Emotional surrender

June 26, 2020

[Updated – 9/26/20]

This will be the first of two or more posts on this topic.

Emotional surrender has been on my mind lately. In Recovery from Parkinson's (2019) Janice Walton-Hadlock (JWH) writes, “As it turns out, an ability to emotionally surrender is a better predictor of recovery than a determination to 'succeed'.” So this would seem to be a pretty important topic!

Let's talk about what emotional surrender, an important phenomenon in various spiritual traditions, might involve in the JWH protocol. First, note that coming off pause certainly qualifies as the most pivotal event in the recovery process. So, given the quotation above, it seems fair to say emotional surrender must be centrally important among the internal processes that ultimately prompt coming off pause.

How does surrender link with turning off pause? Successful surrender clearly requires a strong feeling of safety, the key ingredient in coming off pause. Pause and emotional surrender seem incompatible. Pause includes a kind of wariness, a guardedness (~ the opposite of feeling safe) that surely runs directly counter to surrender. Pause would appear then to stand in the way of emotional surrender, suggesting that if you can accomplish the latter you have likely (and possibly via that very process) eliminated the former.

What can we expect surrender to look like for someone engaged in the JWH protocol? To get some flavor of this I turn to some quotes from JWH. I'll let these quotes stand on their own without further comment as I think they paint the picture for the reader. There are only two instances of the word “surrender” in the eight currently available chapters of Recovery from Parkinson's (2019). But one of those is the key comment provided at the start of this post. So the importance of the idea is clear, and we will see if it is mentioned further when the full, new edition of Recovery from Parkinson's becomes available in the near future.

First, a few quotes from Recovery from Parkinson's (2013). (As a side-note, I urge readers to get their grounding in the JWH approach from the newer edition of Recovery from Parkinson's before venturing at all to look at the 2013 edition. The newer edition is quite different, and reading through the old stuff without having the new stuff firmly in mind can lead to confusion.)

From Recovery from Parkinson's (2013):

“I would have to say that most of my PD patients really, really hate the word “surrender.” They think it means “giving up.” It doesn’t. It means admitting that Love is in charge.”

“Dopamine release occurs when a person succeeds in vanquishing his ego and surrendering (being obedient to) the instructions given to his heart by the universe.”

“The word 'surrender' came up often – and easily – with fully recovered patients. In their new non-Parkinson’s mindset they spoke about surrendering and they meant it in the sense of surrendering from their posture of perpetual wariness, cleverness, defensiveness, or heightened alertness. The 'surrender' was simply the admission that, no matter what, even if they did nothing in self-defense or self-maintenance, they were actually safe: safe enough to go back to living via the heart. And when they decided that they were actually safe 'after all,' and let themselves feel safe (not think, but feel), their bodies had responded with relaxation and a brain shift that brought about an end to their tremors – and an even fuller feeling of safety.”

Concerning her own recovery JWH writes, “That love, those friends, had always been there. And now I was aware of the love around me because I was no longer in control.”

In the moments just before recovery, a patient uttered: “'I’m truly grateful for the Parkinson’s: I’m safe now because I have surrendered my life over to You (within a religious context); I finally understand You are in charge; not me. I’m safe and can live fearlessly.'”

From Stuck on Pause (2017):

The first two of these quotes concern the feeling of surrender during Yin Tui Na, but clearly transfer easily to the general idea of surrender when working toward coming off pause.

A patient said:

”'You don’t know what they’re going to do. You just have to relax and experience whatever they do. Wherever they put their hands, you just have to let go and enjoy it. And that helps you relax, by trusting someone else and feeling what they’re doing.'”

JWH responds:

”... He had just described, way better than I had ever done, the reason behind the second of the five steps of turning off pause: let someone else provide comfort. Surrender to the support of someone else, even though you don’t know what they’re going to do or say. After all, the hands-on support is not really about what they do, it’s about the fact that someone is caring and you are accepting that care because you’re safe.”

“[People on pause usually] don’t understand that the one who needs to actually do the work is the patient. And the 'work' consists of surrendering to the fact of being cared for, the fact of not actually being 'alone in the universe.'”