TRAUMA DAYS: GOLF
Upping your game by letting go
It sounds counter-intuitive and nonsensical (the idea that by letting go we can achieve, gain or get a better grip on life). The science and the practice shows it to be very logical and a no-brainer when you understand it. To do it, it feels far from that: it feels clumsy, quite tricky and then absolutely blissful for a second as we feel a subtle but incredible shift in how we see life. When I manage it, I can’t help but get a tiny hit of liberation and energy- often just when I need it most.
We can do this for small stuff in a few seconds, or we can do this gradually and with commitment for the more sticky stuff life is sucking us into.
This might be a new way to approach our world, our work, specific jobs, people, relationships, wants and To Do’s, even fantasises and desires, or their counterpart (that weird sense of foreboding that something bad is going to happen, that we sometimes get in our line of work or if we have had trauma backgrounds).
So, what does letting go involve?
When I first came across the phrase in popular culture it was (annoyingly for me) associated with the cringe-worthy, bile-inducing, toxically positive, sickly-sweet cliché filled, uber-stereotyped, underwhelming cartoon “Frozen”. (Did I not like it? No not much, but to be fair I wasn’t being very open minded at the time and then put myself off it with my own grumpiness). The song “Let it go” is, I gather, very impressive for something or just very catchy. (To me, it seems to just consist of those three words being whined at different pitches in an American accent by the parents of under 5s until their bored-shitless offspring humour them by joining in the repetition one time so that their doting care-givers will just leave them alone and let them carry on picking their nose, which is all they were wanting to do anyway). So, why so popular?
I have no idea. I don’t want to look it up and delve into psychoanalysing Frozen as I fear I may throw up. I am therefore very grateful to my sister, Ems, who accompanied me on TITEN training this week (Ems was my carer etc as I’ve had surgery on my arm, but was also there being brilliant in her own capacity as a trauma-informed safeguarding dude). Ems was really getting into the practice of taking something you find difficult or interesting in your own mind and shifting your perspective of it to shrink and contextualise it and was working on how to integrate this into her ministry (she’s a vicar but, like me, always feels self-conscious when someone asks her what she does for a living). I received a text from Ems from my grand-niece’s 4th birthday party with a quote from said film: “It’s funny how a little distance makes everything seem small and all that once bothered you never gets to you again”.
So there you go. I mean, it’s important to clarify that it might be that some things that have bothered you may leave behind it a little warning flag in the brain (that’s how we learn, right?) but the important bit is the potential for them not ‘getting to you’ again that is worth considering.
Can we achieve this?
Can we un-stick ourselves from things that restrain us, confine us, condition us and seep into our thoughts and decisions? Why would we want to?
Policing and Emergency Response are just some occupations where we are conditioned to rely on and default to processes, language (mainly acronyms!), informal codes of how things are done, generations of legacies of conditioning about what is important to think about and what is not, getting it right, covering the bases, following the procedure. There is little room for deviation in much work for a reason; for safety and for doing things effectively at scale. That kind of thinking can be present in all sorts of disciplines and different careers will bring them a plethora of subtle but quite rigid infrastructures on how to think and how to communicate. These conditions and processes enable us to manage things, contain things, quantify things, label things, control things. They are no doubt necessary. The same might go for certain upbringings and cultures and backgrounds; our families and our generations or our subcultures or communities of those we align ourselves with may all have their own codes and conditions and emphases that we come to recognise as norms and allow us to feel connected to others. They might work very well to uphold a sense of identity and belonging in the main, two qualities of life that are really quite valuable.
What I have been noticing and what many ancient traditions and now neuroscientists have been explaining (the latter in the past few decades, the former for thousands of years) is that sometimes we can find ourselves at the mercy of our own ‘grip’ on these things.
- We can feel ourselves obsessing repeatedly over something that isn’t sitting right in the frame of what we expect to see, something that might not fit well in a box.
- We might feel consumed by all the different plates spinning and boxes piling up and can’t seem to find any way through between them or have lost any sense of satisfaction from spinning or boxing up in the first place.
- There might be a sense of un-ease and agitation at something we are repeatedly doing, taking over us: a rhythm we have been cajoled into, a routine that has dominated our days or weeks (or even years) and left no wriggle room just to be ourselves anymore, or just a sense of duty to ‘be there and respond’ to absolutely everyone’s demands, not matter the cost, because of an ingrained assumption that being there is all that you’re there for; to react to the next thing coming your way.
It's these moments where being able to loosen our grip would be really good: releasing ourselves from fixating on something that makes us uncomfortable; pausing the spinning and boxing up of tasks to identify which of them really mean something and which don’t; and (this one is massive for me at the moment), stepping to the side of the expectations to be response and reactive to others when they want to engage and ask for my time and attention.
It is really hard when we like to be there for people, to be responsive, to get things right.
But when we grip so hard that the pain of the grasp overwhelms the satisfaction of what we are holding on to, then we need to loosen up.
How I do it is my way. Others may have their own way. (Apparently even cartoon Aryan cutesy figurines have their way and wrote a fricking song about it)*
*OK so massive annoying obvious disclosure: I need to let it go about Frozen, don’t I?
- The first thing I do is to learn my ‘tell’. What is my body’s way of telling me I’m gripping too hard on something or someone? What does my thinking style feel like when I’ve become stuck in this rut? I try to practice tuning into that and picking up on it ASAP. For me, it’s a quickening of my heart beat, a sense of constriction in my head, a panic between the eyes and a fidgety itch in my chest. And then I often have a desire to run.
- The next thing I do is a simple exhale (count of six, three times) just to steady the body response. Then I do something active with my arms or a physical task so my body has something to do while I think about what’s consuming me or making me feel trapped.
- Then I allow myself honesty for what is feeling uncomfortable. For what I want to let go of, even if it is socially awkward, or a faux-pas or if I feel I’d be offending someone or letting them down, I am just honest and say out loud (albeit often in a whisper) what I want to losen up on.
- Then I get my brain shifting about. I use the ‘zooming up and out’ change in perspective, so I get some distance so I can work out if this thing, situation, person, relationship, etc is as gripping in the great scheme of things as it happens to feel right now. I elongate time, fast forwarding to my end of my days and imagining myself looking back at this time. I then imagine the world and all that is yet to be explored and all the things going on and lives playing out in nature as well as humankind. This helps me shrink that which has felt so over-bearing.
- Finally, I get back to myself : my values and what I really think. Here perhaps I give myself a bit of a kick up the bum and a pep talk. What’s important to me? Do I really need to be satisfying someone else’s whims? What is going to be left of me if I try to squeeze myself into so many of other people’s boxes? Do I even care about their boxes? Do I even respect the expectations that some people have come to have on me? What if I am frustrated because I am trying to allocate them to boxes or to shoe-horn them into parts of my life or personality in which they really don’t fit? Do I have to?
(At this point, I often choose to go a little more nihilistically brutal if necessary and actually remind myself that we only have one shot at this life, that it can be cut short in any second and extinguished, and that we are essentially born on our own and die on our own, and everything in between is our choice how we do it.)
By the time I’ve savoured these few minutes, I feel looser, more open, more relaxed, more empowered and (ironically) more selective and focussed for whatever I let occupy my thoughts and actions yet.
All because I let go a little, I gained a hold on what is important.
The satisfaction naturally takes me to a puddle of gratitude that I splash about in for a second, before I stomp off in my wellies towards the horizon ready for my next adventure.
And for those who have a few more minutes, I urge you to read this. It’s also on Spotify.
“She Let Go” by Safire Rose
She let go.
She let go. Without a thought or a word, she let go.
She let go of the fear.
She let go of the judgments.
She let go of the confluence of opinions swarming around her head.
She let go of the committee of indecision within her.
She let go of all the ‘right’ reasons.
Wholly and completely, without hesitation or worry, she just let go.
She didn’t ask anyone for advice.
She didn’t read a book on how to let go.
She didn’t search the scriptures.
She just let go.
She let go of all of the memories that held her back.
She let go of all of the anxiety that kept her from moving forward.
She let go of the planning and all of the calculations about how to do it just right.
She didn’t promise to let go.
She didn’t journal about it.
She didn’t write the projected date in her Day-Timer.
She made no public announcement and put no ad in the paper.
She didn’t check the weather report or read her daily horoscope.
She just let go.
She didn’t analyze whether she should let go.
She didn’t call her friends to discuss the matter.
She didn’t do a five-step Spiritual Mind Treatment.
She didn’t call the prayer line.
She didn’t utter one word.
She just let go.
No one was around when it happened.
There was no applause or congratulations.
No one thanked her or praised her.
No one noticed a thing.
Like a leaf falling from a tree, she just let go.
There was no effort.
There was no struggle.
It wasn’t good and it wasn’t bad.
It was what it was, and it is just that.
In the space of letting go, she let it all be.
A small smile came over her face.
A light breeze blew through her.
And the sun and the moon shone forevermore…
©2003 “She Let Go”