What you let go of
Loss of Control
The psychology of surrender. What happens inside you when you stop making decisions – and why your body has spent years searching for exactly this.
Control is not a tool. It is a metabolism. It is the mode in which your nervous system spends most of its time: checking, planning, deciding, correcting, checking, planning, deciding, correcting. Thousands of times a day. You call it thinking. It is work – and it never stops.
If you are used to being in control, you have never felt the weight of this work, because it has never been lifted. Like the bird that does not know the weight of its feathers, because it has never been without them. You do not know how heavy you are until you experience something that relieves you of that weight for an hour.
Giving up control does not mean becoming weak. It means ceasing, for a moment, to be the one who carries everything.
No one can do this alone. You cannot relieve yourself of control. Try it – through meditation, through alcohol, through drugs, through sport – and you run up against the limits of your own apparatus. Your brain cannot outwit itself. It needs a counterpart.
That counterpart must have certain qualities. It must be more present than you. It must be the cleverer one in the game it plays. It must not need you – otherwise, in that very moment, you are back to being the one who provides. And it must be willing to carry the responsibility for what happens when you let go.
That is my function.
I.
Refusal
“I don’t need this.”
You do not come to this place without first having rejected it for months. Perhaps you found this page six months ago, closed it, did not think about it for two weeks, opened it again, closed it again. That is healthy. Your system knows that what waits here will cost you your architecture. It resists. It has to resist – otherwise it would not be your system.
Refusal is the first phase. It is not the weakest. It is the most truthful. Anyone who has not been through it is not coming for the right reasons.
II.
Negotiation
“Just one small step. Just once.”
Once your system has noticed that refusal no longer holds, you begin to negotiate. With yourself. You ask whether you can keep it small. Whether an hour would be enough to satisfy your curiosity. Whether you could justify it to your wife, your therapist, yourself.
You write emails you never send. You compose sentences and delete them again. You rehearse versions of yourself that you might present there. You build a mask to walk into the first room where you are meant to wear none. That is the irony of it – but it has to be this way. No one arrives here naked.
III.
Exhaustion
“I can’t go on.”
At some point, even negotiation exhausts itself. You understand that you can no longer win the game you are playing against yourself. You stop looking for arguments. You stop checking yourself – whether you are worthy enough, whether it fits your self-image, whether you could defend it if anyone asked.
This phase feels like resignation. It is not. It is maturity. It is the first moment you stop fighting yourself. A man who has reached this point no longer comes out of curiosity. He comes out of insight. And that is the one reason it truly works.
IV.
Surrender
“I am held.”
The actual surrender is a bodily moment. It does not happen in the head. It happens in a breath out that goes deeper than any you have taken in weeks. It happens when your neck softens for the first time, when your shoulders drop, when your hands stop clenching into fists without your noticing.
You will feel it when it happens. You will have no words for it. Some men begin to laugh quietly – a laugh that is more relief than mirth. Others weep. Others fall silent, as if they had lost a language they never really needed.
What you feel now is not weakness. It is respite. For the first time in years.
V.
Liberation
“I am no longer myself – and it is good.”
The fifth phase is what the literature calls subspace. It does not come in every session. It almost never comes the first time. It comes when your system has practised surrender so often that it trusts it.
In this phase, something in you that you call ‘I’ dissolves. You are not gone. You are very much present. But the inner commentator who has talked to you your whole life, who judges you, plans, corrects, observes – that commentator falls silent. For the first time since your earliest childhood.
What happens in this silence, you cannot describe. It is not happiness. It is peace. It is the confirmation that there is a state beyond your ego, and that this state can be reached. Once you have felt it, everything changes. Even your life out there.
The Anatomy
Subspace is not an esoteric concept. It is a neurochemically well-defined state, described in increasing detail by BDSM research over the past two decades. Four substances are released in a sequence you never reach otherwise:
Adrenaline
Sharpness. The alertness of an animal in the moment of danger.
Endorphins
The body’s own morphine. Warmth flowing through you.
Dopamine
Anticipation. Reward. The trail towards the next touch.
Oxytocin
Bonding. Trust. What otherwise only mothers and lovers feel.
Together, this mixture acts on a region of your brain called the Default Mode Network. It is the network that constructs your identity without pause – who you are, how others see you, what you must do next. In subspace, this network partly goes quiet. What remains is sensation without judgement. Being without commentary.
Meditators reach this state after decades of practice. Psilocybin triggers it pharmacologically. Some people at the end of their lives describe it when they say they have let go of everything. You reach it here, in an hour, because under safe conditions your body learns what lies beyond the ego.
What remains after the loss
You will return from this experience with something you cannot have out there: the knowledge that the way you usually function is just one mode among others. That there is another state, that this state can be reached, and that you can come back at any time.
This knowledge changes you in your ordinary life as well. You will be more relaxed without becoming any less effective. You will make decisions more clearly, because the part of your mind that otherwise talks everything to death has learned to be still for a moment. You will be less reactive – to emails, to conflicts, to the small humiliations that everyday life serves up day after day. None of it hits you the way it used to, because you know that the world out there is not all there is.
Loss of control is not weakness. It is a memory of a state in which you did not yet have to carry everything.
Anyone who knows this state lives differently. Not freer in the naive sense. Freer in the precise sense: because he knows there is a choice. Because he knows that control is a tool, not a destiny.
— Alexa