Letting Go of Disappointments and Painful Losses (10 page)

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.

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.

C
HAPTER
E
IGHT

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 now 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:

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?

The trauma of a major disappointment or painful loss tends to break down your defenses. You find it hard to expect much of anything for fear of being disappointed all over again. We went ahead with the shots … but not without anxiety.

On the heels of a painful loss, relief can come as we revise our expectations to better fit the reality of our current situation. Remember—what is, is. To continue to hang on to expectations that are unsupported by the facts will simply intensify our struggle. If we want to improve the quality of our lives while grieving our losses, we have to learn to let go.