The Season That Teaches Us to Trust the Process

Fog sitting low over a fall hillside with trees disappearing into it

Trust the process.

I’ve heard that sentence used to dismiss more real pain than almost any other four words in my line of work, and I’ve also watched it be the truest thing available to somebody. Depends entirely on who’s saying it and what they’re asking you to do about it.

So let me say what I don’t mean before I say what I do.

I don’t mean lie down. I don’t mean stop asking questions, stop seeking a diagnosis, stop looking for a lawyer, stop trying to get out of a situation that is hurting you. Surrender does not mean compliance. Plenty of people have been told to trust the process by somebody who had a stake in them not leaving.

What surrender actually gives up

Surrender gives up the guarantee, not the effort.

There’s a difference and it’s the whole thing. You can work as hard as you want on a marriage and you cannot guarantee the other person changes. You can take every medication correctly and not guarantee the scan. You can do everything right as a parent and your kid still has his own free will and his own road.

Most of the suffering I see in anxious people isn’t caused by the hard thing. It’s caused by the exhausting, round-the-clock, completely fruitless attempt to secure an outcome they were never in a position to secure.

That’s the thing you’re being asked to set down. Not your agency. The guarantee.

Why we hold on so hard

Because at some point, control worked.

Almost everybody with a white-knuckle grip learned it somewhere real. If you grew up where you had to watch the adults for signs, prediction was survival. If something bad happened suddenly once, your system concluded that vigilance is what prevents suddenness. And if you were the one who held the family together, you learned that things fall apart the moment you stop pushing.

That’s not irrational. It’s a conclusion drawn from evidence. The problem is it’s evidence from a different environment, and you’re still running the program in a life where it costs more than it saves.

You’re standing in a fire with a water pistol. You’re good with it. But you’re in the ashes now, still squeezing.

Fog driving

Anybody who has driven a Kentucky back road at six in the morning in October knows how this works.

The fog sits in the low places and you can see maybe forty feet. You don’t stop the car in the middle of the road and wait for the entire route to become visible. You also don’t floor it. Instead you go slow, use what light you have, stay on the road you know, and the forty feet keeps moving with you.

That’s the whole practice. Not certainty, visibility. You get enough to take the next stretch, and the next stretch is where the next forty feet comes from.

Faith, at least in my experience, has never been a floodlight. It’s headlights in fog.

The practice, on a Tuesday

Sort the list. Two columns, honest. What’s actually mine to do, what isn’t. Most anxious people have half the second column filed under the first one. Other people’s choices, other people’s feelings, the economy, the future, whether he finally gets it.

Do your column all the way. Surrender is not an excuse to skip the part that belongs to you. Make the appointment, have the conversation, send the application, do the homework from therapy.

Set a worry time and keep it. Sounds gimmicky, works better than it should. Fifteen minutes, same chair, same time. When it comes up outside that window, you tell it you’ve got an appointment scheduled. You’re not suppressing it, you’re scheduling it, and your brain accepts scheduling more readily than dismissal.

Let your body in on the decision. You can decide to surrender with your mind and your shoulders will keep bracing for three more weeks. Feet on the floor, long exhale, cold water, walk. The body needs its own convincing.

Pray specifically, and let it be short. “Help” counts. “I can’t carry the outcome on this one” counts. You don’t have to be eloquent to be heard.

The part I’m still working on

I’m not writing this from the finished side.

I am a fixer by temperament and by training. My instinct in any crisis is to get in front of it, make a plan, handle it. I’ve had seasons where the only honest prayer I had was “I don’t like this and I’m doing it anyway,” and I don’t think that got sent back for revision.

What I’ve noticed is that the peace never arrives before the surrender. I keep waiting for it to come first, as a kind of proof that letting go is safe, and it doesn’t work in that order. You let go while it still feels terrible, and some time later you notice you’re breathing differently.

Before you close the tab

The fog will burn off. It always does, usually around ten, and then you’ll look back at the road you came down and see it was a road the whole time.

You don’t need the whole route. You need the next forty feet and the nerve to keep the car moving.

Baby steps. Progress over perfection.

This is education, not therapy. If you’re in crisis, call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. If you’re in Kentucky and white-knuckling something you can’t control, let’s talk. Circle of Hope Counseling Services.

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