The Worst Advice: “Just Let It Go!”
By: Carol L. Skolnick
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There is a teaching story from the Eastern tradition in which a guru instructs his devotee, “My child, sit in meditation, but whatever you do, do not meditate on a monkey.” Of course, the thought of a monkey comes to awareness and the disciple discovers he can focus on nothing else. Meditation teachers are familiar with this phenomenon of “monkey mind,” yet, contrary to the story, many teach that it is necessary and even possible to bypass the mind.
During the years that my depression felt never-ending and at times crippling, I received the same advice from many well-meaning friends and professionals. They all assured me I was a strong, smart and resilient person and that all I really needed to do was to “let go” and “move on.” The same directive came in many different forms.
* “Feel your feelings”: “Go back to being four years old and mad at your daddy,” some practitioners suggested. “Yell, cry, hit the wall, stop skimming the surface; if you deeply re-experience and express those emotions you can get free of them.” (As if feelings alone ever resulted in self-knowledge!)
* “Snap out of it”: “Stop being a victim, pull up your socks,” admonished denizens of various “awareness trainings” where their trainers publicly shamed them into “getting off it.” After all, it’s only a “story.” (As indeed what is not, including the story, “I’m over it,” until it gets triggered once again.)
* Meditation: “Watch your thoughts and don’t get involved in them, don’t believe them, let them go. If you stop paying attention to them, they’ll go away and you’ll transcend (i.e. move on from) this world of illusion.” (“But isn’t it a thought to say I have no thoughts?” “Ssh! Stop thinking!”)
* Affirmations: “Replace that negative thought with this positive one, repeat it ten times on the hour every hour for 30 days, and watch your life transform beyond your wildest dreams!” (Then, if your life does transform, you get to tell the “story” of how you moved on…or the one about what b.s. affirmations are if in fact you don’t get what you want.)
* Manifesting: “You created your problems—maybe even in a previous life! Why would anyone choose this hell? Well, you did! So set an intention, get really specific, ask for everything you want—the sky’s the limit—and create the life you want!” (Translation: You can’t possibly be happy in this tired, old, imperfect mistake of a world—God really messed up big-time, eh? —so rather than working within it and seeing the beauty of it, simply drop it and make a new one; you’re that powerful!)
* “Neutraceuticals”: “Therapy won’t help you because if you’re this unhappy, it means there’s something wrong with your brain or your body. This pill (herb, vitamin, “superfood”) will fix you and help you to move on. And this one here will boost the efficacy of the first one…and here’s another to counteract the side effects of the other two.”
You may be laughing with recognition by now, though I am of course exaggerating and having some fun here. I believe that “it’s all good,” and would never recommend that anyone stop something that is working for them or that a healthcare professional prescribes. In fact, supplements and medications have been enormously helpful to me at times; I benefited from therapy enough to stay in it for about 20 years; there are instances when I enjoy sitting for meditation; and setting intentions certainly can’t hurt.
However, no one thing has ever gotten me to “let it go and move on” in the long run. We may see a counselor or go to a self-help workshop to help us deal with the pain of a broken heart or an unhappy childhood…we may exercise, diet, take a remedy or take a vacation when we don’t feel well. These are all excellent things to do. But just as a bandage covers a wound and may in fact protect it from further injury, it cannot heal the wound at its source. For that we must go deeper.
During the years of my most intense suffering, I, too believed I ought to let go and move on…and berated myself for not doing so. Thoughts like, “I should be over this by now,” “I know better than to feel or act this way,” and “I’ve been over this a million times and I just don’t get it” only added to my suffering before I learned how to deeply question my painful beliefs. What I have learned since that time is that we do not create our thoughts—and therefore we cannot drop them or un-create them. In fact, they may be there for a good reason.
There’s a monkey in our meditation; so what? What if we not only accepted the monkey but saw it as a friend? What if we didn’t automatically assume that a “monkey” is an annoyance at best, a character flaw at worst? What if the silliest monkey has something serious to teach us?
My mentor, Byron Katie, says “Wake the baby.” This turned out to be the best advice I ever got. Stress in the moment is the “compassionate alarm clock” that lets us know we’re caught up in a bad dream. Would you drop a baby that screams in the night, or would you hold it tenderly and soothe it, letting it know all is well in the moment? What about an older child who “knows better?” You don’t shake her awake and say, “Snap out of it and move on!” Why, then, would you do that to yourself?
Instead, we can listen to the confused mind…and get to the source of that confusion. “My father neglected me.” That is a stressful thought, and as such, it merits investigation even if the whole world would agree with you. You have all the proof, you think, of your father’s neglect: he was rarely home, he wasn’t affectionate, he spent his evenings locked in his study, he didn’t pay for your schooling. How does “feeling” that and “moving on” heal our lives? What if we dared to defy the whole world in its great wisdom and asked ourselves if it’s true that we were neglected? In what ways were we not neglected by him and even well cared for? How was this “neglectful” father a gift in our lives, providing us with the perfect path to our freedom from suffering today?
We can’t awaken to truth until we see the nightmare for what it is. “There’s a monster under the bed. (Or a monkey in the mind.) Is it true? Sweetheart,” we might ask our confused selves, “Can you really know that it’s a monster? Let’s take a look.” The best advice I ever got was to hold the mind as you would an innocent little one who is frightened. We don’t ever have to let go of anything. Rather, that which we are trying to let go of—when met with understanding—lets go of us.
©Copyright 2008 by Carol L. Skolnick. All Rights Reserved. Permission to publish granted to GoodTherapy.org. The following article was solely written and edited by the author named above. The views and opinions expressed are not necessarily shared by GoodTherapy.org. Questions or concerns about the following article can be directed to the author or posted as a comment to this blog entry.