How to surrender vs. giving up
You’ve probably heard about the healing benefits of surrender. You may have heard it referred to as “letting go” which can feel incredibly hard to do.
If you’re recovering from past trauma, advice to let things go has been dismissive and ill-intentioned. It came from people who didn’t want to be bothered by your pain.
Surrender instead means you accept things you cannot change. And discern the difference between things you have control over and those you don’t. (Yes, it sounds like the serenity prayer.)
Giving up, however, means that you’ve lost hope. While it’s healthy to give up false hope, giving up hope altogether leads to depression and learned helplessness.
It means you feel so ineffective in your life, that not hoping for anything better beats the pain of wanting more (and never getting it).
Surrender is peaceful
Surrender is the peaceful feeling that you’ve done what you can and the rest is up to God or the Universe. It’s the difference between force and attraction.
To my mind, anything you have to force eventually breaks. Think about a key in a lock or an unrequited love relationship.
Trying to force someone to love you by giving them everything they want at the expense of yourself is codependency. As soon as you stop forcing, that relationship will cease to exist. Your self-abandonment is the glue holding it together.
Surrender is the trust that what you want will come to you without you forcing anything. Giving up is the belief that you’ll never get what you want, so why try.
When you surrender the false hope that a toxic or narcissistic family member will ever understand you, that’s freedom and empowerment.
Giving up is disempowering
Giving up, however, feels disempowering, in large part because you know it’s not true. Part of you knows you deserve that thing you don’t feel worthy of receiving and that’s why you feel so bad when you give up on it.
On the other hand, when you surrender something you knew deep down would never happen, you feel open to what you actually deserve. And you’ve made space for that good thing to come in.
For example, all that energy you wasted trying to get validation from people who would never see you? Now you can turn that energy toward yourself and start inviting in things you love.
Because that false hope closes us off to many good things in life. As long as we are seeking validation from outside sources we can never feel content and secure.
Your validation has to come from something that never changes, and that’s inside of you. It can’t come from someone else’s opinions or cultural ideals of what bodies should look like. (Did you hear big butts aren’t “in” anymore?)
It may sound impossible now, but you can create your own happiness from within. This is the journey that begins when you surrender the belief that it depends on something outside of you.
