Book Review: How Can I Let Go If I Don't Know I'm Holding On

Title: How Can I Let Go if I Don’t Know I’m Holding On

Author: Linda Douty

Date: 2005

Publisher: Morehouse

ISBN: 0-8192-2132-5

Length: 180 pages

Quote: “It is my hope...that this book will encourage you to...practice the art of letting go.”

This is another New Agey “spiritual” book people hand to other people, the kind whose central presupposition is that feelings can be put before facts, that people can feel happier if they just “let go” of anything and everything that they want and don’t have. Meh. There may be people out there for whom this line of thinking leads to lower blood pressure. For me it leads to higher blood pressure. So this is not a book I can recommend highly.

If this book is for you, you’re a person of exceptional strength of character who can resist the temptation to callous selfishness that’s typical of those who preach this kind of “wisdom.” You know that you must keep these “insights” absolutely to yourself. Even if God is leading someone else into a Job-like experience, which is something God might reveal to that person in per prayers but not to you, the meaning of that idea for you is that you need to behave like Job’s friends after, not before, God rebuked them. Shut your mouth, tremble, pray, and offer sacrifices.

Suppose someone you know personally owned a house and worked in an office that have been buried in lava by an erupting volcano. You might think, “I should show them something in Douty’s book!” Recognize this as the voice of the Enemy. Rebuke it. There’s a reason why Jesus never preached about “the art of letting go,” but rather demonstrated the arts of giving and sharing. What is God calling you to let go and sacrifice? Time? Money? Privacy? Listen silently for the Spirit’s guidance, then let go whatever you’ve been blessed with the opportunity to give to your afflicted friend.

Be sure to include that urge you may feel to edit and correct your friend’s emotional feelings. People who have lost their homes and offices are not usually happy. It would be abnormal and a possible warning sign of real mental illness if your friend’s moods didn’t range through grief, anger, and anxiety. Are you feeling an urge to slap a Band-Aid over your friend’s feelings and insist that person seem happy? Kneel at once in prayer. Say, “Dear God, please heal my delusional thinking that I have any business even trying to guess what X is feeling. Please forgive me that I actually had a fantasy about telling X how X is supposed to feel. This difficulty I’m having accepting the way X says X does feel shows that something is badly wrong with me. Please help me to detach my emotions and avoid turning X’s real problems into a demand that X fix my craziness. Please remind me that this is not about me. Please shut my mouth, load down my back, and keep my feet moving until I can get over this mental problem I’m having.”

If temptation returns, try giving your friend all the groceries and money in your house. You may find that a few days without food help you to stop trying to play guru and focus on facts.

The fact is that, even though our desires do lead to suffering, in Christianity that’s good. The suffering is not there to help us eliminate desire and die, as in Buddhism, but to help us reduce the amount of suffering around us. Only in specific, limited senses do Christians think about “the art of letting go,” or “the art of losing.” Ours is basically an activist religion. We fast, rest from our work, abstain from this or that form of pleasure, for limited times and specific purposes—to make time for prayer, save money for a worthy charitable cause, etc.—not to achieve the ultimate obliteration of consciousness as fast as possible. Rather than withdraw from reality and ignore material needs, we engage with reality and help others meet their material needs.

With this in mind, if you are having particular difficulty with some particular need to let some specific thing go...I’d be less inclined to recommend this book than to recommend examining what you are clinging to. You do know you’re holding on, if you need to let something go, and if you think about it you know why. Is mourning for one departed family member interfering with your doing what you need to do for another? (If that’s the problem, what do you feel guilty of having done or not done for the departed family member?) Is a sense of identity with one language, computer program, filing system, etc., interfering with your learning to use a different one? (If that’s the problem, how can you update your sense of identity?) Is your belief that something’s not been resolved inconvenient to someone else? (If that’s the problem, then you might do well to let go the belief that you need that person’s approval.)

I’ve seen so many more situations where Douty’s ideas about “letting go,” as if this were a thing in its own right, were or would have been harmful than situations where they would have been helpful.The primary use of these ideas would be in clinical psychology, for counselling people who can’t bear to rent out the room full of toys that belonged to the children of whom they lost custody ten years ago even though they do know, on one level, that if a 19-year-old does move back into a room full of Fisher-Price houses the first thing that 19-year-old is likely to do is to move the toys out. If you are that person with the rooms still decorated in Fisher-Price and Strawberry Shortcake, by all means read this book.

If someone else handed you this book, please be sure you use it liberally against that person’s manipulative demands. The grandparents who still know their way around their own house don’t need to “let go” of their independence and move into a nursing home; their children need to “let go” of some of their wealth and status symbols, and honor their parents by not putting them into hospices before their time. People who are in mourning doesn’t need to “let go” of their grief; their friends need to “let go” of their craving for superficial happiness and accept their share of the duty of mourning the dead. People who have been unfairly treated don’t need to “let go” of their demands for justice; their neighbors need to “let go” of their complacency, stir themselves up and work for justice along with those who have been done wrong.

Most Americans really need to “let go” of an unhealthy combination of social-emotional stress and physical laziness, a fantasy that “we” (meaning an ever-expanding socialist bureaucracy) can take care of everyone else’s needs while we, individually, watch television. Most of us would like to think that we’re “caring for our friends’ feelings,” and some of us can work up real emotional fits as we vibrato, “I’m sooo sorry that you’re so unhappy! You need to ‘let go’...” Wrong. I re-programmed myself some years ago to recognize “You need to,” in any context in which I might say it, as a cue to say immediately, “I’m sorry. I’m being stupid. What do I need to do right now?”

I do not in fact have to resolve every difficulty everyone I know has. Sometimes I need to feel my discomfort with the fact that I’m not able to do what ought to be done. But in all cases I need to focus on the facts of any situation, and only the facts, and never compound the facts with any idiocy about how I think the person ought to feel, unless and until someone says to me “Everything in my life is going perfectly; my emotional feelings are my only problem.”