After Restructuring: Letting Go of Control

After the fallout of restructuring, there is another step. No one really prepares you for it. They talk about boundaries like they are the finish line. Set them, hold them, protect your peace, and everything will fall into place. You will feel empowered. You will feel free. Your relationships will magically reorganize around your new, healthier self.

That is a lovely idea; it just was not my experience, because after I set boundaries, after I stood up for myself, after I disrupted every dynamic I had quietly participated in for years, I found myself in a place that felt far less like empowerment and far more like chaos. The instinct in chaos is not surrender, it is control. I became desperate to be understood. That is the truth of it.

I told myself I did not care what people thought. I said it out loud. I repeated it like a mantra. I wore it like armor, but underneath that armor was a woman who still wanted connection. Still wanted to be seen. Still wanted someone, anyone, to look at her and say, “I understand why you did what you did.” I did not get that. So, I went looking for it.

I fought with my ex-husband in ways that were less about resolution and more about validation. I told myself I was standing up for truth, for fairness, for my children. And in many ways, I was, but if I am honest, I was also trying to force him to agree with me, to see me, to acknowledge me, to confirm that I was not the villain in the story I was being cast in. That moment never came, and the more I pushed for it, the more I looked like exactly what I was being accused of being: controlling, judgmental, self-righteous.

There is something deeply humbling about realizing that your attempts to be understood are making you look like the very thing you are trying not to be. It forces a question most of us avoid. Am I trying to be right… or am I trying to be free? At the same time, I was still absorbing the fallout everywhere else. The small gestures that felt like quiet indictments, the distance, the silence, and I would tell myself, “I do not care,” but I did. Of course I did. I am human.

At one point in my life, all I wanted was connection, real connection. Love that felt mutual. Understanding that did not have to be explained over and over again. A sense that I could exist as I was without having to earn my place, and because I wanted it so badly, I tried to force it. I tried to make it happen, to shape it, to control it, and to build it into something tangible that I could finally hold onto and say, “See, it is real.” But connection does not respond well to force. It slips, and the harder you try to hold it in place, the more it reveals what is not actually there.

School changed something in me. Not in a dramatic, overnight way, but in a steady, undeniable one. It forced me to sit with my experiences in a way I had not before. It asked me to examine my own biases, not just in theory, but in practice. It required me to speak about my life, my wounds, my upbringing, and the ways those things had shaped how I saw the world. There were moments when my honesty made people uncomfortable. Some instructors told me to be careful. To pull back. To not share so deeply. Others encouraged it. They saw something in it. Something honest, something necessary, and I began to notice something important.

Even in professional spaces, even in environments that are supposed to value growth and awareness, there are people who prefer you to stay small, not because they are malicious, but because your honesty asks something of them. When you are willing to look at yourself, to speak your truth, to name your experiences without dressing them up to be more acceptable, it disrupts things. It challenges systems. It reveals contradictions, and for some people, that feels threatening. So, they label it: naïve; too much; vulnerable in a way that must mean weak.

What I learned is that it is the opposite. When you surrender to who you actually are, there is very little left for anyone else to use against you, because you are no longer hiding from yourself. When you are not hiding, you are not easily manipulated. Somewhere in the middle of all of this, something shifted. Not loudly. Not in a way that anyone else would have noticed, but in me.

I stopped trying to be better than. I stopped trying to prove that I had the right answers, that I had figured something out that others had not. Instead, I started sitting across the table: not above; not below; across. I began to see that everyone was navigating something. Everyone had wounds, patterns, limitations that shaped how they showed up. And the people who told me to quiet down, to pull back, to not be so direct or honest, were not doing it because I was wrong. They were doing it because of what it stirred in them.

That realization softened something in me. It also strengthened something. I stopped trying to appeal to everyone. Not out of ego, but out of clarity, because once you understand that you are not meant for every space, every person, every dynamic, you stop contorting yourself to fit where you do not belong. You begin to choose, and that is where surrender starts.

Surrender is not giving up. It is letting go of the need to control what cannot be controlled. It is releasing the expectation that others will see you the way you see yourself. It is accepting that you may never receive the apology, the acknowledgment, or the validation you once needed, and deciding to move forward anyway.

I think about a moment with my father often. It was during the time I had created distance from my mother, and before his Alzheimer’s set in. He held a card I had written to her and looked at me with a kind of frustration I could feel before he even spoke.

“I do not understand,” he said. “How you can say she is the best mother in the world in one moment and then turn around and say you cannot be in her life the next?”

He threw the card toward me. I remember standing there, feeling a wave of guilt I did not have the language to respond to, because the truth was complicated, and at that time, I did not know how to explain it. Looking back now, I wish I had said this: that my need for space did not mean I saw her as bad; that my love for her and my hurt could exist at the same time; that distance was not rejection, but an attempt at repair, that I hoped she could take me seriously if I did that for myself, and that it wouldn’t be forever, but I did not say that. I stood there. I cried. And I walked away silently.

Later, I understood something I could not see then. When all you know is dysfunction, dysfunction feels normal. My mother was the best mother I knew, because she was the only mother I knew, and compared to what she had come from, I did feel like I had something better, but better does not always mean healthy, and surviving is not the same as living. I had shifted into wanting something different for us both: mutual understanding; respect; connection that did not require me to disappear, and I did not know how to explain that to people who were still operating within the only system we had ever known. So, I stopped trying.

That was part of my surrender. I stopped correcting every perception. I stopped trying to manage how people saw me. I stopped fighting for a version of the story that made me feel safer. And instead, I made decisions that aligned with what I knew I needed to heal. Even if no one agreed. Even if no one understood. Even if no one ever would.

I surrendered to that possibility. That I might walk this path without validation; without applause; without anyone saying, “You were right,” and then, something happened.

Two years after my mother and I had said things to each other that cut deeper than either of us probably intended, I received a letter. I almost threw it away. Part of me assumed it would be more of the same, but hope won and I opened it, and inside was something simple: an apology. Not perfect. Not detailed. Not everything I had once imagined I would need, but something. A beginning.

At the bottom of the letter, there was a sentence that shifted everything: your father has been diagnosed with quick-onset Alzheimer’s and dementia. I remember falling to my knees in the quiet stillness of the kitchen. Crying in a way that felt like grief and clarity colliding at the same time, because suddenly, the time I thought I had to hold my position, to wait for things to be right, to receive what I needed before I re-engaged…was gone, and in that moment, I felt something I can only describe as a quiet question, not from outside of me, but from within.

Can you let go now? Can you release the expectations? Can you show up differently? Can you stop looking at all the pain others caused, and focus on what is needed from yourself right now? Not because everything had been resolved. Not because the past had been repaired, but because I had. I had already done the work of seeing myself, validating my own pain, understanding my own experience. I had reparented the parts of me that once needed something from others to feel whole, and now, I had a choice: to hold onto what I did not receive with emptiness, avoidance, and pain, or to move forward with what I had built within myself with assured action, conscious decision, compassion, and empathy.

I chose to let go. Not of my truth, but of my expectations that in order to forgive others for their behavior, they had to do something to justify my own. I chose forgiveness, not as a performance, but as a path, and from there, something new began, not a return to what was, because I was wiser now, but a path built on self awareness.  I knew what I needed to do to stay firm with my own needs without allowing resentment to build if others didn’t consider me.

I wouldn’t teach them how to respect me anymore, I would speak up when I was hurt and allow the behavior to shift from the other person if it was meant to be there.  I wouldn’t martyr; I would tell people what I needed so that they didn’t have to read my mind and I wouldn’t explode when they failed to respond to my indirect and passive hints.  I would express when I was disappointed and still allow the situation to exist without collapsing emotionally. I wouldn’t allow others’ behaviors to undo my own progress because I no longer depended on their certainty to make me feel like I was always standing on shaky ground. It became the beginning of something different; something more honest; something that I will share with you next.

If you find yourself in this space, where you have set boundaries but are struggling with what comes after, where you are trying to hold onto your truth while letting go of control, where you are unsure how to move forward without expectation, without resentment, without losing yourself in the process—this is the work, and you do not have to do it alone. If you are ready to explore what surrender looks like in your life, to find your footing in the uncertainty, to hold your boundaries while softening your grip on control and allowing your desires to exist even when others don’t understand them—reach out. Book a Free Strategy Session here, Let’s walk that path together.

Always Shining.

XO Ashley