Letting go heals: why surrender keeps showing up in therapy, psychedelics and prayer

The Short Version

Four researchers who work in very different corners of the mind keep landing on the same word. Psychedelic researcher Matthew Johnson says people who try to hang on during a psilocybin session are more likely to have a bad trip, and he links the lasting benefit to a loosened, changed sense of self [2]. Attachment researcher Allan Schore says a therapist cannot reach a patient's emotional brain without a shift he calls "surrender," which cannot be forced [3]. Neuroscientist Andrew Newberg found surrender to be one of the five elements nearly everyone reports in a spiritual experience, and his scans show the brain's effortful frontal regions going quiet at that moment [4]. Psychiatrist Nolan Williams ties "letting go" to how exposure therapy dissolves fear, and describes a depressed brain in which the alarm system has taken over from the brain's "governor" [1]. None of them treats letting go as giving up. In each account it comes after preparation, practice or a safe relationship, which suggests it is a capacity people can build.

Table of contents

What They Said

Matthew Johnson: in a psilocybin session, holding on is the problem

Dr. Matthew Johnson, who at the time of recording was a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins and helped lead one of the world's leading centers for psychedelic research, gives the most detailed account of what letting go looks like in practice [2].

The idea comes up when Andrew Huberman describes the core of the psychedelic session as expanding a narrow perceptual "bubble (a sensation, an emotion, a memory, even a pen) without fear of where it leads [2]. In Huberman's words: The letting go of control, it seems to me, could be sort of the expansion of one perceptual bubble to the point where you're not actually worried that that perceptual bubble is going to pop or that meaning you're not worried about what people think of you." [2] Johnson agrees, and adds a clinical observation: people who try to hang on are more likely to have a bad trip, and eyeshades help turn attention inward [2].

Johnson is candid that this rests on clinical observation rather than brain imaging. "There's a lot going on here in the black box in terms of the operant behavior of how you are, you know, within yourself choosing to handle like letting go," he says, and he looks forward to a day when researchers can watch it happen: "Ah, there they are surrendering to the psycholic experience. Here they are trying to hold on, but we're not there yet." [2] Still, he concludes that "through clinical observation, seems pretty clear that something like that is going on." [2]

He gives a telling contrast. Smoked DMT, he suggests, is so extraordinary partly because it removes the choice altogether: "there's no ability to hold on to the self while you're in the kind of peak phase." [2] With psilocybin there is more room to resist, which is why the attitude a person brings matters so much.

Why would surrender heal? Johnson's leading answer is about the self. Under psilocybin, the habituation that normally lets us ignore the everyday world falls away, so someone might find their own hand breathtaking [2]. He describes psychedelics as loosening the brain's learned predictions; we are prediction machines, and "the self is the biggest model," including labels like smoker or failure [2]. His best speculation is that "the common denominator are persisting changes in self-representation." [2] He credits the philosopher Chris Letheby with this line of thought: Letheby's "conclusion is that that changes in self representation may be the commonality," and that this "could go along with plant spirits and the Buddha and chakras and whatever your model, you know, system in Jesus, all of that, but it could also be completely devoid of any supernatural and religious." [2] That remark matters for this article: Johnson explicitly allows that the same change can be described in spiritual language or in purely naturalistic terms.

His example is a smoker in one of his studies who said it felt like he could simply decide not to smoke, like flicking a switch [2]. Johnson calls these "duh experiences": people realize, with real force, something they had told themselves a million times [2]. Huberman builds on it, arguing that neural networks don't change in response to language or affirmations; "They change in response to experience," given the right neuromodulators [2]. He also stresses that plasticity is a process, not an event, and may unfold long after the trigger [2].

Johnson is just as clear that surrender happens inside a structure. Participants are screened over a couple of days to exclude psychotic and bipolar disorders, then get "anywhere from four to eight hours of preparation, getting to know the people who are going to be the guides or the therapist in the room." [2] He describes drugs as "uppers, downers, and all arounders," with psychedelics as all-arounders, so the team lays out everything that might happen [2]. On the day, participants wear eyeshades and lie on a couch, and every emotional response is welcome, even crying hysterically; people with recreational experience sometimes have to unlearn the social rule of holding it together [2]. One participant, overwhelmed by her own heartbeat, asked, "tell me again, I can't die." [2] That is what letting go with support looks like: the fear is spoken, answered and moved through.

Letting go also has limits. Even in Hopkins' carefully prepared setting at around 30 milligrams, "about a third of people will say, essentially at some point they have a bad trip," though they may have one of the most beautiful experiences of their life minutes later [2]. Outside a protected setting, panic can turn deadly; Johnson keeps a growing file of cases, including an 18-year-old in Oregon who took a large dose, ended up disoriented in a neighbor's house and was killed by police [2]. And after the session he counsels restraint, not impulsiveness: avoid big decisions like ending a relationship or quitting a job and "sit on that two weeks." [2]

He also suggests the framework, not just the molecule, carries the effect. Esketamine (Spravato), given at low doses without psychedelic therapy, has antidepressant effects that last about a week, while older Russian work using high-dose ketamine as a psychedelic therapy, with preparation and discussion, found high success rates for heroin and alcohol addiction [2]. "We're seeing effects, you know, a year or more later with psilocybin and some of the classic psychedotes," Johnson says. "That could be a pharmacological difference or it could be that they get a lot more mileage out of ketamine if they treated it like psychedelic therapy." [2]

Nolan Williams: letting go as exposure, and a brain where the alarm has taken over

Dr. Nolan Williams, the Stanford psychiatrist and neurologist whose Brain Stimulation Lab develops treatments for severe depression and trauma, speaks about letting go more briefly, but his wider account of depression gives the idea a neural shape [1].

The direct link comes when Huberman raises Matthew Johnson's observation that "letting go" matters during psilocybin sessions [1]. Williams connects it to exposure and response prevention, a standard treatment for OCD [1]. He tells how he once left a patient's car lights on for an hour to show the battery would be fine, after which the fear vanished [1]. The lesson is that the fear dissolves only when the person stops performing the controlling behavior and lets the feared outcome fail to happen. Huberman then shares his own lifelong knock-on-wood compulsion, and Williams reassures him that normal isn't zero on psychiatric scales; a habit becomes a disorder only when it seriously impairs functioning [1].

Williams also explains why the brain holds on to unhelpful rules in the first place. Stress eating once prepared us for famine, and a veteran diving behind a car at a loud noise in San Francisco would be adaptive on a battlefield [1]. Psychedelics, he suggests, may open a highly plastic state in which memories can be recalled and reconsolidated differently [1]. In his ibogaine study of former Navy SEALs, Army Rangers and other special operators, early reports are dramatic, and many veterans describe finally forgiving themselves for moral injuries [1]. With eyes closed, ibogaine users re-experience earlier life memories with detached empathy for themselves and others, and the drug has been described as "10 years of psychotherapy and a night." [1] He is equally firm that it is "in no way a recreational substance," and that it carries cardiac risk reduced by screening with an electrocardiogram [1].

His circuit work adds a second angle on control. The left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex acts as a "governor of the brain [1]. In healthy people it activates just before the cingulate, a conflict detector that is overactive in depression; in depressed patients, the cingulate leads [1]. Huberman likens this to a game in which the players have started telling the coach what to do [1]. Williams also describes a volitional threshold": as depression deepens, thoughts become semi-voluntary and harder to control, and at the extreme, in catatonia, people get stuck [1]. For mild depression, behavioral tools like meditation and exercise work well, but past that threshold, effort alone stops working [1].

This matters for anyone who has been told to try harder. Patients who had been told they weren't trying hard enough in therapy often report that, after rapid TMS, they could suddenly understand their therapy books [1]. Several who reached remission early in the five-day protocol described sitting at the beach, fully present, in a way they had only read about in mindfulness books [1]. Williams's research also found that inhibiting one cognitive-control area of the left prefrontal cortex, the one involved in the Stroop task, increased people's hypnotizability, a hint that turning down effortful control can open a more receptive state [1].

Williams is the most cautious voice here about crediting the experience itself. Ketamine's antidepressant effect correlates with how much dissociation people feel, which he calls "necessary but not sufficient." [1] When he gave the same patients ketamine with the opioid blocker naltrexone, the antidepressant effect was dramatically blocked while the dissociative experience was identical [1]. That challenged the popular idea that the "trip" alone is what heals [1]. His broader view is that ketamine, psilocybin and his SAINT protocol all change the same connections, between the subgenual cingulate and the default mode network, and that depression is a recalibratable circuit rather than a permanent chemical deficit [1].

Allan Schore: the therapist has to surrender first

Dr. Allan Schore, a psychoanalyst, psychotherapist and neuroscientist at UCLA, brings surrender into the therapy room, and makes the surprising point that it is the therapist who must surrender [3].

Schore's framework is that the right hemisphere, which dominates brain growth from the last trimester of pregnancy through the second and third years of life, is essentially the unconscious mind, and it is shaped by moment-to-moment emotional exchanges with a caregiver [3]. "Attachment is not psychological, it's psychobiological," he says, meaning it regulates the autonomic nervous system and the limbic system, not just thoughts [3]. Those early patterns replay under stress, in romance and in therapy [3].

So to reach a patient's attachment patterns, a therapist has to listen "beneath the words," tracking shifts in arousal in their own body [3]. Schore explains how that is done: "for the therapist to be able to get to the attachment dynamics, which are right, laterally, the therapist has got to switch out of the left into the right. And there's a term for that. The term for that is surrender. Surrender. You cannot consciously, purposely put yourself into the right." [3] This is the clearest statement in any of the four sources that the healing state cannot be reached by deliberate control.

What follows is synchrony. The therapist first feels what the patient is feeling (through the right insula), which may differ from what the patient reports, then implicitly slows or lifts voice, face and gesture to bring the patient's state down or up together [3]. "Face voice gesture. You'll see it on my face. You'll see it in the tone of my voice. You'll see it in my gestures," he says, and "at the end of the first session, the patient may say, I don't know why, but I'm feeling better." [3]

Schore's mechanism of change is not technique: "the key to making changes in the patient is not what you say to the patient or what you do to the patient. It's how to be with the patient." [3] He distinguishes emotional empathy (right brain, feeling the same thing together) from cognitive empathy (left-brain understanding), which he says doesn't produce change [3]. He insists that "the major change mechanism in psychotherapy now is not insight," but emotionally laden connection [3], and he pushes back on popular talk of reparenting ourselves: "Too much is on a conscious level there. If you really want to make these changes in a personality, they have to be changes in the right brain." [3]

He also turns the idea into a critique of self-reliance. Schore argues there has been too much emphasis on autoregulation and not enough on interactive regulation [3]. The avoidant attachment style dismisses the need for others and relies almost entirely on autoregulation, while the disorganized style, under stress, can neither self-regulate nor seek help and shuts down through dissociation [3]. Rewiring without a therapist is possible, "No, it's not impossible," but "The real key to changing a right brain is finding people you can be close with," people you can be open and vulnerable with and show your shortcomings to [3]. He highlights "heightened affective moments," brief stretches, sometimes only 50 or 60 seconds, when two people are synchronized and sharing emotion; these get written into memory and drive change far more than intellectual understanding [3].

Letting go, for Schore, also means letting emotions run their course. He argues that "one of the major fallacies is that negative emotions are bad and positive emotions are good"; all emotions are adaptive, and he lets disappointments move through him fully [3]. "The real key to a secure attachment is the ability to integrate both positive and negative emotions," he says [3]. And he models the same release in how he learns: during a ten-year period of self-study he returned to the piano to know something "in my fingers rather than in logic," and "decided never to memorize anything," focusing on deep understanding [3].

Asked about MDMA-assisted therapy, which the FDA recently declined to approve, Schore says the relationship remains the key, and such compounds might work best with therapists trained in right brain dynamics [3].

Andrew Newberg: surrender as one of five universal elements

Dr. Andrew Newberg, director of research for integrative health at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital and a pioneer of "neurotheology," has scanned the brains of people praying, meditating and speaking in tongues for about 30 years [4]. His team also surveyed a couple of thousand people about their spiritual experiences in their own words [4]. From those narratives, they found five elements almost everyone describes: unity, intensity, clarity, surrender and transformation [4].

His description of surrender closely echoes Johnson's and Schore's: "whether a person is trying to get to this experience through, you know, years of meditation or prayer or going to church or something like that, whether it happens to them spontaneously, whatever is going on, at some point, our purposefulness kind of gets taken over. The experience kind of pulls us along and we let go, surrender, you know, people use different terms, but it is this feeling of surrender." [4] He compares it to sexuality, where "at some point, we're just going along for the ride." [4]

The brain scans give this a visible signature. When people concentrate on a prayer or meditation, their frontal lobes become more active, "But when the person gets to those profound experiences, the frontal lobe shuts down," he says [4]. At the same time the parietal lobe, which normally creates our spatial sense of self, decreases its activity: "We lose our sense of self. And we don't see the boundary between ourselves and something that's out there in the world." [4] The limbic system lights up during intense joy or awe and writes the moment into memory, which is why such experiences don't just feel real but reshape beliefs [4].

The fifth element, transformation, follows. People describe "a sense of realness and a sense of, I am now a different person," and about 90 to 95% of survey respondents said the experience changed them for the better, affecting relationships, work, beliefs and even their fear of death [4]. A study of people on an intense retreat based on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius found that afterward their brains were more sensitive to dopamine and serotonin, which Newberg and Mel Robbins connect to the afterglow people feel after a retreat, a moving service or a concert [4]. He notes that antidepressant drugs also work on the serotonin system [4].

Newberg insists this is not reserved for mystics. "We don't have a separate brain that becomes spirit," he says, so a sunrise, a walk in the woods, a Mozart concerto or holding a child sit on the same continuum as mystical experiences [4]. His favorite example is a police officer directing traffic, dancing, waving his arms and blowing his whistle in rhythms: "that's an enlightened being." [4] It's not what you do but how you engage it [4].

He also speaks to the opposite of letting go: being stuck. Using the phrase "the neurons that fire together, wire together," he explains that repetition builds skills but can also close us off to other options, and breaking out takes energy that is hard to find when you're stuck [4]. His prescription is deliberate: "the goal is then to find a new ritual, to find a new practice, a new way of doing things." [4] He is humble about the science: "the questions are more than the answers," and "There is never a one-size-fits-all." [4]

Where They Agree, and Where They Don't

Agreement: the turning point is a release of effortful control

All four describe a moment when deliberate, controlling effort gives way. Johnson sees it clinically in people who surrender versus those who try to hold on [2]. Schore says the therapist "cannot consciously, purposely" enter the right-brain state and must surrender instead [3]. Newberg sees purposefulness "taken over" and the frontal lobes quiet at the peak [4]. Williams describes fear dissolving once the controlling behavior stops, as with the car battery, and a depressed brain in which effortful control has lost its lead [1].

Agreement: the change is in the self, not just in ideas

Johnson's "changes in self-representation" [2], Newberg's "I am now a different person" [4], Schore's insistence that change must happen in the right brain, not through insight [3], and Williams's veterans forgiving themselves for moral injuries [1] all point to a shift in how people experience themselves. Johnson and Huberman say networks change "in response to experience," not affirmations [2]; Schore says the key is "not insight" [3]. They agree that knowing something is not the same as having let it go.

Agreement: surrender needs a container

No one recommends letting go in a vacuum. Johnson's model surrounds the session with screening, four to eight hours of preparation, guides and integration [2]. Schore's surrender happens inside a therapeutic relationship built on "safety and trusted" [3]. Williams says psychedelics should be used only under strict medical supervision: "these drugs can't be recreational drugs." [1] Newberg describes surrender as often arriving after years of practice or ritual [4].

Disagreement: is the surrender experience itself what heals?

Here the sources pull in different directions. Johnson leans toward the experience mattering: people who hold on do worse, and a psychedelic therapy framework may be what gives psilocybin effects "a year or more later" [2]. Newberg's respondents overwhelmingly credit the experience with transforming them [4].

Williams is more skeptical of giving the subjective experience the credit. His naltrexone study showed ketamine's dissociation was identical while its antidepressant effect was blocked, so the experience was "necessary but not sufficient." [1] He also points out that TMS lifts depression with no psychedelic experience at all, and that imaging shows ketamine, psilocybin and SAINT change the same connections [1]. From his vantage point, surrender may be one route to a circuit change that can also be reached by other routes. Both views can hold: Johnson is describing what predicts a good session, and Williams is asking what is strictly required for the biology to shift.

Disagreement: whose surrender?

Johnson and Newberg describe the person in the experience letting go [2][4]. Schore puts the emphasis on the therapist, whose own shift into the right brain makes synchrony possible, and on the relationship, not solitary practice [3]. He is critical of too much emphasis on autoregulation [3], while Newberg's advice centers on individual practices and rituals, though he also describes brains resonating in good conversations and close relationships [4]. Schore even questions whether a drug can shortcut this; for MDMA, the relationship remains the key. [3]

Disagreement: spiritual or natural?

Newberg does not claim people who feel oneness are right or wrong about reality [4]. Johnson, via Letheby, suggests the benefit can be explained naturalistically, with or without spiritual interpretation [2]. Schore lists spirituality among right-brain capacities alongside love and compassion [3]. None of them requires belief for the pattern to hold.

Why It Works

The sources offer several mechanisms, at different levels.

Loosening the brain's predictions. Johnson describes perception as top-down: we are prediction machines, and psychedelics loosen learned predictions so their violation isn't filtered out [2]. Because "the self is the biggest model," loosening it can let labels like smoker or failure change [2]. Holding on keeps the old model in place; letting go lets it update.

Quieting the effortful brain and the boundary of the self. Newberg's scans show frontal lobes more active during concentrated prayer and then shutting down at the profound moment, alongside a parietal decrease that dissolves the boundary between self and world [4]. On psilocybin, imaging by David Nutt and Robin Carhart-Harris found overall brain activity decreases while global connectivity increases [1]. And in Williams's work, inhibiting a cognitive-control region increased hypnotizability [1].

Rebalancing control rather than adding more. Williams's depressed brain is not under-controlled in the usual sense: the conflict-detecting cingulate leads and the prefrontal governor follows, and the more treatment flips that timing back, the greater the antidepressant effect [1]. Past the "volitional threshold," trying harder no longer works [1]. That helps explain why patients told to try harder could finally use their therapy books after treatment [1].

Letting the fear fail. Exposure and response prevention works by dropping the controlling behavior and letting the feared outcome not happen, as with the car battery [1]. Williams adds that psychedelics may open a plastic state in which memories are reconsolidated differently [1], and Johnson speculates that MDMA's reduced amygdala reactivity may let people reprocess trauma without a fight-or-flight response [2].

Synchrony between two nervous systems. Schore's mechanism is interpersonal synchrony, being in the same state at the same time, which over time builds new connections between the orbitofrontal cortex and the cingulate, insula and amygdala [3]. Hyperscanning shows right temporoparietal junctions synchronizing between therapist and patient [3]. The switch between hemispheres can happen in about a hundred milliseconds, and the right brain uses wide, evenly suspended attention rather than narrow focus [3].

Memory and neurochemistry that lock in the change. The limbic system writes emotionally intense moments into memory [4], and Schore's heightened affective moments are stored as images in autobiographical memory [3]. After an intense Ignatian retreat, brains were more sensitive to dopamine and serotonin [4]. Williams adds that spaced stimulation and ketamine both enlarge dendritic spines, and that the opioid system appears to play a role in mood [1].

Where It Applies, and Where It Doesn't

It applies inside a safe structure. Every example of healthy surrender in these sources has scaffolding: a screened and prepared psilocybin participant with guides [2], a patient with a trusted therapist [3], a practitioner with a ritual or tradition [4], a patient under medical supervision [1].

It doesn't apply to people prone to psychosis or mania, when drugs are involved. Johnson names psychotic disorders and bipolar mania, or a strong predisposition to them, as a major risk, and trials exclude even people with a close relative with these disorders [2]. Williams notes high-THC cannabis has caused psychosis [1].

It doesn't mean surrendering judgment. Johnson's warning against big decisions for two weeks after a session [2], and his cases of people hurt while disoriented [2], show that letting go during a guided experience is not the same as acting on every impulse afterward. Under psilocybin people shouldn't navigate city streets [2].

It isn't the whole story for severe illness. Williams's "volitional threshold" implies that for severe depression, no attitude shift may be enough on its own; he describes medical tools such as SAINT, which brought full remission within one to five days for 60 to 90% of patients depending on the study [1], and triple chronotherapy, which must be done under supervision [1]. For mild depression, meditation and exercise work well [1].

It isn't only for dramatic experiences. Newberg places a hike, a service or holding a grandchild on the same continuum as mystical states [4], and Schore sees synchrony in music, dogs and face-to-face conversation [3].

Its limits are acknowledged. Johnson says imaging can't yet show surrender in real time [2]. Newberg says there is no specific study on feeling stuck [4] and no scan that shows enlightenment [4]. Williams calls the psychedelic experience necessary but not sufficient for ketamine [1]. The pattern is striking, but it is a convergence of observations, not a proven single mechanism.

If you are dealing with depression, trauma, compulsions or thinking about any psychedelic, talk to a qualified medical or mental health professional first; all four experts stress screening, supervision or a trained guide.

What To Do With It

1. Prepare before you let go. Johnson's participants spend four to eight hours preparing and hearing the full range of what might happen [2]. Whatever the practice, know what you might feel, including fear, before you start, so it doesn't make you grab for control.

2. When something rises, let it move through instead of holding it together. Johnson's team welcomes every emotional response, even crying hysterically [2], and Schore lets disappointments move through him fully, rejecting the idea that negative emotions are bad [3].

3. Let the feared outcome fail to happen. Williams's car-battery lesson shows how dropping a controlling ritual lets the fear dissolve [1]. For real compulsions, do this with a clinician trained in exposure and response prevention [1].

4. Practice with structure, then let the structure fall away. Newberg's surrender often comes after concentrated prayer or meditation, when the frontal lobes quiet [4]. Pick a practice, show up for it, and don't force the peak.

5. Seek out close, synchronized connection. Schore's key is "finding people you can be close with," being vulnerable and showing your shortcomings [3]. Favor face to face over text, and notice those 50 to 60 second moments of shared emotion [3].

6. Widen your attention. Schore describes switching from narrow, word-by-word focus to wide-ranging attention that takes in the outside world and your own body [3]. Huberman widens his gaze during interviews and feels the conversation shift [3].

7. Build new rituals when you feel stuck. Newberg's advice is to "find a new ritual, to find a new practice, a new way of doing things," with some idea of where you want to go [4]. Look back to moments when you felt unity, clarity or surrender for clues [4].

8. Cultivate the small experiences. Nature, music, novelty, exercise and sleep feed the right brain [3], and a sunrise or a walk sits on the same continuum as mystical states [4].

9. Integrate, and wait before big decisions. After any intense experience, write it down, talk it through and, as Johnson advises, "sit on that two weeks" before life-changing moves [2].

10. If trying harder isn't working, get help. Williams's patients were told they weren't trying hard enough, when their brains had passed a "volitional threshold" [1]. Needing medical treatment is not a failure of will. Treatment helped those patients understand their therapy books again [1].

Sources

1. Dr Nolan Williams Psychedelics Neurostimulation For Brain Rewiring · Huberman Lab
2. Dr. Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics for Treating Mental Disorders · Huberman Lab
3. Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain · Huberman Lab
4. The Science of Spiritual Experiences: How to Rewire Your Brain for More Happiness & Purpose · The Mel Robbins Podcast