Antidotes to Control: Focus on What You Can Choose
It’s alluring to think we can control anything other than ourselves, that telling others what to do, how to do it, when, where, and why will help you to feel less out of control. But nothing could be farther from the truth, my love. Seeking control leaves you feeling out of control.
There are ways to move through that desire to control the uncontrollable and to help yourself feel better by attending to you. Your thoughts, your feelings, your actions, and the result you create for yourself in this life.
You can release yourself from your own desire to attempt to falsely control others.
Whether you’re healing from your own codependency, growing up with codependents, narcissists, folks who use or abuse alcohol or other substances, or if you were raised by wounded children, as many of us were, and so took on that wounding as your own, this work is vital.
And it’s part of the global healing we need to do, and we are being called to do in this moment, to heal the collective unconscious. And to heal ourselves, so our interactions with others, with the people we love, with strangers, with everyone and everything can come from a place of love and care and understanding.
There is a difference between true control and false control. True control is the control you have over yourself.
Your think-feel-act cycle, your decisions, your outcomes, your results from the thoughts you’re thinking and all that they generate for you. From true control, self-control, you respond thoughtfully, with intention. You don’t react. You are aligned with your own integrity and act from it regardless of what someone else wants or needs or what you think or project them to want or need.
When you’re skilled at managing your own mind, your choices are less likely to be about attempting to feel in control because you are in control of yourself.
For most of my life, I had a deep desire to attempt to control the world. To tell others what to do without emotional consent to do so.
So this conversation is not rhetorical or hypothetical for me. I do this work. I am a life coach and I show up for my clients, for all of you because I’ve been there. When I look back on my own life and all those years of trying to sometimes subtly and sometimes less subtly control others, I can see how much pain and suffering it caused me.
And so, I want to support you in shaking yourself free from the grasp of false control. My own desire to exert false control was evidence of the emotional childhood I was swirling around in.
Emotional childhood is when we blame our thoughts, feelings, actions, and results on other people. It can sound like, “He said x, so I feel y.” Instead of realizing he said x, I took it personally, made it mean something terrible about me. And so I created my feeling in myself with my own thoughts. My reaction to his words.
And yes, our reactions often come from our trauma, our history, are informed by the multiple systems of oppression we may be subject to in our lifetime due to our social location, as animals socialized as women, as people of color, as queer folks, as differently abled folks. And yes, we can call out the systems and we can simultaneously look at our own reactions and the framework in which we’re understanding he said x, so I felt y.
In my own case, I stayed in emotional childhood because I didn’t know any other way to be.
I didn’t have another rubric for living, which I now have through thought work and understanding the think- feel-act cycle. I chose to lean on false control, attempting to control others, because I didn’t feel in control of myself. My own thoughts, my own feelings.
And quite frankly, because I feared feeling my feelings. My own feelings weren’t a thing I grew up connected to. I didn’t have the words or access to the somatic or bodily experience of my feelings other than angry, sad, joyful. And part of me feared feeling feelings because I worried that I didn’t know how.
I worried that it would be too much for me, which I’ve learned isn’t real or true. I now know that I am most in my power when I’m feeling my feelings in my body, when I’m processing them through, when I’m really present to them and accepting them, when I’m not pushing them away. And when I’m focused on the one thing I can control, my own mind and my responses to life on life’s uncertain terms as an emotional adult.
Remember the problem with attempting to control anything outside of ourselves. Thinking you can control the world is impossible. It doesn’t serve you. And in fact, can be harmful and exhausting to your mind, body, and spirit, shunting you time and time again into sympathetic nervous system activation, into that flight or fight freak out part of your nervous system.
The futile effort to control others can create stress, frustration, disappointment, even anger in your mind, body, and spirit because controlling the world is impossible.
And as always, I get it. I was there too. Nothing to feel shame or guilt or anything else about, other than motivation, to bring your awareness, acceptance, and action to this thought habit, especially if it’s fueling the codependency and resentment cycle where you try to control someone and they don’t do what you want and then you resent them for it.
Or the externalization or people-pleasing habit, where you ask someone else to control you by asking their opinion because you don’t trust your own. And then you resent them when they give you an opinion, feedback, or advice that you don’t want. Or when you ask for advice from that place of not trusting yourself, and then you act on that advice, and then the situation doesn’t turn out the way you want. And then you resent the advice-giver when they give you advice because you asked.
Oh brains. Before I step into details about the antidotes, the remedies, I want to say this; not being able to control the world is one of the greatest gifts I’ve ever heard of because if the only thing I have to control, the only thing I can control is me, then I am free. And it frees me from the responsibility of attempting to make other humans’ choices for them.
And here we’re talking about other adults. If you have a toddler, or an infant, or you’re caring for a fragile elder, someone else who’s not able to make their own decisions, then that’s a different story altogether. So if you’re an adult and you’re thinking about other adults, it’s so freeing to know that they get to make their own decisions. It’s the only way forward. And you get to make yours.
I find this fact so liberating.
What is a human, particularly when raised in codependency or chaos to do to release this habit of trying to control others?
Step one is awareness. That’s how we do in this family. Awareness, acceptance, action. You can’t heal what you can’t see. So start to raise your awareness around your own subtle and overt attempts to control people, places, and things.
And maybe that’s all you do for the next week, the next month, the next year. Focus on noticing your own thought patterns. And if that’s what you do, if that’s where this work starts and ends for you right now, then that is fabulous. Bring your awareness to your words, your thoughts, the sensations or feelings in your body when you are about to or are attempting false control. Please don’t judge it. Just bring gentle awareness to you and your habitual thought patterns.
Two, remember, you can set boundaries and I recommend that you do.
Stepping away from attempting to control others and setting boundaries, these are not mutually exclusive things.
Just check in and ask yourself if you’re setting a boundary with the energy of taking care of yourself, versus attempting to control anyone or anything.
Remembering when we set a boundary in this family, it sounds like, “If you do x, then I will do y.” Your focus is on you when you’re setting a boundary. What you want and need, and not on the other person and their decisions as an adult. They can do whatever they want to do and you will make a decision for you. If you do x, then I will do y.
I will of course include here a caveat for parents. So you do get to tell kids what you want them to do, especially when it comes to safety. No running in the street, no juggling knives, no using the toaster in the bathroom, we don’t hit in this family, et cetera.
And all of that can be done either with control energy or with the energy of loving parenting. And if you’re making rules with your kids from the energy of trying to control them, no matter their age, I will lovingly ask you to check yourself before you wreck yourself, because think back.
Fetuses don’t always do what you want them to do. Newborns, toddlers, they certainly don’t. And your school age or teenage kid, your kid home from college.
The more you can have loving rules for safety, calm, and peace in place from a place of pure love and not control energy, the more your kid will feel that love energy behind your words and there is nothing to rebel against or push against.
They might still rebel anyway because sometimes that’s developmentally appropriate, but I think and I hope you get my point here. Love energy serves you. Controlling energy doesn’t. In order to do this, to recognize what energy you’re bringing to your communications, decisions, statements, you need awareness of what’s going on for you in your mind and body, which is the gift of daily thought work and the breathwork meditation I teach.
They are both amazing tools for feeling your feelings in your body, where feelings live. Feel into when you’re trying to control and when you’re making a suggestion from a place of love. Not all suggestion-making is about control. You get to learn to feel the difference in your body.
Next remedy. If your issue is asking for other people’s opinions as a way to try to control your outcomes, I want to invite you to focus on practicing trusting yourself and your decisions. Listen, you may make a decision that doesn’t work out the way you want it to. You may fail. Failure is a gift because it means that you tried and you learned something.
So put yourself out there, make the scary decisions without second guessing yourself and then if you fail, that’s great. You’ve got more information to use as loving evidence to help you make your next decision. To quote the magnificent Buddhist teacher, Pena Chodron, “Fail, fail again, fail better.”
Our final remedy, focus on what you can choose. A gift of recognizing where you may be trying to control is that it gives you options. My favorite being to shift from a focus on control to a focus on choice.
You may think the thought, “I feel out of control,” and thus you will feel out of control.
So logically, you may want to attempt to control life.
When this comes up, recognize the part of you that’s talking. Is it your inner child? How old is the you that seeks control? Be your own best parent. Give yourself some big old love, remind yourself that you are taking care of you, and you’ll likely have to do this many times to get the message through and that’s okay.
So instead of repeating that old advice of looking for what you can control and focusing there, which can lead you to mentally tighten your grasp on the people around you, on your nutrition and your supplement and exercise schedule, instead of tightening your grasp on anything at all, instead of trying to control anything, I want to invite you to ask yourself, what do I want to choose to think and feel in this situation?
Focus on the fact that you can make choices and therein lies your power.
Through that question, you can begin to feel into the thoughts and feelings you want to have on purpose. So you can actively choose them. Again, not to try to control anything but because you are making that choice.
Because when your perfect plan to control your nutrition, et cetera, works out, that I can control framing can be one more thing leaving you feel so out of control. Instead, choose the next right thought. So my love, here is your homework.
Take a moment to list out, pen to paper, all the things you want to control. Then write out your new choice to release your attempt at grasping for control.
I release all the things I cannot control. That could be your first one. I release my desire to control the pandemic. Instead, I choose acceptance. This is happening. I can take good care of myself, my family, the healthcare providers and grocery store clerks in my world, I can write to my senators asking for a rent freeze, rent cancelation. I mean, that would be even better, right?
But for now, I release my desire to control the pandemic. I choose acceptance. I release my desire to control the stock market. I choose to trust that things will eventually balance out. I release my desire to control my partner, my children, my dog, my body, my neighbors, the government. I choose love.
When you’re focused on controlling, you are in fact out of control because you’re striving for something impossible.
You’re creating more spin energy in your life. Let it go, my sweet one. Let it all go and focus on what you want to choose to give your attention and energy to right now. Perhaps it’s a way to make your own life better or the life of an elderly neighbor, a low-income parent down the street, or someone you’ve never met who’s suffering in this moment.
In my life, I am actively consciously on the daily choosing self-love, compassion, surrender, and release. And I’ve put Post-Its up around the house to remind me of this. I am writing it out in my journal a dozen times a day. And I’m voicing it to my one-on-one coaching clients and guiding them to make the best choices for their own lives.
And I’m sharing this dedication with the people I love because brains need repetition to make change, for neuroplasticity. The conscious changing of our own patterned reactions to take hold. And these thoughts may feel extra challenging right now, so I’m doing everything I can to remind my brain of this choice, to release my desire for control.
I want to say clearly that releasing your need to attempt to control is universally challenging for human minds, and may always feel extra challenging if you were raised not having a sense of control, have trauma around other people making choices for you.
While you can’t control the world, the thing you can control is so important to be conscious of, to have top of mind, and that is you.
I see you, my darling. I see you out there. Keep breathing. The other choice that I am making is to remind myself that I cannot take this global pain away and can’t make the people in my life relax, take a nap, rest, or make choices like I want them to. To not go out, to take a break. But what I can do is to regulate my own nervous system as much as I can, breath by breath, thought by thought.
I will leave you with these final guiding questions to ask yourself, more homework my sweet nerd. I know you love your homework.
Take this to your journal and I want to really, really encourage you to set aside, five, 10, 15 minutes a day to coach yourself, to ask yourself what the circumstance is at hand, what you’re thinking about it, what you feel in your body as you think that thought, what the action is you take when you feel that energy, that vibration in your body, and what the result of that specific action is.
And get specific. Get real. Get vulnerable and write it down. This is how you take back your mind from your socialization, from the patriarchy, from your familial teachings, your stress responses, your anxiety, worry, fear, and attempts to exert false control in the world. Write it down, my angel. See it in black and white on paper for your own wellness.
So those questions are:
- Who do I want to be in the world? Someone who shows up with false control or do I want to be someone who lives from acceptance?
- What kind of feelings do I want to create for myself with my think-feel-act cycle?
- How do I want to show up always and in this particular moment for humanity?
Thank you for taking the time to read Feminist Wellness. I’m excited to be here and to help you take back your health!
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