January 22, 2024
Chapter 21: Outside, inside
Those who focus on the outside
become clumsy on the inside.
~ Confucius
As both a therapist and recovering control addict I’ve learned two more important differences between control and power.
The first of these differences lies in where they focus their attention:
Control focuses outward, while power focuses inward.
What’s that mean?
It means that control focuses on the environment, on other people, places and things.
But power focuses, not on the environment, but on how I react to it — on my own thoughts, feelings and needs.
The more controlling I am, the more preoccupied I become with what’s happening around me, and the more I lose touch with myself.
Becoming powerful, though, is all about listening to the self, and learning to understand and accept what I hear.
So where control addiction pulls me into a hypervigilant war with external reality, developing personal power leads to growing self-awareness, self-acceptance, and self-care.
January 22nd, 2024 at 2:33 pm
Excellent observations and distillations and distinctions, Steve.
As I read your post, I had this thought — for the more spiritually inclined or God-centered reader, I think this speaks more to our experience (it certainly speaks to my experience) —
“Becoming powerful, though, is all about listening to God, and learning to understand and accept and surrender to what I hear.”
In other words, God must increase, I must decrease.
And this assumes that the person has made the shift from a me-centered smaller view of life (where I think I am the main character and star of the show) to a God-centered and larger view of life (where God is God and I am not; this is God’s story, not mine; He is the main character, and I am a peripheral bit actor or actress or even a stage manager, etc).
January 22nd, 2024 at 4:54 pm
Thanks, John. I don’t disagree. When I work with clients who are less God-centered, though, I try encourage their faith in their selves — i.e., the validity of their perceptions, the legitimacy of their feelings, the instinctual wisdom of the organism they embody — which to my mind is just another way of describing the God part.