Understanding Your Inner Control-Freak

Source: Mohamed hassan / Pixabay

My partner and I recently went to a dance-jam, hoping to blow out some of the tension we’d accumulated in the aftermath of the election. Ten minutes into our stomping catharsis, her Apple Watch sent a most appropriate message: “It looks like you’ve taken a hard fall.”

There’s a reason they call them smart watches.

We had indeed taken a hard fall—our team and ourselves—and dancing madly was merely an attempt to get back on our feet and blow off some steam, feel the support of community, and ameliorate our acute sense of feeling out of control.

The fact is, we all have our hands firmly on the wishbone, but that’s no guarantee our wishes will come true, that life will go according to plan and prayer, and when it doesn’t we need some strategies to help us navigate the experience of feeling out of control.

These strategies don’t need to be elaborate or labor intensive. Dancing may be just as effective at managing a temporary sense of helplessness, insecurity, or fury as diving into work is, a tactic many of us use to distract ourselves from pain and give us a sense of control over our lives. Yes, action is often the antidote to anxiety, but defaulting to busyness when life suddenly snatches control out of your hands can be like being bitten by a rattlesnake: You panic and run, and it only causes the poison to travel faster through your system.

Mindfulness practitioners tell us that the antidote to chaos isn’t order; it’s sitting with chaos, at least for a spell. And though the ancient Greeks defined chaos as emptiness and void, they crucially considered it the primordial potential from which all things arise. In most of the world’s creation stories, for instance, Chaos with a capital C is described as the condition of the Earth before it was formed, meaning that Chaos precedes Creation, and if you deny yourself the one, you’ll deny yourself the other.

So, perhaps, it’s best to take on chaos—and the loss of a sense of control over it—as a contemplation, one that’s not about distraction but investigation, not about destruction (end the fear and insecurity) but creation (dance it up, write it down, draw it out, sing the blues, compose a Suite for Weeping Violins).

Call it what you want, though—the will to conquer, the drive for mastery, being a control freak—the struggle for control is in the germ plasm of the human experience. For one thing, it’s a natural reaction to helplessness. Even a baby’s cry is an attempt at control, a strategy to manage hunger and pain, and both our immune system and fight-or-flight response evolved to help control our environment, inside and out.

This is control’s appeal and power—it helps tame the wild and get things done, whether your strategies of control show up as action, discipline, perfectionism, workaholism, violence, seduction, generosity, guilt-tripping, anger, or supplication. And it’s not just manipulation, it’s mastery—learning to control the ball, shape the language, manage the team, stay healthy, and keep a lid on disorder.

The problem with power and control is that they work often enough that it’s hard to tell when they stop working, and instead clamp their teeth down on your vitality.

Where we get into trouble is in distinguishing what we have control over and what we don’t, and the belief that mastery will automatically bestow on us a sense of being in control of our lives. “If I’m the master of my own fate,” I once heard someone say, “why do I feel so out of control?” And you may be the proverbial author of your own life, but as any author knows, the act of sending work out into the world is referred to as submission.

What you don’t have control over is birth and death, race and gender, the weather, the price of gas and food, interest rates and election outcomes, most of your body’s internal functions, and what other people think of you.

What you do have control over is how you react to the things you don’t have control over. “The only argument available with an east wind,” the poet James Lowell once said, “is to put on your overcoat.”

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Up to a point, though, control is good for us. In the 1970’s, anesthesiologists found that letting post-op patients dole out their own doses of painkillers gave them more effective pain relief, with fewer doses, and what pain they did have was experienced as less intense. But control is good medicine only in the right doses, and the wisdom to know the difference between too little and too much is the punchline of the serenity prayer—which people often read not as the search for the serenity to accept the things they cannot change, but as the search for serenity by trying to change the things they cannot accept.

A fundamental fact about the nature of control, if not the definition, needs to be kept in mind: it’s about exerting authority over, curbing and constraining, and when allowed to cell-divide unchecked it exerts a throttling effect on life. It’s also a hatchery for ulcers and insomnias, especially if you tend to get your knickers in a knot whenever things aren’t predictable and orderly.

Unfortunately, there’s no official checkpoint where healthy, adaptive control crosses the border into anxious control that’s likely to end in an emotional hernia, where striving becomes strife, and a certain ambidexterity in both exercising and surrendering control is in order. Discerning one from the other probably comes down to the old gospel criteria: by their fruits you shall know them. What does your intuition tell you about your controlling behavior? What does your body tell you, your dreams, your friends, the results you’re getting, the price you’re paying for those results?

The truth is, trying to control life doesn’t usually bring you the security you want. Nor does it bring exemption from other people’s incursions and exploitations, or undisturbed sleep. But it does tend to bring on exhaustion, because it requires a tremendous investment of energy, and it’s ultimately impossible.

And even when you can achieve it, being in control isn’t the same as having peace of mind. In fact, the drive to get a fix on life puts you at odds with it, because at its most intrinsic levels—the cellular and molecular, the microscopic and atomic—life is gaga with randomness and motion, and there’s simply no way to get a grip on it. The historian Henry Adams once said that “chaos is the law of nature, order is the dream of man.” But we act as if we could simply unhinge our jaws like a snake swallowing an egg and swallow chaos whole, then just spit out the hard parts.

Ultimately, controlling behavior is like ego. It’s gotten a bad rap, characterized as something we’re supposed to transcend on the way to some incredible lightness of being. But trying to eliminate it is like trying to drain a mirage of its water. It can’t be eliminated, only seen through.