Control

Control has a number of closely related definitions: the power to influence or direct people's behavior or the course of events,  a means of limiting or regulating something, or  the power to restrain something, especially one's own emotions or actions.  It comes from the late Middle English word “contreroller", the person who keeps accounts or rolls (transactions).  I wanted to tackle control today because it’s something we all have in common. As humans have developed, the deep-seated need for control began as a way to predict circumstances and increase our chances of survival individually and as a species. What this has evolved into is not necessarily a need to actually BE in control, but we long to have a sense of control over our environment. You can see that sense of control exercised through rituals that provide a familiar framework and reassure us that there are some constants in our daily lives - rituals can range from your morning hygiene routine to the practice of religion to athletic activities. Social standards also provide us a sense of control - if everyone follows “the rules”, we feel safer.

Many of us also seek out control by actually moving from just sensing it to taking control and acting on our impulses or plans. Control at this point becomes about power. When we feel we aren’t in control, we feel vulnerable and can imagine all sorts of dire consequences: physical pain, abandonment, emotional pain, the list can go on and on. These imaginings transform into real psychological pain therefore, when the real pain happens, we feel it even more deeply than we imagined it. To complicate the situation, we psychologically gain a sense of control by trying to give that control to others and creating trust. Trust and control actually SUPPORT each other, but when trust is broken, we’ll try and find trust “substitutes” like emotional/physical barriers or monitoring another person’s behavior. The catch-22 is that when we use trust substitutes to give us a sense of control, we enact a vicious cycle that EXCLUDES instead of promotes trust.

All of that is fine and great if we know how to recognize when we have control issues. But how many of us really reflect long enough before we’re acting on our lowered sense of control? I know I can catch myself often acting a little irrationally because I feel powerless/helpless/out of control, but I’m not that great at it when strong emotions are involved. What I tend to do when I know I have a problem is give it a little research to see what I can learn and apply to my own life. :-)  Here’s what I found out about control…

We tend to perceive control in our lives in two ways: internal control (I’m in control) or externally (another has control). You’ll often hear this referred to as “locus of control”. Those of us who exercise a lot of internal control tend to be self-reflective and believe that our actions strong influence on how events turn out.  Those of us who believe there is more external control will tend to blame someone OR praise someone for how an event transpired regardless of our own actions. There are lots of reasons why we end up with a more heavily weighted internal or external locus of control, much of which depends on how helpless or powerless we felt as children. Still, at some point, it is our own responsibility to respond to problems that an internal or external control mode causes us (probably a theory based on internal control! LOL!).  If you are unsure which control type you are, consider the following… A person with a stronger internal control center is proactive, competent, responsible, empathetic, and realizes their full potential (good and bad qualities).  Those people also tend to feel responsibility for others’ feelings, which is not always a good thing. A person with a stronger external control center is thoughtless, chaotic, moves form one extreme to another, tends to feel like a victim, and blame others for his/her circumstances.

It is natural to want to control a given situation in which we find ourselves. Our brain uses a sense of control to help us survive.  Giving up control can be very scary, especially when we’ve operated mostly in one mode of control patterns for a lifetime. The benefits of exploring where we lie on the spectrum of need for control can exceed the fear we feel when we are out of control in situations, especially in relationships and health.

More on locus of control tomorrow… unless something more immediate comes up! :-)

Have an awesomely blessed day out there, and don't forget to give someone a smile today!