The oak dining table gleamed in the late afternoon light that streamed through my apartment windows. I ran my palm over its polished surface, feeling the grain beneath my fingers. This table had held so many meals, so many conversations, so many meaningful moments of my adult life.

A young couple stood awkwardly in my living room, clearly uncomfortable with my emotional goodbye to the dining set. “It’s perfect,” the woman said, her eyes bright. “We’ve been eating on a card table since we got married. Our family is growing, and—”

“It’s yours,” I said, cutting her off with a smile. “I just have one request.”

They looked at me apprehensively.

“Cherish the memories you make around it.”

Relief softened their faces. The husband nodded solemnly. “We will.”

I had accumulated beautiful furnishings for my apartment piece by piece over the years, each representing a triumph over the poverty I had grown up in. This dining set, the artwork on my walls, the carefully chosen lamps and vases were all symbols that I had “made it.”

Now I was giving them all away. I had infused each piece with all the love I could muster as I cleaned and polished it for the last time. I wanted nothing negative to travel with these objects to their new homes.

One by one, my possessions departed—a couch to a family whose home had been damaged in a flood, bookshelves to a teacher setting up her first classroom, dishes to a young man leaving an abusive home. Each time an item left, I felt lighter.

I had no job waiting for me in New Mexico, where the Great Silver Wolf (a trusted guide for as long as I can remember) had told me in a vision to go and find my spiritual teacher. No apartment. No contacts. Just a calling I couldn’t ignore and a trust that somehow this leap into the unknown was exactly what I needed.

I stood in my empty apartment for the last time, surveying all that remained—three cardboard boxes and a suitcase waiting to be packed into the back seat of my car. And I asked myself for the umpteenth time, “What am I doing?” Was I throwing away everything I had worked for based on a dream?

When I closed the door behind me for the last time, the click of the lock was surprisingly loud. Final.

Watching my old life disappear in the rearview mirror, I felt a giddying sense of freedom wash over me. I had no idea what was coming next, and that was okay! For the first time in my adult life, I had no set plans. I had no way to predict what the Universe had in store for me, and I wasn’t going to try to control it. I was determined not to put limits on the goodness that was coming to me. I drove in silence for four days, the highway disappearing beneath my tires. Crossing into New Mexico on that final day, I asked myself, “Who do you want to be when you get there?”

I heard myself say, “I want to be a beautiful, healing light to all I come in contact with.”

The illusion of control

Most of us spend our lives in a perpetual tug-of-war with reality. We strain and struggle to bend circumstances to our will, convinced that if we just try hard enough, plan carefully enough, or work long enough, we can shape the world to match our vision. The patriarchy is a belief system, a limiting view of the world that works by design to keep us, men as well as women, isolated and alienated, both from our own wisdom and from one another. It encourages this illusion, teaching us that control is not only possible but necessary—that without it, we’re at the mercy of hostile forces that will destroy us.

This belief in our ability to control outcomes keeps us in a constant state of anxiety, forever vigilant against anything that might disrupt our plans. It’s exhausting!

And then, when things inevitably don’t go as we intend, we blame ourselves for not trying hard enough. Or we blame others for interfering. Either way, suffering follows.

This desperate grip on control that the patriarchy normalizes stems from several sources, all nurtured by the belief that we must either dominate or be dominated.

The first is fear. We’re taught from childhood that the world is dangerous, resources are scarce, and safety comes only through vigilance and control. This fear-based outlook keeps us small and separate, preventing us from trusting others or the natural unfolding of life.

The second is the myth of independence. The patriarchy glorifies the “self-made” individual who needs nothing and no one. It teaches us that depending on others is weakness, vulnerability is shameful, and true strength means standing alone. This illusion of independence drives us to try to control our circumstances so we never have to ask for help.

The third is an inflated sense of our own knowledge. We believe we know what’s best—for ourselves, for others, for the planet. This certainty blinds us to the wisdom that might emerge from unexpected sources or situations that don’t match our plans.

I see this pattern regularly in my therapy practice. Clients come in determined to “fix” their partners, their children, their own unwanted emotions. They’ve tried every control strategy—arguments, ultimatums, rigid routines, self-help books, strict diets—and still, the world refuses to comply with their vision. They don’t realize that their suffering isn’t caused by the circumstances they’re trying to control but by the attempt itself.

A path beyond this suffering opens when we start to question our attachment to specific outcomes. What if things don’t need to unfold according to our plans? What if something better than what we’ve imagined is trying to emerge?

When couples who come to me for therapy and say they are going to “make their marriage work,” I invite them to feel how the word make lands in their bodies. There is a force in it. It carries a subtle violence that reveals our patriarchal conditioning. That single word make suggests we can control outcomes through sheer determination, as though relationships were machines we could fix with the right tools and enough effort.

When I suggest to these couples that they loosen their grip on the outcome, I often see alarm flash across their faces. One partner might tense up, thinking this means giving up. The other might panic, afraid that without constant effort, everything will fall apart. These reactions make perfect sense when our worldview tells us we’ve got to hold on to what’s important and that letting go means we don’t care. The two biggest fears we grapple with in relationships are the fear of losing the person we love and the fear of losing ourselves in trying to keep them around.

Over time, the anxiety around controlling the outcomes of the situations my clients are so worried about begins to dissolve. Couples learn to create the space that healing requires, whether that means healing together or consciously parting ways. They discover that when they stop trying to force the river to flow in a certain direction, they can finally see which way it naturally wants to go.

Sometimes this allowing of whatever needs to emerge leads to a deeper connection the couple couldn’t access when they were trying so hard to “make it work.” Other times, surrendering control of the outcome means the couple recognize with compassion that their paths need to diverge.

This principle is true outside of our personal relationships too. Is there anywhere in your own life you have been trying to “make” something happen? Perhaps it’s a career goal, a creative project, a personal transformation, or a community initiative. What might shift if you loosened your grip on what you want the outcome to be or how you think it should unfold? What possibilities might emerge if you created space for results you haven’t yet imagined?

Allowing the unexpected to happen introduces a subtle shift in our stance from “making” to “receiving,” and this transforms how we move through the world. Instead of approaching each day with a rigid agenda of what must be accomplished, we bring our intentions and then remain open to what life brings. Instead of evaluating everything through the lens of our preferences and plans, we ask, “What is this moment trying to teach me? What wants to emerge here?”

When I arrived in Raton, New Mexico, recently liberated from nearly all my worldly possessions, I had no connections, no definite plans. Yet doors opened. The salon owner who greeted me with “We’ve been waiting for you,” though I had never called for an appointment. The job offered on the spot. The apartment next to the bed and breakfast that had just been renovated, and the landlords who became friends and mentors whom I still regard as family.

None of these blessings could have been planned for. There were no advertisements for the job or the apartment. They were only possible because I was open to them, because I had created space for the unexpected by letting go of my attachment to how things “should” unfold.

Radical surrender

What I’m talking about here is taking fearless trust in the Universe to a deeper level.

For most of our existence, humans have lived according to what Indigenous scholar Four Arrows Wahinkpe Topa has named the Kinship Worldview. This worldview is a lens we can look through that shows us how we are all related—not just to other humans, but to all life. The Kinship Worldview recognizes that we are part of complex, interconnected systems we can influence but never fully control. It invites us to discern what is truly ours to manage—our own behaviors, choices, and responses—and what we are free to surrender to forces larger than ourselves. It introduces a quality of trust, beyond courage, that runs directly counter to the patriarchy’s foundation of fear. This is radical surrender.

Radical surrender requires a different way of looking at our lives and the world around us—the ability to see what is ours to control and what is not. It requires a certain amount of comfort with the mysterious gray areas of life. Why would we try to control what we admit we can’t fully understand?

Surrender doesn’t mean we become passive or abandon our values and commitments. It means responding with intelligence as well as heart to the reality of each situation. Rivers demonstrate surrender in action by the way they flow around boulders rather than trying to force their way through them. Our role isn’t to control the entire river but to navigate its flow with skill.

When we stop exhausting ourselves by trying to force the current in a different direction, we discover we have the energy and clarity to paddle with purpose, steer around obstacles, and appreciate the journey itself. We can use that energy to respond mindfully to what truly matters in each moment, freeing ourselves from responsibility for the outcome.

The paradox of surrender is that in letting go of what we cannot control—which is most things—we gain access to a different kind of power. Not power-over (the patriarchy’s version, which seeks to dominate and control others) but power-with (the Kinship Worldview’s version, which emerges from collaboration, connection, and alignment with life’s natural intelligence).

The level of trust this requires doesn’t come from naive optimism or the denial of real challenges. It’s grounded in knowing we are held within systems of relationship and meaning that transcend our individual experiences. It comes from learning, again and again, that life is always bringing us gifts we could never have planned for—or even imagined.

Perhaps most importantly, we find that we can take courageous action without knowing exactly how things will turn out. We can fight injustice, create beauty, nurture healing, build community—not because we’re certain of success as the patriarchy defines it, but because these actions align with what we care about and what the world around us needs.

I think of my New Mexico pilgrimage often when working with clients at crossroads in their lives. They ask me, “How can I know if I’m making the right choice? What if I give up what I have, and nothing better comes along?” These questions assume that certainty is both possible and necessary before we act.

What I’ve learned, both personally and professionally, is that certainty is rarely available when we face important decisions. What serves as a better compass is alignment. Which options are better aligned with our values, with the wisdom of our bodies, and with the natural intelligence of life itself? When we feel this alignment, we can step forward without guarantees, trusting that however things work out, we can move freely within whatever reality unfolds.

This essay is an adapted excerpt from Susan L. Herrmann’s book, Breaking Up with the Patriarchy: Decolonizing Our Lives and Returning to Kinship Worldview.