When I am feeling overwhelmed or overly anxious about something, I get very uptight about minor things going wrong that would slip by without a response on a normal day.
I get particularly tetchy with the kids, expecting way too much from them and, naturally they fail. This makes me feel even more tetchy and frustrated and everyone ends up miserable.
On a normal day I’m quite an easy going person who is fairly self-secure and can change and adapt if things don’t go the way I would expect but then, every so often, the monster appears and I become a Control Freak. A bit like the hulk but not green. And with clothes.
When a close member of my family was in hospital having an emergency operation, my response was to make sure the house was very clean and tidy every day even if it meant that I was mopping the kitchen floor at 11.00pm. My life might have felt turned upside down but at least I had some stability at home.
What makes us into a control freak? Why do we do we feel the need to control our environment?
We all have ways of trying to manage our lives in ways that promote safety and happiness, and minimise or eliminate pain and danger and unhappiness. Ultimately, the control element is to help us in minimising our pain or unhappiness.
We have all known or know people who control using obvious methods of manipulation, threats, demands etc. but there also ways of controlling by using helplessness (“Please do this, I don’t know how to …”), silence or ignoring (withdrawal), refusing to get involved or not taking responsibility (passive aggressive behaviour).
The problem is that controlling our environment in this way doesn’t necessarily get us what we need or want and can make life unpleasant for those around us. Rather, we need to learn to manage our environment and circumstances rather than change it to our will.
Correlation is not causation
I had this phrase drummed into me during statistics at school and it is so true about life in general – not restricted to maths problems. For example, just because it might rain on a bank holiday doesn’t mean it’s raining because it is a bank holiday. Or your bus might be late 3 Tuesdays in a row because of road works further down the road and the resulting build-up of traffic. The bus isn’t late because it is a Tuesday and probably won’t be late once the road repairs have ended.
Many of us that we believe that it is because of our efforts to control things, through whatever means we have chosen to do so, that things go the way we want them to, and if they don’t, we are likely to conclude that the result has occurred because we didn’t do it well enough, long enough, hard enough or adequately enough to bring about our desired outcome.
In reality, our efforts to control things is just an illusion. We need to recognise this fact if we are to relinquish our need to control.
If you identify with elements of this article or would like to know a bit more – the next post will look at what we can do to help manage ourselves and our reactions to circumstances rather than the control method.