The Paradox of Surrender—How Letting Go of Control Makes Us More Free with Dr. Anna Lembke
Episode Notes
Would we rather be in control than happy?
What happens when science, therapy, and sheer determination can't fix what's broken? Is there another way forward?
Dr. Anna Lembke, Stanford psychiatrist and bestselling author of Dopamine Nation, joins us for a fascinating conversation about her new book, Radical Surrender: Letting Go in a World Addicted to Control.
Anna shares how profound personal loss challenged everything she believed about control, accomplishment, and her place in the world—and led her to an unexpected spiritual awakening.
We explore:
- Why our best efforts sometimes aren't enough
- When control becomes a substitute for faith
- The surprising connection between surrender and transformation
- How to let go of control without giving up our agency
- How surrender changes us and our relationships
- How prayer can become a practice of surrender
Together, Dr. Alison and Dr. Lembke explore the surprising intersection of psychology, neuroscience, and spirituality.
About Dr. Anna Lembke:
Dr. Anna Lembke is a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine and Chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic. An internationally recognized expert in addiction medicine, she has published more than 100 scholarly works. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence.
Get Dr. Anna Lembke’s new book: Radical Surrender: Letting Go in a World Addicted to Control
Learn more about Dr. Anna Lembke here.
Get exclusive access to the first 2 chapters of Dr. Alison’s newest book, The Secure Soul.
Connect further with @dralisoncook on Instagram
📖 Find a full transcript and list of resources from this episode here
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Transcript
No amount of science or psychotherapy, because I tried them both, could get me out of my grief
state after the loss of those twins. And so it wasn't until about a year after losing our son,
Lucas, suddenly had this realization that, okay, I'm clearly not in control of what is happening to
my life. So there must be a force greater than myself that is governing the universe. And I'm just
going to do an experiment and give my will over to that force and see. what happens. And it was in
that moment that I felt the first awakening of some kind of peace,
hope, serenity. I think a surrendered life comes with agency. It's not a kind of a passive stance.
It's saying, okay, I cannot control these things. I acknowledge I am suffering, but...
get up and I can do the dishes and I can take out the garbage and I can write a thank you note. I
can just do the next right thing within my, and I think that's really, really important. The desire
and the need to control is so powerful in us that we would rather be in control than be happy.
Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's deep dive episode of The Best of You. I sometimes
look at the What's on my calendar? The people that I'm getting to interview this month,
really this whole fall, really this whole season for the podcast. And I'm just amazed.
I cannot believe I get to talk to some of the people that we've gotten to be with here on the
podcast this fall. Just people whose work has inspired me, has taught me, has transformed me.
People whose lives I really respect. I respect how they're doing their work. Not just what they
say, but who I perceive them to be. as they do their work in this world.
And today's guest is no exception. I've been a fan of Dr. Anna Lemke's work for a long time.
Many of you know her from her bestselling book called Dopamine Nation, which helps so many of us
understand this strange predicament of living in a world where we have almost unlimited access to
things that can instantly change the way we feel. They can distract us.
They can numb us. It could be food. It could be shopping. It could be social media. It could be
alcohol. It could be work or exercise. It could be our phones, even things. that aren't inherently
harmful can become ways of reaching for that instant gratification, that instant hit of dopamine,
of relief when we're uncomfortable. And this is not healthy for our souls.
There is a healthy way to reach for comfort, but so much of this unlimited access,
as Dr. Lemke points out in Dopamine Nation, is really rewiring us in ways that aren't helpful.
And in many ways, I think Anna's new book goes one layer deeper.
And I just absolutely loved hearing her personal story as a scientist of kind of having this moment
where she realized there has to be someone or something. bigger than herself.
And I think Dopamine Nation was kind of coming in and asking this question of what happens when
we're constantly trying to manipulate or control the way we feel by turning to things outside of
us, right? What is that doing to us? But in this new book that we're going to talk about today,
it's called Radical Surrender. She's asking an even deeper, even bigger question, which is what
happens when we discover that we can't control? When all of these things we're turning to,
even the good things, don't help us anymore. What happens then?
What happens when we can't guarantee that the people we love will make the choices that we want
them to make and we can't control that? What happens when we can't guarantee that our bodies will
remain healthy no matter how hard we try? What happens when we realize that we can't guarantee?
that a relationship will work out or that a dream we're working toward will happen or that our
children will be okay or that suffering will somehow pass us by if we just make all the right
decisions and do all the right things. And I find it such a fascinating conversation to have with
someone who is truly a scientist, as she'll share today. She doesn't come to religion from a
religious background. She was raised as a secular humanist, right? And she doesn't stick.
with one particular religious strand, but she has bumped up against something that I think is so
powerful for us, even as believers, as people of faith, to see when someone bumps up against the
limits of our humanity and we realize there's something else to which we have to surrender.
And one of the things I always appreciate about having conversations with people who are coming
from a different background is I think when we stay curious, we can learn things from each other.
And that's what happened in today's conversation. Dr. Anna Lemke is a psychiatrist. She's a
scientist. She's a professor at Stanford University, and she's the author of the bestselling book,
Dopamine Nation. She's got a new book coming out. It's called Radical Surrender, Letting Go in a
World Addicted to Control. And in this conversation, talks about how accomplishment and control
essentially became her religion, how when life became uncertain, her instinct was to work harder to
try to control things more, and how somehow force reality into the shape she wanted it to take.
And as you will hear her describe in today's episode, until she encountered a kind of suffering
that could not be solved in this way. Anna talks about reaching a point where science,
therapy, effort, and control couldn't provide an answer. And in the middle of that grief,
she had this very simple but profound thought, I am clearly not in control.
And no other human being is in control either. So what if there is a power greater than me?
And what if I give my will, that's her words, what if I give my will over to that power and see
what happens? Now, I want to be clear here, especially because many of you listening are coming
from a Christian faith background. Anna's not writing a theology book. She isn't attempting to
define who God is or how she arrived at a particular set of beliefs as a result of this experiment.
She really approaches the topic as a scientist. And this is what I really enjoyed about the
conversation, what I found really provocative and really stayed with. I've thought about this
conversation a lot because many people of faith, we already understand this language of surrender
to some degree. We sing about surrender, right? We pray about surrender. We say,
not my will, but thy will. We believe, quote unquote, God is in control. But what is this actually?
Because I know for me, and I'm guessing for many of you, I may believe that God is in control, but
how do I actually live that out when life gets hard? How do I actually experience that in my body?
What does that actually mean for my agency and what's mine to do today and what I'm trying to hand
over to God? What does this all actually mean? Because a lot of what I've seen in some ways is that
spirituality can become another way of trying to control an outcome.
We think if we can just pray correctly or long enough or hard enough or if we just have enough
faith or if we can just make the right, correct decision, if we can just hear God correctly,
then surely we can control an outcome. We may not admit that.
consciously, but sometimes that's what can happen. And so I loved this conversation when in real
time, as Anna and I were talking about this, about prayer and about these practices, what does it
really look like to surrender even when we're praying, right? Instead of trying to get God to help
us control an outcome, we simply go to God and say, I'm scared, or I don't know what is going to
happen. I need you to join me in this. I don't. want to be alone in this.
And so there's something for all of us to learn about what it means to surrender.
And one of my favorite parts of this conversation is how clear Dr. Lemke is that surrender is not
the same thing as passivity. And she describes in both scientific terms and also in psychologically
resonant terms that sort of movement between surrender and agency.
I found it so powerful and so helpful in some of the things I'm dealing with in my own life and
trying to figure out what does it actually mean to be surrendered to a God who loves us.
Dr. Anna Lemke. is a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine. She's the
medical director of Stanford Addiction Medicine. She's the best-selling author of Dopamine Nation,
and her extraordinary new book is called Radical Surrender, Letting Go in a World Addicted to
Control. Please enjoy my conversation with Dr. Anna Lemke.
Dr. Lemke, I am just... thrilled to have you on the podcast.
I've been such a... devotee of your work. And this newest book is just a stunning book that I think
so many people in my audience are going to relate to. I'd love to start just a little bit with your
own personal story. I think so many of us have this idea that there's such this big divide between
scientists and people who are spiritual and especially in our culture. And I always love finding
all these pockets where that is just not the case, where there's much more overlap than many of us
would like. to think. But you talk about growing up in, and I think you describe it as a secular
humanist home where religion would have been viewed with some suspicion.
And yet then you begin this book, and I want to just tell you how sorry I am for the loss that you
experienced. And you just describe it in such, you're such a beautiful writer. This devastating
moment in the aftermath of having lost your son and just this moment of realization,
there has to be more to this,
what all of this may entail. And I guess I just wanted to ask you if you could kind of start this
conversation with that moment. Because it kind of anchors this conversation about surrender.
And you didn't necessarily in that moment have a developed spiritual framework for understanding
what that even meant. But something in you knew you had to surrender to something. Thank you for
inviting me on your show and for that absolutely lovely introduction. I'm so excited to be here and
to talk to your audience. So I think my story, you might...
Think of it in three major beats. The first beat is that having grown up in this secular home,
accomplishments and control became my kind of substitute religion.
And when things got dicey or uncertain for me,
I just doubled down on control. By exerting my will, I was going to make the universe do
essentially whatever I wanted. to do, or so I thought. And that included very early in my marriage,
my husband and I got pregnant accidentally. And without too much deliberation,
I decided to have an abortion because I felt I wasn't ready for a child. And this is an important
piece of this, because as you know, a couple years later, when I did feel ready to become a parent,
got pregnant right away, uncomplicated pregnancy, had our child,
and then it turned out that that child was diagnosed with and died of leukemia. My response to that
was to, again, double down on control, distance myself from grief, try to control the people and
situations around me, and in doing that caused essentially more harm.
Also to move on and pretend that that had never happened, got pregnant again right away, was
pregnant with twins, really felt in that moment that that was some kind of universal justice,
like the twofer that the universe owed me. But in that second trimester, lost those twins.
And no amount of science or psychotherapy, because I tried them both,
you know, to an extensive degree, could... get me out of my grief state after the loss of those
twins, or could help me make sense of what had happened, especially given my worldview prior to
that moment. And so it wasn't until about a year after losing our son,
Lucas, or maybe even more than a year, that I woke in the middle of the night,
went to his bedroom, looked down at his empty crib, and suddenly had this realization that,
okay, I'm clearly not in control of what is happening to my life. No other human being can help me,
not even the wisest that there is. So there must be a force greater than myself that is governing
the universe. And I'm just going to do an experiment and give my will over to that force and see
what happens. And it was in that moment that I felt the first awakening of some kind of peace,
hope, serenity. Wow. Yeah. And that to me was fascinating.
I mean, as a scientist, I found that fascinating. I was like, okay, this is interesting. I went
back to my bedroom next to my sleeping husband. I fell asleep. I slept better than I had in almost
a year. And when I woke the next morning, that feeling of serenity was still with me.
I went out into the garden. I looked at the garden that my husband had been planting as part of his
grief process. And it was as if I was seeing it for the first time. The world felt remade.
And this kind of sense of, you know, whatever happens, it's going to be okay. And also what I found
very fascinating as a scientist in that moment. was that I felt a call to moral action.
So this sort of surrendering my will came with it a mandate to try to do the next right thing.
I thought, well, I have no idea what's going to happen next. I'm going to give that over to my
higher power. But it feels like, and this was very much a felt experience, it feels like as part of
this negotiation or understanding or commitment to this higher power that I need to try to choose
the moral good. And this was like kind of out of the blue, right? Because I had been raised in a
culture of moral relativism, that there's really no difference between good and evil. It's all made
up and depending upon culture, geography, time period. But I had this very strong sense that no,
the moral good can be known. And I can through contemplation.
and prayer know what the next right thing is, or at least I can make an attempt. And in that
intention, walk closer to my higher power. So that sort of began from there. And that moment has
made all the difference in my life, totally transformed my life and my worldview in a way that's
difficult to describe, but important to try to capture. Yeah,
and it's so fascinating as a scientist that the felt experience of it was...
kind of really what it just felt so real there was an experiential i think we talk about sort of a
phenomenological research which is that sort of you just um as opposed to kind of deductive
reasoning there's sort of this this is this is a felt experience that is real and was trans that
that was transformative i i imagine and we'll get into this that you've probably because i i see a
lot of the people you just talk in your book you've now kind of understood maybe what was happening
and kind of some of the spiritual, kind of the neurobiology of spirituality, which is so
fascinating. But it sounds like at that moment, it didn't matter. You just knew it was real. Right.
I mean, in that moment, it was the only moment where I felt some degree of hope and that I was
going to be able to move forward. Yeah. So it was just this really powerful moment of,
oh, this, I think. I think I can do this. I think I can go on.
This works. This seems to be working. Yeah, and you're absolutely right about the felt experience.
I mean, we can sort of cognitively rationalize, you know, till the cows come home.
But for many people, that spiritual awakening or that spiritual transformation is a felt
experience. It's incredibly subjective, meaning that it is, you know,
something that I experience that's not. in the material world,
but that can be communicated and is certainly felt. And in my case,
it's interesting. It wasn't like all of a sudden I saw a white light or I had this convicted belief
in God. It really wasn't that. It was more subtle than that. It was sort of like, oh,
well, this... This might be an alternative way of thinking about the universe.
And I should consider this because what I have been doing has not been working.
And this seems to be leading me in the right direction. And then, of course, from there,
you know, it's been now 26 years. There's 26 years of accumulated felt experiences and personal
evidence that, you know, my life is.
gone so much better. And I am such a better person for having made this spiritual.
Interesting.
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It just anecdotally, I when I was studying, I studied I started off in clinical psychology where we
were doing a lot of like social science research and analysis. And and as a person of faith who had
an experience, I mean, mine was very much in the context of a of sort of a specific Christian
worldview. But I did have that experience when there was surrender of almost what you just it's
like the. The sky is bluer. The grass is greener. Almost kind of like some of what we talk about
when we fall in love. You know, there's something beyond. And all that to say, part of why I
switched into this joint degree in psychology of religion is I, because you said something I wanted
to underline, especially for my listeners. You said, I tried science. I tried therapy and they
didn't work. And it's so funny to me as a therapist, when I hear you say that, I'm like, yes. And
it's not because therapy isn't important and it's not because science isn't important. But for me,
when I switched into that joint degree, it was like, we can get all the tools in the world. We can
get all of the cognitive restructuring in the world. And we still need things to make sense of
meaning and suffering and pain. And so to hear you say that is like,
is like a yes. There's got to be room for a lot of different means.
And so I just want to personally tell you how much that means to me to hear somewhat of your
stature and your influence in the scientific community. Just recognize that.
there's more to life than, and not that these fields aren't amazing. Yeah, exactly.
I mean, you said it so well. I mean, there's a role for science. There's a role for psychotherapy.
You know, that's a big part of my daily professional life. And yet by excluding the spiritual pivot
and the importance of thinking about spiritual things,
we are really denying ourselves an innate source of resilience and transcendence.
I mean, you know, we evolved really for a form of worship.
And when we don't have a way to live and enact that part of ourselves,
I think it can get funneled into these sort of distorted forms of false worship.
And, you know, sadly, in my world of academia and science, there's such a,
there's so much stigma, you know, around talking about spirituality or faith.
I mean, I have met, in researching this book, I've met so many of my colleagues here at Stanford
who had these secret spiritual lives. you know, that they're afraid to talk about, and yet it's
core to their, you know, their existence. It's like the essence of their lives.
And yet we're not talking about it. There's really, it's too bad. I want to quote you right in the
book. I think this is so relatable. To so many of us, again,
whether you're a person of faith, to be honest, because we still deal with this, or wherever you
are on this journey, you write, the crisis at the heart of radical surrender is a crisis of the
will. It arises the moment we are confronted with a reality we cannot predict,
prevent, or control. No matter how determined we are or how carefully we prepare,
it's the sudden recognition that not everything is receptive to effort or intention.
And then this list is just aging. illness and death are foremost among life's inevitabilities.
But also, I love this, you say, but also love unrequited. The pain of a broken heart,
you write, injury irrevocable, dreams unfulfilled. I think of so many of my listeners,
a child who makes choices that are beyond my control. I cannot,
no matter what I do, I hear from so many moms, I cannot. control this. And I also know if I keep
trying, I'm going to make it worse, to your point. So I just think that is such a profound
statement about reality. Not everything is receptive to effort. or intention. And so much of modern
life teaches us that if we work hard enough, if we do enough therapy, and even in faith spaces,
if we pray enough, if we get the right relationship with God enough,
that somehow we will get the outcome we want.
I guess what I want to ask you, what's so fascinating to me about your story is on the other side
of releasing, you found But to get to that is hard.
Do we have to reach some version of the end of our own effort to kind of almost hitting that rock
bottom before we discover the paradoxical sort of.
hope or peace that you describe? Or are there ways we can learn to relinquish control before life
almost kind of forces us to? That's a big question. Yeah.
I think we can practice surrender. I think we can do it as a daily practice.
It is true that many people who come to this place of radical surrender have hit rock bottom in
some way or another. For me, the loss of our child, for many of my patients in addiction,
realizing their disease is unmanageable, people with terrible eating disorders who can't make
themselves eat even when they know they're dying. So there is this, it does emerge from the heart
of human helplessness. I think that the veil is very thin. And when we all stop to kind of
recognize how small is our boat, how big is the ocean, I mean,
that's a moment of helplessness. That's a moment of terror. That's a moment innately of realizing
our smallness, our helplessness, our feeling overwhelmed.
I personally do not know how people parent.
without relying on a higher power. I really do not. I mean, the terror of parenting,
of bringing a life into the world, of doing your very best, of watching that child go out and make
mistakes and suffer and encounter difficulties that we as their parents have no ability to protect
them from, and nor should we be trying to do that, right? They have to have their own experiences.
I mean, that's... That's really, really hard. But, you know,
this sort of giving it over to a higher power really then allows us to trust in this greater power
that is going to take care of us, that's going to take care of our child. I mean, without which I'm
just not sure how it's possible. to be there for our children in the way that they need us to be
there. So I do think we can practice it. The first step is just acknowledging that we lack control
over a given situation. And part of that acknowledgement is also just noticing when we're
ruminating. So when we're looping in our thoughts again and again, this sort of thought looping is
the way that the executive control networks of our brain try to solve a problem,
including problems that are unsolvable. And once we recognize that we're doing that,
you know, having compassion. for ourselves, noticing the emotion, noticing that space we're in,
and then giving it over and trusting that control to a power greater than ourselves,
to God, however we define it, releasing our burden of trying to control things that we cannot
control.
And then importantly, doing the next right thing. So I think a surrendered life comes with agency.
It's not a kind of a passive stance. It's saying, okay, I cannot control these things. I cannot,
I acknowledge I am suffering, but I can get up and I can do the dishes and I can take out the
garbage and I can write a thank you note and I can just do the next right thing within my,
and I think that's really, really important. Yeah, I love that emphasis on agency,
that it's not passive.
I think in spiritual communities, because there's a delineation,
right? There's one end of the spectrum where it's all in my hands, but then there can be another
end of the spectrum that I sometimes see, which is it's all in God's hands. Right. And there's an
over-spiritualization. And that can also be because then we only have God to blame when things
don't go the way they're going. So I love that in the book. And can you talk a little bit more
about this next right thing where you describe sort of the there's almost layers to it and there's
a sort of a cycle to it where the surrender and then the agency kind of work together?
um,
doing the next right thing brings us back to the present moment.
And then also to, you know, a... sort of sphere of influence where our powers of discernment are
much greater, where we actually do have an increased ability to know what is right and what is
wrong. Because far in the future, I think in general, we humans are not very good at that.
We can imagine all kinds of utopias and try to engineer those utopian perfections, but that may
turn out to be a living hell in reality. When we hold ourselves out as God,
right, and try to engineer reality, it tends to not go well. But we can know in the short term,
within a given day, within our immediate sphere, sort of what is calling us to action and to do
that. And it is then the concatenation or stringing together of many small acts that then gets us
to a much better place in life. And this is what I'm always telling my patients in recovery. that a
good day becomes a good week, a good week becomes a good month, a good months become years.
And it really does happen like that. So instead of trying to project my psyche into the future and
engineer a good year, all I really need to do is do the right thing today and trust that this
concatenation of right things will lead me to where I need to go and where the world and where God
needs me to go. absolutely right about this dangers of like spiritual bypass or holy laziness.
We're now where we're just sort of completely passively giving it over. And that then can become
its own form of control or justification of non-action. But I really think that when we are
walking with God... We are active agents, right?
But we are humble active agents, right? We recognize that we will make mistakes and that our powers
of discernment are limited and they're mostly limited to the present moment or at least the present
day. And that we have to stay humble and open through the process and be willing to admit when we
have made mistakes because we are often the last to see. So powerful. You talk about,
you mentioned that We will worship something. We are designed in a way to worship something.
And your past work on addictions and ongoing work on addictions, what is the cost of us not,
you know, what is the cost of us not? Being able to kind of that I love how you kind of describe
that humble walking with that humble participation with someone bigger than ourselves.
It strikes me when you describe worship, right, that we are designed to be.
And again, the words, you know, the religious words, and I spend a lot of my time trying to unpack
the way these religious words can be harmful, like subservient or, you know, it's there's a loving
partnership is how how I like. to describe it spiritually. But there is a sense of our humility
with it. But if we don't have that, we will worship.
And you kind of talk almost in terms of what the ancients called the disordered loves. We will find
something to attach ourselves to. Can you talk? And again, I want my listeners to hear we're not
just because you may have a faith doesn't mean we're not susceptible to at times turning over to
another. item that feels like we're more in control by self-medicating.
Or talk to us a little bit about that link between addiction and these disordered desires when we
kind of find a, for lack of a better word, a false god to walk with. Right. Yeah.
I mean, addiction is in many ways a false worship. Yeah. There's this fascinating paradox between
the desire to be in control of a situation.
And addiction is very much that, in that by using this substance or using this behavior,
I can in the moment guaranteed change the way that I feel. And it is that ability to change our
subjective experience, even if it's to change it to more misery. But I'm the master,
right? I'm in control. It's like the patient, Daniel, who's addicted to slot machines, who talks
about how now he can't stand playing slot machines. He plays on his phone. He's in terrible debt.
I'm in a very serious addiction. And yet it's... addicted, and he says,
it's the misery that I control. So the desire and the need to control is so powerful in us that we
would rather be in control than be happy, right? And that is this crazy thing that keeps people in
their addicted loops. It's that misery that I can control. Even though we really can't control
that, it's an illusion of control because although we may be able to control in the microcosm,
of course our world is going to hell in the macrocosm, right? The longer we spend in our little...
prediction action, addicted loops, this vortex of craving and compulsion, the less available we are
to be present for the rest of our lives. The other thing that's really fascinating about...
this paradox between control and letting go is that at the same time that we have a profound need
to feel in control, we also have a very intense desire to want to let go,
merge, lose the self, dissolve, be one with the universe.
And you see this in many different forms of false worship. For example,
sports, so huge sporting events. I mean, there are few things in the modern world that command as
much worship as sports. And I think a huge part of the appeal is that... We have no control.
It may be the last bastion of us not knowing what the outcome is. And we want to give ourselves
over. Yeah, we want to surrender. We want to be part of that not knowing what is coming next.
powerful thing that is subsuming us. I mean, our desire for that is also really intense.
So that tension between wanting to control our micro experience and also let go and merge as we do,
you know, at a major sporting event, or as some people do in the process of gambling or using their
drug of choice. And that toggling back and forth is kind of really, is at the core,
I think, of this sort of practice of false worship. And ultimately, you know,
that doesn't really get us to where we want to go. We want to have some kind of, what I'll call for
lack of better phrasing, proper object of our worship, which I think at the end of the day is no
human endeavor, right? It is the thing that is not human.
AI is also not a proper object, right? Because even though there might be a lot of wisdom in AI and
in an AI companion, it's still a human project, right? It's human engineered. Yes.
The real transcendence comes when we get out of our own thought loops or the thought loops of this
engineered entity and we transcend all that and give it over.
It's so powerful. Something beyond. And that does require that presence.
And that I love how there's just constantly this thread throughout your this work of of that
surrender and that agency, that surrender and that agency. It's such a powerful there's that
there's that.
I often think about it. My background is in internal family systems and I write a lot about inner
attachment. And I often think about it as recognizing. I'm grasping for control. So I recognize and
return to love. And so there's that, there's that. And then that return is what gives you that.
I love how you emphasize that, that agency. And it's a proper,
like you said, it's a proper orientation. It's perspective that matches with reality.
I want to talk a little bit about prayer because you describe prayer.
And I think you say, I think this is a quote you say, pray even if you're not sure you believe.
Yes. So talk to me about as both a psychiatrist, someone who practices prayer yourself,
why do you think that's so important and how does that relate to some of what we're talking about
here? We have become creatures who are so admiring of our control over material reality that we
would not even, many of us would not even consider
merging with that reality, surrendering to a power greater than ourselves. It's just completely not
an option for so many people living in the secular world. And I know that because I was one of them
and I grew up in that world and I live in practice and academia and science where that's for many
people the case. And yet in not...
even considering prayer, we are really depriving ourselves of a proper experiment to see what that
might bring to our lives. And as my dear friend and theologian Kent Dunnington said,
There is faith that aspires to belief. You don't have to believe in order to have faith.
You don't have to believe in order to pray. To me, the central feature of prayer is just merely the
recognition that it's not me. I am clearly not in control of much of what happens to my life.
And furthermore, my efforts to exert control when I shouldn't is very damaging.
is very, very damaging. So just the simple practice of acknowledging that, as you talked about in
your internal family systems work, acknowledging when we're grasping for control,
acknowledging that it comes often from a place of anxiety, a place of fear,
of wanting to eliminate those emotions, and instead embrace those emotions, acknowledge them,
and have faith and trust that a power greater than yourself will guide you to sanity and is holding
things so you don't have to. And for me, this was... I mean, I'm such a control freak that there
was no way I was going to be able to give up control unless I could conceive of someone else taking
control, right? So it was kind of like... I don't need to do this because there is a force that is
in control and is a loving and benevolent force and guiding the universe. And I may not understand
why I'm suffering in this way right now, but I can trust that my suffering has meaning and that
that meaning will be revealed to me at some point. And in the meantime, I can just do my part.
People are willing to do all kinds of crazy things, take all kinds of drugs, engage in all kinds of
biohacking exercises.
Where all kinds of devices on there entrust all of their data to an AI agent.
I mean, all these things. And yet- We have a lot of faith. Yeah, a lot of faith, right? But just
to say like, hey, how about conceiving of a higher power and getting on your knees and just asking
that higher power for help? That is just like, that's bananas for people. And it's just so ironic.
Kind of as we're talking here as your scientific background and my background growing up in the
church, I think there's always really cool things to be learned. It makes me feel freer to,
there can feel like prayer, that turning towards someone bigger.
than myself, it can feel like even in that there's a sort of attachment to an outcome.
And so almost in that, when I hear you say pray, even if you don't believe, there's a connection.
I always think about it in terms of attachment. There's a connection to sort of the ultimate
attachment tether, right? The ultimate of divine love.
There's that. And when I think about it, it's kind of like a child with a...
don't know what's going to happen, but I need you. And that is a surrender that is a little bit
different than many of us growing up in church backgrounds were taught, which is if I can get the
words just right, God will fix this problem. Right. Yeah. And there's a little bit of it.
So what you're helping me, you know, it's like you're helping me go. It's even if even when I'm
saying, you know. I I'm scared. I don't see how this is going to get fixed.
Right. But I need to not be alone in it. Right. I need someone capital as someone with me in it.
Yeah. That's a surrendered prayer. Yes. Versus a prayer of, okay,
God, here's what needs to happen tomorrow. Right. And if that doesn't happen, then that means I
probably didn't have enough faith. And I'm right. Right. There's, you can kind of find that, which
is so interesting. I think there's so much. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Oh,
I so appreciate that perspective. That's fascinating. You know, because I didn't grow up in a faith
-based family, that wasn't at all part of my journey, but I can totally see it.
Like God is a, God is a vending machine, right? Like you, you owe me, you owe me. Yeah.
I mean, you know, the way that I think of and experience prayer really just comes down to,
please help me, show me the way. That's it. That's kind of it.
It's like, I can't do this alone. Please help me. Show me the way. I never really conceive of an
outcome this or an outcome that. My prayers are always like, whatever it's going to be,
please give me and the people I love strength to endure. That's it.
It's a simple mind up here. But it is a surrender. And that's what I think is so interesting about.
I love that. It's not another attachment to an outcome. And I think that's one of the problems over
here. You're reminding me, and you quote Anne Lamott in the book, the kind of thanks,
help, wow. Yeah, right, exactly. The basics of just acknowledging. I want to touch on,
because you do, a little bit of the neuroscience here, you do make this claim that spiritual
transformation is actually mediated through neuro... plasticity that,
that surrender, there is something physiological going on that actually disrupts these old kind of,
again, like you're, I love how you just bring this all back to control, right? These mind maps.
Can you explain a little bit about what you mean by that and what's actually happening there? Yeah,
absolutely. So at age five, we have more neurons and neuronal connections than we'll have for the
rest of our lives. And as we mature from about age five to 25, we essentially cut back on the
neurons that we're not using and myelinate the neurons that we use most often, making them more
efficient such that by age 25, we have... a model of the world or a mind map that essentially
structures our experience. And this mind map is a prediction machine.
where we're constantly predicting what's going to happen next. And then if we have an experience
that's consistent with our prediction, that feels really good and releases dopamine and we're like,
yay, I'm on the right path. But if we have an experience that's different from what our mind maps
predicted or what we expected or what we thought we could control, then we get this jarring sense
of surprise, uncertainty that feels very uncomfortable and manifests as negative emotions like
shame. rage, sadness, grief.
When that happens, when we do not accurately predict our experience,
we need to update our mind map or our mental model to reflect that new experience.
But we are deeply resistant to doing that. We become very attached to our models of the world.
And we don't want to make those changes. And instead,
what we often do is deny that this reality is really happening. and actually double down on control
and kind of superimpose our map on the world and do these sort of sleights of hand or these
manipulations or what have you, or only associate with certain people or whatever it is so that
we're constantly affirming our existing mind maps, not having new experiences that might threaten
or disrupt them. And that defensive posture, it's essentially the narcissistic defense.
through repeated iterations gets us to a very bad place where we have internal consistency with our
mind maps, but we're not living in reality, right? We're completely divorced from, and that's not
adaptive because the universe is constantly changing, constantly changing. We have to adapt to a
constantly changing universe.
If you look at neurotransmitters, I talk in Dopamine Nation about how dopamine is our approach,
explore, exploit neurotransmitter. Well, serotonin has in many instances an opposite function.
It is our retreat, reevaluate, and potentially reroute neurotransmitter.
And one thing that I found absolutely fascinating in my researching this book is that when we
suffer, When we repeatedly encounter situations that don't go our way or that cause uncertainty or
that generate confusion or things aren't working, that actually leads a specific type of serotonin
receptor to proliferate in the brain, the 5-HT2A receptor. And those proliferated serotonin
receptors are in many ways laying the groundwork for a transformational paradigm shift.
Because when we get to a breaking point where we finally cannot live in denial anymore and we have
to accept that this uncomfortable reality is a reality, then what happens is our control networks
turn off, our spirituality networks turn on. And serotonin floods and binds those 5-HT2A
receptors, the role of which is to fundamentally increase neuronal plasticity.
So we go back to our five-year-old brains and all of a sudden we're in this place of heightened
plasticity where we're open, where we're receptive, we're learning, we're able to make new mental
models of the world. And that's essentially what happened to me at Lucas's bedside,
right? It was my repeated attempts to deny what was happening, to control other people and
situations, to have another baby to replace the child I had lost only led me to a worse place.
And then all of a sudden it was this recognition, oh, this is... model is incorrect, right?
There was a flooding of serotonin, of endogenous opioids, our analgesic, of oxytocin,
our sort of merging, connecting neurotransmitter. And then all of a sudden I was in this place of
heightened plasticity where I could see and feel and learn anew. We literally are reborn in those
moments. Amazing. That's incredible language, right? Yeah. And is it?
at least in your experience, it stayed. It doesn't go right back to what it was before.
It sounds like it is semi, I don't want to use the word permanent, but it is a structural change.
I mean, for me, it was definitely a structural change that persisted for decades,
for decades. But of course, it was also reinforced by living differently, living a surrendered
life, getting repeated, let's say, messages from God or repeated experiences that reinforced that
this God model of the world was a good model, was a functional model,
was a better model than the model that I used before. And you stayed. engaged with that process,
like the good scientist you are, you continue to observe and experiment. And daily practice,
daily practice, you know, through prayer and meditation, contemplation, asking for help, asking for
help, guide me, show me the way. And of course, when we do that, when we humble ourselves in that
way, it also reorients us on gratitude because then when things go right.
It's almost like a surprise. And even little things go right. And it's like, oh, thank you. Thank
you for making that person show up at exactly the same time that I showed up. What a coincidence.
And that really worked out. So it's like you said, the sky is blue or the leaves are greener.
You're seeing it through a different filter of gratitude and amazement for all the things that can
go right instead of this kind of persecutory, like, oh, look what happened and didn't go right for
me today. Yeah. I do want to touch on before we close, I want to be mindful of your time,
but I just thought this whole chapter was fascinating because it gets at our personal relationships
and you've touched on this, but love by letting people have their own experience and that somehow
in this surrender, it's also part of it is allowing someone else.
to have their disappointment, have their pain, have their anger, or maybe even make a choice we
wouldn't make. Again, you're so clear to say this is not being passive. This is not being helpless.
I tell my moms, especially of young adult kids, when you let them make a choice you don't like,
you're not saying I don't care. You're not hoping for opportunities to speak wisdom in when there's
time that might surface, but you are participating with something bigger than yourself. is trying
to control. Talk to us a little bit about what this looks like and how surrender is not
indifference, right?
It's actually love. Just love to hear your thoughts on that.
It's so powerful. Well, I mean, I think... just going to come in and say I think especially women
struggle with this, which was called codependent sort of tying our well-being to the well-being
of others, our children, our spouse. And then it becomes a very subtle form of control or
manipulation because then we need them to be a certain way, i.e. happy, or have certain types of
experiences in order for us to feel okay. And it becomes this loop where we're constantly
monitoring and checking in, looking for reassurance. When we get it, we feel better for like a
nanosecond, and then we're right back to kind of... And I can tell you, guaranteed,
family members will... They can feel this. They can feel the weight of our need to control their
experience and the way that we're cueing off of them to make ourselves feel better.
And it's an incredible burden and it will drive our loved ones away. And trust me, I talk in there
about how I read my daughter's diary when I thought she was hiding something from me, which she
was. My reading her diary didn't make our relationship any better. It made it worse. The point
being this kind of like this codependent, intrusive manipulation, it's death. It's the death now
for our relationships. But when we surrender and we trust that a power greater than ourselves is
taking care of us, we can also trust that it is taking care of the people that we love,
right? And with that, it just comes a release. And here's the great paradox.
When we let people go and have their own unfolding experience. Guess what?
They experience us as more loving. They want to be with us. They want to confide in us.
We're not like this dysregulated mess that needs them to be perfect for us to be okay. It's
incredible. It's an incredible book. The book is called Radical Surrender, Letting Go in a World
Addicted to Control. I just... be more grateful to have had this time with you to have benefited
from your wisdom for so long, but to actually get to hear from you. And and is there any any
particular I know the book comes out, but is there any particular anything else you'd like to share
about the book before we before we wind down and just what what's on your anything else that's on
your heart? I'd love to give you a chance to share. I just want to say thank you for having me.
This has been really nice for me to have this conversation with you. As I told you,
I'm surrounded, you know, I live in a world where I can't often have these types of conversations.
So it's, except of course with my patients, you know, in their journeys, talking about their
spiritual practices. But this has been really a joy for me. So thank you. We'd love you anytime.
I try to have all different kinds of experts, not necessarily experts. And I will tell you
anecdotally to your point, oftentimes I'll have someone on to talk about mindfulness and then they
tell, oh, no, I practice contemplative prayer, you know, that spirituality because this is a faith.
And I can, from my side of things, sometimes, you know, people are like, why do you not only have
explicitly, you know, Christian theological? And I'm like, because this is all wisdom. Right,
right. have so much to learn. And I think I've learned so much just from you,
not just about life and reality, but about honestly practicing.
a healthier version of not trying to control God just because I, you know what I mean? And this
book is just powerful. So I just want to commend it to the listener that there's so much wisdom in
this book and good science to help us understand it, but just grateful for you and all your work.
And we just send you with our best wishes. Oh, thank you. Thank you so much.
Thank you for joining me for this week's episode of The Best of You. It would mean so much if you
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