What Drives The Need To Control?

So I'm going to share something about control here. It's the need to control situations, control relationships, control, above all, yourself. This need we have to put sort of standards on our own behaviour and make sure that we're this type of person. I'm going to talk about how we can kind of drop that and I'll talk about the motivation to drop it because in past videos one of the things I focus on is the persona shadow kind of dynamic. Everything that's good that we're attached to, this artificial kind of identity we construct for ourselves is full of little sub-personalities we have and one of those is the controller. The nervous system desperately feels like it needs to control aspects of our own life, our own behaviour primarily. But other people, we have all sorts of scripts for how they should behave, outcomes, situations in our lives, we desperately need to control it. It drives a lot of anxiety really. So we're noticing that's going to lead to a lot of anxiety, it's going to feel stressful. So the thing to remember about control, this controller sub-personality that we have, which is in the persona, we like to feel in control, is that the shadow aspect of it is really very interesting. So ask yourself, what's the opposite of the controller? It's this part of ourselves that we don't like, we want to put away, deny, repress, project, even get rid of it as far as possible. Ask yourself what's the opposite of control? Now the concept I use for this, the shadow aspect of the controller, is the wrecker. Now what is the wrecker? The wrecker is, do you ever hear someone say something like, I don't know what happened to me there, I just lost control. So this might be as a kind of an explanation for an angry outburst or I just went crazy. This wrecker part that surfaces every now and then is actually caused by the controller. It's the attachment, the need to stay in control primarily of ourselves in life. It's creating the wrecker. So an example, what am I really talking about here, an example would be, let's say someone goes to visit their family for the holidays, right, and they're promising themselves, look I'm not going to react no matter what gets said, I'm going to stay calm and I'm not going to say anything. So they really have this idea of, look I'm being very accepting of other people when I go there. But really all they're doing, they're still attached to the controller because they're trying to control and maybe even repress feelings of frustration or anger and to control themselves. Okay, all the while, every time we're attached to this part of the persona, the thing that's acceptable in our eyes and hopefully acceptable to other people we think, we're really feeding into this wrecker. This explosive outburst is just ready to come out, okay. So it's not much use me talking about this if there's no solution, right. So there has to be a solution to it. Now the solution is not for us to get rid of the wrecker because that's what we're all trying to do anyway. We're always repressing it and denying it and trying to get rid of it, right, hide it, get as far away from it as possible. So that's not going to work. This will be solved by looking at our attachment and our belief in the usefulness of the controller. The alternative to the controller is acceptance, complete acceptance. So that person who goes into the family situation with their relatives, rather than trying to stay calm, it involves much more self-awareness and just an acceptance of, look, I'm going to feel some emotions maybe in this experience with my family. And okay, I may do certain things, I may take breaks, I may take walks, I may step out if things get too intense for me, but I'm going to allow myself to feel whatever it is that's going to come up for me and I'm not going to condemn myself or judge myself for that. Okay, I'm going to allow, I'm going to accept it just as it is and just be curious about it. I'm not going to try and control it though. It could also be about controlling other people. You know, we have all these scripts and the controller loves to have scripts about how other people should behave, so it could be a part of it is about accepting other people. Sure it is, but I'm going to drop my script that my parents should be unconditionally supportive of me, for instance, or whatever script it is we have about our siblings or our grandparents or whatever it is. Okay, so let's just go in and look at the control I am placing on other people. I'm nailing myself in these situations. Let's see if I can just drop that with acceptance, primarily acceptance for myself and my own emotional reaction. See, the issue is what's really happening here is all of this is coming from a nervous system which feels threatened and it doesn't have to be rational. It just does, maybe based on past experiences. So rather than trying to control that, we need to actually try and try to calm it down and make it feel like it's okay. Above all, the first step in that is not condemning it for having the reaction because all that's going to lead to is repression and suppression and getting rid of it. Again, next year at the family dinner, it'll be the exact same experience all over again. Okay, so a quick video here today about this. What happens? Why do I have these angry outbursts maybe with family or whatever it is? Well, it's because of this sub-personality of me to control my own emotions primarily. So rather than controlling them, we just work on understanding them and allowing them to be there. Maybe you don't necessarily act out of it, but you certainly don't judge yourself for feeling like that. There's all these ideas about other aspects of the persona which I should be the good person, I should be the considerate son or daughter or whatever. So this is kind of the work really we have to do is to get out of this mindset of persona shadow which is really just one is feeding the other into a different mindset and acceptance is a huge huge part of that mindset. Guys, I hope that was helpful and maybe just bring some awareness to that if you're going into a situation like that where you feel like you're trying to maybe put a script on yourself or someone else or around your own emotional experiences. Take care and I'll talk with you again soon.