If I were to say the words, control, powerlessness, out of control, helplessness, paranoia, insecurity, low self esteem, or even impostor, you’d probably recognise them as the anxious person’s stock in trade of states that they feel on a daily basis.
Of the hundreds of emotions that we can all feel at various time throughout our lives, the number one emotion that anxious people want to experience the most is ‘being in control’ because they feel ‘out of control’ most of the time.
It’s like events make them feel powerless, when they want to feel powerful. People make them feel inadequate when they want to feel good enough. Their spouse’s make them feel insecure when they want to feel secure. Their parents make them feel criticised, judged and condemned, when they want to feel empowered, right and just.
I could go on, because there are so many reasons why, if we had one wish, one secret wish it would be to be to control all events, all people and all situations, because then and only then, could we relax and take life in its stride.
Your Secret Wish Dooms You To Unhappiness?
Now here’s the thing, if you were given a wish to have these things, then far from creating a life that would make you feel good about yourself, you would be dooming yourself to a life that is designed to keep you stuck, and here’s why.
What I Secretly Longed For
I was remembering back to the ‘good old’ days when my anxiety was at its peak, and my secret wish to be in control. I longed to have everything be exactly how I wanted it to be, where, like superwoman, I had the power to make things as I wished. I wanted things to be as I wished so that I wouldn’t feel so inadequate when things didn’t go my way, and I had to just accept it. To me accepting what is, has never been an easy thing to do, and hated the idea that I had to like it or lump it, so to speak.
But there is something worse than being in control and that’s being in control and having things exactly how you’d want them to be.
It’s like this.
Image tomorrow you wake up and a genie said for one day only, you get to control everything around you, do you want that wish? I’m sure you’d leap at the chance and not because you want to do horrible things to people, you just want to feel like you’re getting somewhere without the angst following you all the time, and I get it, because me too!
And here’s how it would play out. You’d get your wish, control everything around you, and the next day things would get back to normal and you would either feel great to have at least felt in control for the first time in your life, or sad that you couldn’t have more of it.
“ You Haven’t Changed A Bi!”
And then let’s say you had more, and you could be in control for months and months or even years and years. Do you know where you’d find yourself at the end of your control? You’d find yourself exactly where you are now, you wouldn’t have changed on iota.
“A pearl is a beautiful thing that is produced by an injured life. If we had not been wounded, if we had not been injured, then we will not produce the pearl.” Stephen Hoeller
And as a twist of fate, the genie didn’t tell you that though you were in control, other people were still growing, learning, and developing, so that when your control stint was over, they were able to cope better with their lot, but you were as you are now, still feeling insecure, and out of control and never learning how to feel secure and in control.
And this is because you wouldn’t have grown, developed, met any challenges or known any differences because once you were in control you would only choose and could only choose experiences that you had already had, and use skills that you would have already used and never grown beyond it.
It would be like giving birth and that baby, though growing physically, would never grow mentally or emotionally- and how awful that would be.
What’s Your Poison?
And yet it’s such a seductive idea that we want and need to be in control to stop feeling anxious, that we live our life wanting this to be true. We eat, gamble, clean, shop, play, drink … just to feel in control when events make us feel otherwise.
In using behaviours to cushion, soothe, comfort and love us even, we are doing something that is so familiar that in a perverse sort of way it helps us to not feel powerless anymore, but powerful and in control when we really aren’t, and that’s why we continue doing them even when they do us harm.
It’s Not Great Being Forced To Change But The Alternative Is Worse!
So think about you and how if you weren’t forced to make changes, accept things, put up with irritating people, rise to the challenge, then you’d never learn how to cope better and better with what happens to you.
Granted, this is the rough and ready way of coping and it’s not always pleasant to learn directly like this, but if we don’t then our level of fear, anxiety and apprehension for a given thing would never change.
The Anxious Person’s Conundrum
And in that fantasy world where you were given control, the irony is that at the back of your mind would be the fear that if you lose control then you would feel worse. And whilst you are in control you fear that you won’t be in control and so can never really relax and enjoy being in control, and that’s how an anxious person would think and ruin enjoying being in control.
So let me ask you this.
If you were now given the choice to be in control would you take it? Or would you know that though it’s not always pleasant, learning how to cope better and become stronger makes your life better than being able to control everything that happens. Because it’s one thing being carried across a bridge because you fear falling, and another learning how to take one step at a time across it, with help and support, to eventually feeling comfortable walking across it unaided, isn’t it?
Here’s to not being in control
Speak soon
Elaine
