“Surrender is not about giving up. It is about letting go of the illusion of control,” wrote Judith Orloff. That insight helped one woman break a cycle of insomnia, fear and controlling behavior that she traced back to her childhood and her mother’s dementia.
The woman, now in her fifties, spent years waking up at 3:47 a.m. after only minutes of sleep. She would lie awake, check the clock, replay the previous day and plan the next one. Insomnia crept in gradually, starting with disrupted sleep from newborn care, then difficulty sleeping during perimenopause. Stress hormones from working in a busy clinic and raising a family kept her wired at night. By age 50, she was getting about 20 minutes of interrupted sleep each night.
She also began forgetting words and names she had used every day. She could not recognize her neighbors’ faces. Her concentration slipped during important presentations. She snapped at her partner and had outbursts of rage. Then her mother, who lived across the country, was diagnosed with dementia in her early 70s. The woman became terrified she was losing her own memory.
Control was a pattern she had learned as a child. Her mother’s mental health was fragile, and the mother controlled everything to get through each day. The woman carried that habit into adulthood. When insomnia and memory fears mounted, she doubled down: she made lists, demanded family members do things her way, kept rigid routines and lost all flexibility. She never asked herself if any of it was working. The effort was exhausting, both physically and emotionally.
One night she yelled at her children for needing help with homework. One child cried; the other shut down. She heard herself using the same words, tone and rage her mother had used with her. That moment broke her heart and made her realize control was no longer serving her.
She enrolled in a mindfulness-based stress reduction course. One early exercise required lying still and scanning her body, which was excruciating for someone always needing to be “doing.” The program gave her a safe place to notice that pattern. Weeks later, another exercise asked her to watch how she automatically reacted to stress. She saw a clear pattern: control. When anything felt even mildly challenging, she organized everyone and everything to feel safe.
Once she recognized that her coping strategy was no longer useful, she decided to let go of trying to control her insomnia. Her sleep improved dramatically. Her memory also recovered. She still forgets things occasionally, but she no longer spirals into catastrophizing about dementia. “The fear of losing my memory was doing more damage than any actual memory problem,” she said.
When she visited her mother and the mother did not recognize her, the woman felt present rather than hurt. She saw her mother confused and frustrated, doing her best with what she had. “We’d both been running the same program—control what you can, stay vigilant, keep going,” she said. She chose to respond with compassion rather than control.
She learned three things from the experience. First, control is fear wearing a mask of competence. Second, the body does not distinguish between a real threat and a perceived threat; learning to regulate the nervous system required recognizing an outdated pattern and consciously letting it go. Third, harsh self-criticism only adds more stress; real compassion for her exhausted self was what finally helped her heal.
