Little Book of Letting Go: 30 Days to Cleanse Your Mind, Lift Your Spirit, and Replenish Your Soul - Softcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Hugh Prather was the author of more than 14 books, which have sold over 1.5 million copies. He lived with Gayle, his wife of more than 30 years, in Tucson, Arizona, where he was the resident minister at St. Francis in the Foothills United Methodist Church. He died in 2010.

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Maggie

A woman named Maggie emailed Gayle and said that about six months ago she began noticing that she was sad after her weekly phone conversation with her mother. Gayle asked her if this had ever happened before. Maggie said no, and that furthermore her mother was very healthy and nothing unusual had happened recently in her mother's life.

Gayle told Maggie that for the next two weeks she wanted her to sit down with paper and pen immediately after each call, and, while concentrating on her feeling of sadness, to write down every thought in her mind.

Two weeks later, Maggie emailed back that the words loser and You're a loser kept recurring in her mind. “But,” she said, “my mother is not a loser. She's a very popular schoolteacher who has won an award. And I have a great career as a physical therapist and don't consider myself a loser either.”

Gayle told Maggie to sit quietly once or twice in the next few days and trace back all her memories surrounding the word loser. She also told her to write down her thoughts after one more phone conversation with her mother.

The next week Maggie emailed Gayle again, this time very excited about what she had discovered. Six months before, her father, who had divorced her mother when Maggie was ten, had come into town and they had had lunch together. At that time her father told her that he had divorced her mother because “she was such a loser,” having no career goal higher than to be a schoolteacher. Maggie's father was a doctor and had run off with another doctor.

Gayle asked Maggie if there was any aspect of her own life that had not been successful. Maggie replied that she was thirty-seven and had never been able to form a permanent relationship. She said that the man she was dating now wanted to get married but that something was holding her back. He was a wonderful man but she felt very reluctant.

Again Gayle advised Maggie to sit in the middle of the emotion and write down all her thoughts, this time whenever she felt this familiar reluctance.

In their next-to-last exchange, Maggie told Gayle that the thought she uncovered was quite crazy. “It was, ‘If I get married, I will become a loser.’ How could I have such a thought?” Gayle replied, “Because you lived for many years in a house where your father held the deep conviction that your own mother was a loser. You are half your dad and half your mother, so naturally you are going to internalize this loser thought―which proved powerful enough to break apart your home.”

In her last email, Maggie told Gayle that she and her boyfriend had discussed the work she had been doing and he was very supportive. Although they had not yet decided to get married, she had invited him to move in. They were going to see how it went.