Letting It Go

Setting your autopilot is a way to make certain you hold on to protective decisions you have made over the course of your life. Holding on is always easier than letting go. We all hold on by leaving bits of our energy with memories of painful experiences to keep them from intruding into our everyday lives. Those were the experiences we did not have the resources to manage at the time they happened.

You Try to Protect Yourself by Holding On

It takes some of your energy to hold on or freeze your negative experiences, and that energy gets stuck in place and isn’t available for you to use to handle whatever is in front of you right now. So, paradoxically, something you did to protect yourself in the past causes a problem in your present life.

Sometimes we don’t have those resources simply because we are powerless children in a world of grownups. Sometimes it’s because the adults who should have been able to protect us are not immediately available for a variety of benign or traumatic reasons.

One toddler wandered a few feet away from his watching mother and encountered a stress that was toxic for him that other children usually did not find stressful at all. He simply saw a clown who was there to entertain children. The toddler was terrified and inconsolable and set his autopilot to protect him from these dangerous creatures. That protection lasted for years and the autopilot was very difficult to reset.

Sometimes we are overwhelmed by trauma which no ordinary human can manage. This often happens to military personnel who serve in war zones and to the first responders who protect us as police, firefighters and medical professionals. When we encounter too many losses in a short period of time and can’t process them, we tend to freeze energy around them to protect ourselves from feeling the pain of our experiences.

Sometimes we hold on to something because it is incomplete and we want a satisfactory ending. This can be especially problematic when the person or event with whom we want to complete something is long gone from our lives, either because they have died or have changed so much that the original just no longer exists. It’s like wanting to complete something with a 30-year-old parent who is now 80 years old and does not even remember the incident that you have held on to for 50 years.

The more things you are holding on to, the more likely it is that some of them will be reactivated by the ordinary stress of just living. That’s when we sometimes experience anxiety or depression that seems to have no particular cause.

Letting Go is Challenging

Resetting your autopilot and releasing the frozen energy can be time consuming and challenging. Spiritually based systems such as prayer and meditation have been developed over hundreds, even thousands of years to help cope with this problem. Many types of psychotherapy teach clients to change their reactions to current stress. Some kinds of psychotherapy try to reprogram brain connections. New energy therapies seem to do that also. One of these, “Tapping” in its various forms, is currently very popular.

Some of these technologies relieve your distressing reactions without any attempt to learn what caused your distress. Logosynthesis does ask the question, “What originally caused those reactions?” That is because the goal is to free the frozen energy that is used to hold on to the protection from the original situation and return it to where it belongs now.