The phrase “Let go and let God” has a lot of cultural currency. When people are facing overwhelming trauma, be it grief or drug addiction or a bad day at work, the phrase is pulled out to help people untangled their emotions and let go of what is troubling them.

I’ve wondered about this a lot in regards to grieving as a non-deist, for obvious reasons, and for less obvious reasons.

Ironically, part of the reason this advice is so popular is that it gives people a way to let emotions run their course and, eventually, run down without feeling like they are actually giving anything up. Giving something to God is turning possession over, perhaps, but whatever they are giving over doesn’t disappear. Theoretically, it just changes hands. That is far less risky or scary than the idea of letting something go completely, with the additional comfort of believing that your problems are being handled (resolved) by someone with greater power than you possess.

A non-deist does not rest on such comforts, though. Letting go does not mean letting anyone else, real or imagined, handle our problems. Letting go can also signify a possible loss of control that is terrifying. Well, that’s the point of “letting God,” isn’t it? To curb the fear that letting go means losing an important part of ourselves (even if that part is self-destructive, as addicts can attest), of becoming less than we used to be.

We cannot pummel these feelings with logic, as much as we want to. I think a better answer is to do what skeptics do best, and look at the deeper problem, the one that the surface level emotions scramble to hide: the high cost of attachment.

This idea comes from my Buddhist studies, but I believe applies at the secular level. It is attachment to our emotions that make letting go of them so terrifying. Turning our feelings and reactions over to God is a good way for desists to safely keep that attachment whole while distancing themselves from it. Without that safe harbor, non-deists have to just throw these feelings to the wind, and unattach ourselves from what is hurting us. We have to do this, or be kept prisoner by our grief. I can speak with authority on that, because I refused to let go for well over a decade, and the festering wounds of my grief, anger and despair nearly destroyed me.

Seeing the fear of letting go for what it really is, which is a ego-driven attachment to our emotions and state of mind can help put things in perspective. Letting go is not really fundamentally changing part of who we are, nor does it mean we have to lose a piece of ourselves. It is not becoming less whole, it is simply the act of working through our feelings in a healthy way.

Let go, and be free; Let go, and let yourself breathe again.