Letting Go of the Illusion of Control: How Survival Taught Me to Surrender

Trusting God, Releasing Control, and Finding Light in the Hardest Seasons

Wendi Kehn/Hellbloom Haven (Also posted on Substack & Medium)

Jan 04, 2026

Letting Go of the Illusion of Control: How Survival Taught Me to Surrender

I spent most of my life trying to control the uncontrollable.

As a child, I felt everything too deeply. I was constantly scanning the room for emotional shifts, listening for what wasn’t being said. Home didn’t feel emotionally or physically safe, and I learned early that information was dangerous. What I said, what I revealed, what I let slip, it could be used. So I became careful and quiet. I learned how to edit myself depending on who I was around. I worried endlessly about saying the wrong thing, trusting the wrong person, about who might get hurt if something came out.

The planning came later.

I remember watching America’s Most Wanted as a kid and feeling panic settle into my body when they’d say, “They could be anywhere.” I didn’t know then why that fear felt so personal, so immediate, only that it did. I scanned the house, the street, the world, convinced danger was always closer than anyone admitted. I didn’t have language for what I’d already survived, only a nervous system that knew what harm looked like and refused to forget it.

By the time I was a teenager, that fear had turned into strategy. I thought carefully about where I walked, how close I let people get, how to keep pain and dysfunction hidden from view. I learned how to look normal while carrying chaos. I stayed alert because I had learned, firsthand, that harm doesn’t announce itself. It blends in. It waits. And once you’ve been hurt that way as a child, your body never really stops watching for it.

And still, I jumped from one hot frying pan straight into the next.

Over and over again.

When you grow up with so little control over what happens to your body, your safety, and your boundaries, you start grasping for control wherever you can. Control becomes the closest thing to safety you know. That hypervigilance people notice later, the planning, the intuition, and the overthinking, don’t come from nowhere. It comes from having already been violated in ways no child should be, and surviving anyway.

So when I became a parent, I tried to do everything right. I limited sleepovers. I kept people out of our home. I talked to my kids early, gave them language I never had. I paid attention. I stayed alert. I tried to protect them in all the ways I wished someone had protected me.

I had a feeling something was wrong.

I said it out loud. More than once. And no one believed me. There was nothing concrete. Nothing provable. Nothing that met the standard required for action. And slowly, dangerously, I stopped trusting myself, too. I told myself my past was distorting my perception. That I was projecting. That I couldn’t accuse someone without proof.

And then years later, I found out I was right.

Not in the way that brings relief, but In the way that breaks something open and leaves nothing standing. Hearing the testimonies of my children, learning what happened long after the fact, nearly killed me. Knowing harm came to them in a way that mirrored my own history cracked something fundamental inside me. It wasn’t just grief. It was devastation layered with recognition, rage, and unbearable sorrow.

That kind of grief doesn’t stay abstract. It lives in your body.

After that, I no longer felt safe anywhere, not even in my own body. Not in life. Not in love. My body stopped feeling like home and started feeling like evidence. Evidence that I failed. Evidence that I couldn’t be trusted to keep people safe. I didn’t just grieve what happened, I began to believe that my presence itself was dangerous. That somehow, people were harmed simply by being close to me. That loving me, living with me, trusting me came at a cost.

I carried this crushing belief that I was supposed to save them, and that I didn’t. That I should have known how. That if I had been better, smarter, louder, more convincing, more decisive, the outcome would have been different. It wasn’t just grief anymore; it was self-erasure. I began shrinking myself emotionally, pulling back, questioning whether I had the right to take up space in other people’s lives when I felt like everything I touched eventually broke.

There is a particular kind of pain that comes from surviving something as a child, spending your life trying to prevent it from happening again, and still watching it touch the people you love most. Knowing you sensed it. Knowing you tried. Knowing you couldn’t prove it. Knowing you didn’t stop it.

That kind of grief doesn’t stay theoretical. It challenges your identity as a parent, a protector, and as a person who believed vigilance could make the difference.

That was the moment the illusion of control finally shattered.

Because no amount of awareness, intuition, planning, or sacrifice can fully protect us, or our children, from harm. And believing we should be able to nearly destroyed me.

Letting go didn’t mean I stopped caring. It didn’t mean I stopped protecting where I could. It meant I stopped believing that control was the same as safety. It meant surrendering the fantasy that if I just watched closely enough, anticipated well enough, loved fiercely enough, nothing bad would happen.

Survival taught me how to endure.

Surrender is teaching me how to live.

Section 2: When Survival Finally Ran Out

By the time I was thirty‑two, my body and mind were already worn thin.

I had just had my last child, a high‑risk pregnancy that demanded more from me than I had to give. Not long after, I had my gallbladder removed. I was dealing with an abscessed tooth. I was barely coming up for air, finally starting to feel some equilibrium after postpartum, when everything fell apart again.

That’s when I found out about my kids.

There is no way to prepare for that moment. No amount of prior trauma, education, or vigilance cushions the impact. It detonates your life. Suddenly, everything else becomes background noise. Your body keeps moving, but your nervous system is on fire. I spent that year in survival mode, not the kind that looks dramatic, but the kind that is quiet and relentless.

I took my kids to therapy. I showed up to appointments. I listened. I believed them. I dealt with the fallout of family, people questioning, minimizing, doubting. People protecting themselves instead of children. I absorbed the anger, the disbelief, the grief, and the isolation. I did it while caring for a one‑year‑old. I did it without support. I did it while my own body was still healing.

I didn’t fall apart then. I couldn’t afford to.

But survival has a shelf life.

By the end of that year, my system collapsed. I couldn’t hold it together anymore. The cracks that had been forming finally split wide open. My relationship was deteriorating under the weight of everything we hadn’t processed and everything that had changed. Shortly after, I got divorced. It felt like loss stacked on loss, another structure giving way when I had nothing left to brace with.

Life kept throwing curveballs, and this time, I was sinking again into depression, not the kind that comes with despair alone, but the kind that comes from exhaustion. From being strong for too long. From holding everyone else together while quietly disappearing.

That’s when I finally went to therapy for me.

In one session, my therapist said something that landed with a force I wasn’t expecting: We can’t save everyone. And it’s not our responsibility.

I resisted it at first. It felt wrong and dangerous. Like letting go of that belief meant abandoning the people I loved. But she didn’t say it to absolve harm or minimize responsibility. She said it to name reality. We do the best we can with the information, power, and support we have at the time. Sometimes, despite that, harm still happens.

What changed wasn’t the past. What changed was how I showed up afterward.

I supported my kids. I believed them. I got them help. I took action where I could. I cut off contact with family members who could no longer be trusted. They didn’t get the same access to my children simply because they shared blood. I refused to shove it under the rug. I refused to pretend it didn’t matter. I refused to protect adults at the expense of children.

And that mattered.

It didn’t erase what happened, but it disrupted the cycle. It meant my children weren’t alone the way I had been. It meant their pain was named, held, and taken seriously. It meant that even though I couldn’t prevent the harm, I could refuse to compound it with silence or denial.

That was the beginning of something different. Not healing yet. Not peace. But a shift, from believing my worth was measured by whether I could prevent suffering, to understanding that sometimes love shows up not as protection, but as presence, action, and truth.

And that realization, slow, painful, and earned, became the first crack in the belief that I had failed entirely.

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Section 3: Trusting the Unseen

After my divorce, I ended up in a shelter with my kids for a short time. I didn’t know what was next. I didn’t have a plan. I didn’t have a fallback. I had been surviving for so long that I didn’t know what it meant to just… begin again.

But that’s exactly what I did.

When I moved into my house, I had barely anything. I was starting from scratch in every way, emotionally, financially, physically. And strangely… things started to fall into place. Not all at once, and not without stress, but enough to make me pay attention.

I’d go looking for something, and somehow find exactly what I needed. A piece of furniture. A resource. A moment of calm. Things would line up in small but specific ways. Not perfect, but precise. And I began to realize something I hadn’t fully believed before: I was being held. Not in the way I used to try to hold everything together, but in a way that asked me to stop clutching, to release the illusion that I had to control it all.

The clearest example of that? The fireplace.

I had ordered one online, from some Facebook store that looked legitimate, and soon realized it was a scam. I was frustrated and disappointed, but I filed a dispute with PayPal and moved on. A few days later, I found another fireplace listed about 45 minutes away. I messaged the seller, and they told me it was already spoken for, but if the person didn’t show up, it was mine.

They never showed.

I picked it up the next day. It was beautiful, had both a heater and lights, and fit perfectly in the space. A week later, just as the weather turned cold, the furnace in my house went out. And that fireplace? It kept the whole main floor warm while I waited for a replacement. It wasn’t just decoration, it was provision.

And then, at the end of the month, right when money was tight again, the refund from the scam showed up in my account.

I stood in the middle of my living room, warmed by a fireplace I almost didn’t get, paid for by money I thought I’d lost, and I just… breathed.

That fireplace taught me something I didn’t know I needed to learn: God provides what we need, not always what we want. And sometimes, the timing that feels like a failure is actually protection. Sometimes, what looks like a setback is just a redirection. That moment became a touchstone for me. Proof that letting go didn’t lead to loss, it made room for what was truly meant for me.

After that, I started noticing more.

The more I let go of how I thought things should be, let go of the need to force or fix, the more life met me with unexpected beauty. Not ease, but alignment. I’d find the right item, meet the right person, hear the right words at the exact time I needed them. I stopped pushing so hard and started paying attention instead.

I’d think I needed one thing and be given something different, only to realize later it was exactly right. I stopped treating every inconvenience as a sign of failure. I started asking: What if this, too, is part of it?

What if it’s not a disruption, it’s a redirect?

I started shifting the way I responded to life’s smaller frustrations. The things that used to trigger me, send me spiraling, or leave me tense for hours, slowly, they lost their power. Not because they disappeared, but because I learned to meet them differently.

Stuck at a stoplight? I’d take an extra breath.

Caught behind a train? I’d watch the cars pass and find myself smiling at the graffiti, little bursts of expression painted across something slow and unchangeable.

Someone said something rude or out of line? I’d let it roll off. Brush it off with a quiet “that’s about them, not me” and keep moving. I didn’t have the energy anymore to carry every offense. I didn’t need to win every interaction. People are going to do what they do. Let them. I’ll do me.

It wasn’t about being unbothered, it was about being free.

The more I met life this way, with openness instead of resistance, the more peace I started to feel. I began to see that every moment held a choice: to grip or to let go. To see an inconvenience or to look for the invitation inside it. Maybe the lesson. Maybe the gift.

That phrase, maybe it’s just meant to be that way, became a doorway.

Not to apathy, but to peace. Not to passivity, but to trust. And trust, I learned, doesn’t mean expecting everything to go your way. It means knowing you’ll be okay even when it doesn’t.

That’s when I began letting go for real.

Not giving up, but letting go. Of how I thought things should be. Of who I thought people would be. Of the belief that I could prevent every loss, every hurt, every outcome. I started handing over what I couldn’t carry anymore. I stopped praying for perfection and started praying for peace, for wisdom, for enough.

And it came.

I remember thinking, if God wants it that way, let Him deal with it.
And I meant it. Not out of bitterness, but surrender. A sacred kind of surrender.

That’s what it came down to: trust.

Not that everything would go right. But that I’d find a way through, even if it didn’t. That I could trust myself to respond, even if I couldn’t prepare. That worrying wouldn’t protect me, it would just keep me stuck.

I saw a quote once that said, “Worrying is like a rocking chair, it gives you something to do, but it doesn’t get you anywhere.”
And that’s exactly what it felt like. I had spent so much of my life rocking, staying in motion, gripping tightly, thinking I was getting ahead. But I wasn’t going anywhere. I was just wearing myself out.

What changed wasn’t that life stopped being hard.

What changed was that I stopped believing I had to outrun every possible disaster.

I started trusting that I would be guided. That even if I wasn’t ready, I’d be shown the next step. That survival isn’t about having control, it’s about having faith. In the process. In yourself. In whatever holds you when you let go.

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Section 4: Becoming the Light

I wish I could say that everything got easier after that. That surrender led to comfort. That letting go was the final test before things finally settled.

But life had more to teach me.

Not long after, I injured my back. It made working nearly impossible. I got into debt trying to stay afloat. I lost my house, everything I had built, piece by piece, was stripped away. My ability to financially provide, to sustain a home, to hold everything together the way I always had, gone.

I had to send my kids to stay with their dad while I moved through other people’s homes, couches, spare rooms. Everything I had left fit into a tiny little Prius. Then my phone broke. Then the car broke down. I was sleeping on my best friend’s couch when I decided to start my first business, Heartlight Haven. I didn’t know anything about running a business, but I had a laptop, so I started teaching myself. I took courses. I learned everything I could, web development, coding, marketing, SEO, branding, all of it. I poured everything I had into it.

When that business failed in July of 2025, just six months after it began, I didn’t quit. I rebuilt. I rebranded. I moved forward with more clarity, more alignment, and more intention than before. I took everything I learned from what didn’t work and started again with purpose. That failure wasn’t the end. It was the beginning of becoming more deeply rooted in who I am and what I’m here to offer.

Eventually, I had to move back in with my ex again.

There’s something emotionally complex about returning to a place you once fought so hard to leave. At first, it stirred up feelings I didn’t quite know how to name, grief, vulnerability, even shame. But over time, it became something else. A shared act of sacrifice. A decision rooted not in failure, but in love, for our kids, for stability, for doing what’s best in a hard season. My ex and I have both put aside comfort, pride, and easy narratives to make this work. We’re co-parenting under the same roof, navigating the layers and the history and the emotions, because our kids deserve safety, consistency, and support. He’s also giving me space and time to heal my back and rebuild my business, something I don’t take lightly. It’s not easy. It’s not simple. But it’s real. And I’ve come to see that this chapter, as hard as it is, is also full of courage and commitment.

Life is never going to be easy.

It’s hard. It’s complicated. It’s full of heartbreak and uncertainty. But I have proven to myself, over and over again, that I can get through anything.

I am not here because everything worked out.

I’m here because I kept going even when it didn’t.

And that counts for something.

Maybe I’ll never be able to save people in the way I once thought I could. Maybe my love and effort and intuition won’t always be enough to prevent harm or shield the people I care about. But maybe that was never the point.

Maybe the point is this:

That my pain helped me recognize my children’s pain. That my experiences taught me how to hold theirs. That I knew what to do when it mattered most, not because I had control, but because I had lived it. I understood. I believed them. I showed up. I didn’t run. I didn’t disappear. And that same pain, the kind I once thought disqualified me, has helped me show up for people in all walks of life. It has taught me how to be a safe space. A place where people can open up, let their guard down, and be seen without fear or judgment.

And maybe someone else, someone out there walking through their own darkness, needs to know they’re not the only one. That they’re not broken. That someone sees them. Truly sees what they’ve endured and who they’ve become. That they’re not crazy. That the shame they’re carrying was never theirs to hold.

If I can be that light for even one person, if my honesty can help someone else release their shame, trust their story, and remember their strength, then maybe I am still saving people. Not by shielding them from pain, but by reminding them that pain doesn’t get the final word.

Because we hold an extraordinary power inside us.

The power to rise from ashes. The power to rebuild again and again. The power to love deeply after being hurt, to start over after being stripped down, to keep showing up when everything says you can’t.

No, life isn’t easy. It breaks us open and asks more from us than we think we have. But life is also beautiful. It’s full of meaning and mystery and second chances and unexpected warmth.

My oldest daughter is 19 now and finding her way in the world. My son is 18 and about to finish his last year of high school. They’re happy. They’re healthy. And my youngest, just six, keeps me rooted in the present. Life is still hard in a lot of ways—there are days I’m still just trying to hold everything together. I’m deeply grateful, but I’m also still rebuilding. Still healing. And yet, there’s a peace in me now that I never had before. A stillness I guard fiercely. It’s the calm that comes from trusting myself, even when the path isn’t clear.

I don’t know if my business will succeed in the way I imagine it will. Maybe it will. Maybe it will open doors I can’t yet see. Maybe it will introduce me to the right people, the right opportunity, the next aligned step. These days, I trust myself completely. I no longer force or chase. I do what I feel inspired to do. I work with my cycle and my nervous system instead of against them. I trust that I’ll be shown the way in divine timing. I trust that I’ll make it, not because everything is guaranteed, but because I’ve already survived the unthinkable. And I’m still here.

I don’t believe God spares us from the hard things. But I believe He walks with us through every one of them. He offers presence in the absence of control. Comfort when the answers don’t come. Light when we can’t see a way forward. And strength, not to escape it all, but to carry through it.

So if you’re in it right now, if you’re tired, unraveling, trying to keep going, I want you to hear this:

I see you. I believe you. I know you have what it takes to get through this too.

You are stronger than you know.
You are held.
You are not alone.
And you are going to make it.

Thank you for taking the time to read my story.

Best wishes,

Wendi Kehn