, I was physically and mentally exhausted from adjusting to the reality of his handicaps, illnesses, sleepless nights, and the fluctuating hormones in my postpartum body. I had to force myself to eat three healthy meals a day. I had no creative energy for cooking fancy meals, so I had to simplify everything. The objective was to get something from each of the five food groups (meat, dairy, fruit, vegetable, and starch) every meal. I relied on simple cuts of meat, convenience foods, and recipes that were quick and easy to prepare. During that year, we barbecued on the gas grill several times a week and frequently used the rice cooker. Fruit, nuts, and protein bars provided quick, energy-boosting snacks between meals.

  While I’m sure there were days when I didn’t hit my objective, at least I had a target to shoot at. Remember the old saying: If you aim at nothing, you’re sure to hit it. On days when I was more disciplined and stuck with the program, my stamina was significantly better, and there was a marked difference in my emotional energy.

  Sleep is another of our most important needs when we’re in the process of letting go. I remember talking with a mother whose eleven-month-old baby had died after complications from surgery. “All I want to do is sleep,” she complained. While it’s a fact that one of the red flags of depression is wanting to sleep more than necessary, I was puzzled by her remark. After her baby died, she had taken a full-time job and was putting in ten-hour days as an executive assistant. I asked her how much she slept, and she said, “From 9 P.M. to 7 A.M.,” as if this were a ridiculous amount of time to be in bed.

  It had never crossed this woman’s mind that she needed the extra sleep because of the heavy emotional burden she was bearing—not to mention the stress of learning a new job! From my perspective, those ten hours of sleep didn’t point to pathology; they indicated good self-care. The body needs time to restore and replenish itself when we are carrying heavy emotional loads.

  “For those who are suffering with symptoms of anxiety and depression, I’m going to save you $120 right now,” I said to a group of professionals gathered for a stress-management conference. “You can significantly reduce these symptoms by getting eight to nine hours of sleep a night.”

  Sleep is God’s celestial nurse who croons away our consciousness, and God deals with the unconscious life of the soul in places where only He and His angels have charge. As you retire to rest, give your soul and God a time together, and commit your life to God with a conscious peace for the hours of sleep, and deep and profound developments will go on in spirit, soul, and body by the kind creating hand of our God.

  OSWALD CHAMBERS

  As I expected, people fidgeted in their seats, smirked, glanced around, and gave me the look. You know, the look that says, “Yeah, right, lady! What planet do you live on?” Of the several hundred gathered in the room that day, very few raised their hands when I asked, “Who averages eight to nine hours of sleep a night?”

  We live in a fast-paced world, constantly struggling to meet its unending demands. We work, raise families, build marriages, tend to friendships, and try to cram in some exercise and recreational activities. Our daily planners are full of to-do lists. There are never enough hours in a day to get it all done.

  A friend of mine recently had his gall bladder removed. As a corporate executive, he was used to having a lot of energy and maintaining a high level of productivity, but recuperating was taking its toll. When he complained to his doctor that he was still feeling tired two weeks after the surgery, his doctor said, “Following this type of surgery, the body heals at a rate of 15 percent per month from the inside out—if a person rests and takes good care of himself. If you push too hard, you’ll delay your recovery.”

  When we suffer a major disappointment or a difficult loss, it’s as if part of who we are is surgically severed or cut away. It takes time and rest to recover. Sleep is one of the primary ways the body restores itself. If we rob ourselves of it through overactivity, we slow our recovery and impair the healing process. In short, we prolong and intensify the pain involved in letting go.

  Activity itself proves nothing: the ant is praised, the mosquito swatted.

  ANONYMOUS

  My grandfather, an entrepreneur and successful businessman, used to say, “The only problem with sleep is that you’ve got to take it lying down.” He was a hard-working man who could close his eyes and catch a few winks just about anywhere and then awake refreshed for the rest of the day. These catnaps were in addition to the solid eight hours of sleep he got at night. It’s a model of self-care worth considering.

  We’re more likely to be successful in our endeavors of letting go if we lay aside our to-do lists and put ourselves to bed in a timely fashion. With refreshed minds and healthy bodies, we’ll be more effective in handling the new list tomorrow.

  I found I could add nearly two hours to my working day by going to bed for an hour after lunch.

  SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL

  Finally, when you’re doing the hard work of letting go, exercise is prescriptive, not optional. Although I’m not an expert in physiology, as a clinical counselor I know the mental and emotional benefits of exercise. Studies have shown that exercise is a key to managing depression and anxiety. It’s a cheap, easy way to elevate mood, decrease agitation, and deliver a sense of calm to the brain. The endorphins released during aerobic exercise, for example, are powerful mood elevators and natural tranquilizers. Exercise is also a superb tool for managing anger. When we exercise, we physically force tension out of our bodies.

  For as long as I can remember, exercise has been a part of my routine. I used to swim a mile on my lunch hour. After my children were born, I had less time and energy for the pool routine, so I started walking—something I still do today. When the weather is nice, I enjoy walking the hills in our neighborhood for thirty to sixty minutes, four or five days a week. If it’s pouring rain, a treadmill comes in handy. While I do have to carve out time
in my schedule for walking, I think I probably save time in the long run. My proficiency on task is much better when my mood is good, my mind peaceful, and my body strong. The more hectic and pressured a week becomes, the more I need my “sanity walk” to defuse the tension, restore calm, and help me sleep deeply at night.

  The most frequent rebuttal I hear to the argument for exercise is that it just takes too much time. But exercise for enhancing our emotional state really requires only thirty to forty minutes, several times a week. We don’t have to spend long hours in the gym. Some experts say that maintaining a consistent training-level heart rate for twenty-five minutes will alter the brain chemistry in much the same way that an anti-depressant does.

  I encourage my clients to set aside a minimum of thirty minutes for any aerobic activity, since it takes a few minutes to work the heart up to a training-level pulse. An exercise trainer at a local club can help you calculate your training heart rate based on your age and overall physical condition.

  For me, the benefits far outweigh the cost. In fact, when I don’t exercise, I pay for it. I’m more irritable, little things get to me, and I find myself reacting to life in ways I don’t want to.

  If you are in the middle of transition, struggling emotionally with deep disappointment or painful loss, I sincerely hope you will set aside time for exercise. It really doesn’t matter what kind of activity you choose, as long as it’s aerobic and increases your heart rate and the flow of oxygen and blood to the brain. Do something you enjoy. Walk. Ride a bike. Swim. Jog. Rollerblade. Play an intense game of basketball. Any activity is worthwhile if it pushes the tension out of your body and releases the natural chemicals in the brain that help you cope.

  Renewal and restoration are not luxuries. They are essentials. There is absolutely nothing enviable or spiritual about a coronary or a nervous breakdown, nor is an ultra-busy schedule necessarily the mark of a productive life.

  CHUCK SWINDOLL

  When we are doing the hard work of letting go, we can assist the process by downshifting into survival mode and getting back to the basics. Taking care of ourselves isn’t selfish—it’s smart. If we are tending to our own needs, we are more likely to have something worthwhile to offer others. Jesus said, “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Luke 10:27). Our effectiveness in loving others begins with a choice to love ourselves. When we fill ourselves up first, we’re more likely to have something worthwhile to pass on to another. As every flight attendant reminds us, it’s impossible to offer others oxygen if we’ve ceased breathing ourselves.

  Prescription for a happier and healthier life: Resolve to slow your pace; learn to say no gracefully; resist the temptation to chase after more pleasures, hobbies, and more social entanglements; then “hold the line” with the tenacity of a tackle for a professional football team.

  DR. JAMES DOBSON

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  REVISE

  EXPECTATIONS

  THEY SAY YOU GET WHAT YOU EXPECT. BUT THEN, WHAT DO “they” know anyway?

  Launi expected to be married happily ever after. It didn’t happen.

  Tammy, Jackie, Martin, and Len expected their partners to be faithful. They weren’t.

  Bob and Dave expected their company revenues to increase 25 percent last year. Instead, they both filed for bankruptcy.

  Karen and Phil expected their son to go to college in the fall. He died in a motorcycle accident this spring.

  Dace, Mira, Judy, and I expected to give birth to healthy babies. Yet each of us has a child with special needs.

  An Old Testament gentleman named Job had some expectations, and he too felt the bone-deep ache of disappointment when they didn’t come about. At one point he admitted, “When I expected good, then evil came; when I waited for light, then darkness came” (Job 30:26, NASB).1

  This morning I went for a sanity walk with a friend. She is a faithful, devoted mother of four children who has known the deep disappointment of unrealized dreams. “From the time my kids were little, I expected them to finish high school, attend college, and start families,” she told me. “I didn’t have any lofty dreams that any of them would be the president of the United States or the first astronaut to set foot on another planet. I just expected the basics.

  “My husband and I were devastated when our oldest son started experimenting with drugs and dropped out of high school. Even though we had taught him well about the dangers of substance abuse, he chose to ignore us and go his own way. When our second son fathered a child out of wedlock, our expectations were shattered all over again. We had hoped that grandchildren would come along after the children were married, not before. Things didn’t turn out anything like we had expected, and letting go of the dreams we had for our boys has been one of the most painful experiences we’ve ever endured.”

  “So how did you do it?” I asked her. “How did you let go?” It was obvious to me that, for the most part, she was on the other side of the debilitating grief, no longer incapacitated by the pain. I wondered what had helped usher her to that place of peace.

  She referred me to a story in the Bible. “Do you remember the story of Abraham and Isaac?”

  I nodded, for I knew the story well.

  “Do you remember how Abraham placed Isaac on the altar and offered him up to God?”

  “Yes,” I replied, seeing the image in my mind.

  “Well, that’s what I had to do. As clearly as if it happened yesterday, I remember when, years ago, I cupped my hands in front of me, pictured my boys in my palms, and lifted them up to God. I told Him, I place my boys in Your hands. They’re Yours. You take over. Please fulfill Your plans for their lives. I realized that our job of helping direct their course was done, because they were not open to our input.

  “From that point on our expectations changed. We decided that we would do our best to love and support the boys in practical ways, but that the results were between them and God.”

  I thought about my friend’s words and the many times I too had placed my children in God’s hands. I’ll probably be praying those kinds of prayers until the Lord decides it’s time for me to come home. It hurts to see your kids struggle and take hard knocks. For me, comfort comes from knowing that grasping, clinging, and hanging on with white-knuckled fists doesn’t help. But letting go, and placing whatever is troubling me into God’s loving care, does.

  As an approach to meeting our needs, letting go is very different from clamping down, striving, and trying harder.

  Not long ago, I was sitting in my counseling office with a client who was confused and conflicted about a number of things going on in her life. In passing, she mentioned that she had attended a funeral for a little boy with Down syndrome who had died of leukemia. She didn’t know that my son was handicapped or that when Nathan was born, we were told there is a higher incidence of leukemia among those with Down syndrome than there is for the typical population. She had no idea what strong emotion her story stirred in me.

  For the moment, I did the clinical thing. I suppressed the emotion and focused on helping my client. But as most of us know, suppressed emotion doesn’t stay down for long. It’s like trying to hold a beach ball under water. No matter what you do, it keeps popping up.

  I succeeded in pushing this woman’s story to the back of my mind until the next evening, when I was sitting by the fire reading my mail. Among the stack of papers, there was a letter from a woman who had read my book Angel Behind the Rocking Chair. She recounted some of the beautiful characteristics of her son, whom she had recently lost after a long battle with leukemia. The child had had Down syndrome and was Nathan’s age.

  Well, that did it. I was overcome with emotion. All the feelings of the previous day came flooding back. At such times, one thing is certain: No amount of striving or trying harder is going to resolve those deep conflicts of the soul.

  I went to my bedroom, sat on the bed, had a hard cry, and talked to God. I told Him about my fears and asked Him to help me live in the here and no
w and not to forecast negatively into the future. And then I said something I don’t think I had ever formally said before: God, I choose to trust You with Nathan’s life and with Nathan’s death. It was a statement of letting go that ushered in a sense of peace. My emotions weren’t at flood stage anymore. They had subsided.2

  Recently I came across a Scripture that spoke to me about suffering and expectations:

  Then [Jesus] told them what they could expect for themselves: “Anyone who intends to come with me has to let me lead. You’re not in the driver’s seat—I am. Don’t run from suffering; embrace it. Follow me and I’ll show you how. Self-help is no help at all.”

  LUKE 9:23–24, THE MESSAGE, EMPHASIS MINE

  As card-carrying members of the human race, we should expect suffering. Expect heartache. Expect pain and disappointment. Expect the unexpected. Yet while all this is true, we can also expect that as we give God the lead, He will give us what we need to endure the heartaches we experience. He will show us how to navigate the raging storms that come our way.

  I recall taking our children to a pediatrician for checkups and being told that they needed immunizations. The nurse explained the risks and ramifications of the shots and quoted some statistics. One out of an astronomical number of children experiences adverse reactions, she said. This information, I knew, was supposed to assure me that everything would be fine. But my mind went in another direction entirely. All I could think was that we had already defied the odds by having a child with Down syndrome. Who was to say we wouldn’t flout the odds again?