.

Adult children have trouble

relaxing or having fun.

.

As a kid I never knew what to expect. 

Would Dad come home drunk or sober?  Happy or angry?  Would he hug me or hit me?  Would Mom reassure me or remind me of what I’d done wrong?  Would my parents get along tonight, or yell and break things? 

Living with this uncertainty made me hypervigilant.  

I learned to constantly scan for threats, signs of unrest, tension, anger, conflict, or some other trouble. 

I did that for so long that I lost the ability to not do it, to drop my defenses and relax or just play. 

So eventually I found myself living on the edge of fight or flight, chronically braced against disaster. 

And in this way tried to control my anxiety about living in an unpredictable universe.   

.

Adult children judge

themselves without mercy.

.

Childhood taught me to expect others to judge, criticize or reject me. 

This was so painful that I learned to anticipate it and do it to myself before anyone else could. 

Why?

Because it felt safer to abuse myself before you did.

It felt like my choice, so I could feel less victimized and helpless.  

Like quitting a job before they can fire you, or ending a relationship before you can be dumped. 

And this self-judging saved me, I thought, from being surprised or disappointed when you finally did it.   

(It never occurred to me that you wouldn’t.)

In this way I tried to control the pain I believed always came with relationships.

*

(Missed any chapters? Go to monkeytraps.com and scroll down.)

.

.

Adult children lie when

it would be just as easy

to tell the truth.

.

The truth always made me uneasy.

By the truth I mean what I really thought and felt, how really I saw you and myself, and what I really wanted and feared.

Revealing any of that felt dangerous. 

You might not like my truth.

You might judge or reject me because of it.

It felt much safer to conceal or distort it. 

I concealed and distorted for so long that it became automatic, a habit, my default position. 

And in this way I tried to control my fear of other people.    

.

.

Adult children have trouble

following projects through

from beginning to end.

.

This symptom grew out of my low tolerance for emotional discomfort. 

No one enjoys discomfort.

But I really hated it, because I was uncomfortable most of the time, and because I had no idea how to make myself comfortable. 

I had never learned to detach, or vent, or seek support, or help, or advice. 

So I tried to reduce my discomfort by interrupting what I was doing. 

Whenever things got difficult or confusing or stressful or scary, I walked away from them.

I called this avoidance “taking a break.” 

And since every project turns uncomfortable at some point — requiring we do things we’d rather not do — I ended up not finishing anything. 

Then too, if I ever did complete a project, I’d have to decide what to do next.

And that was uncomfortable too.

(What if I decided wrong?)

Thus for years my garage remained a disaster, my graduate degree incomplete, my book unwritten, and I never lost those last fifteen pounds. 

And in this way tried to control my chronic state of discomfort. 

.

.

Adult children guess at

what normal is, then

try to imitate it.

.

When I was a kid I didn’t feel normal. 

Or whatever it was I thought normal felt like.

What I felt was inadequate, scared, confused, lonely and emotionally hungry. 

I felt this way all the time.

And I assumed these feelings were unique to me.

I assumed other people didn’t go around secretly frightened and hating themselves.

I was also convinced that, if you knew that I felt this way all the time, you would consider me abnormal.

And we all know how the world treats abnormality.

So I hid my feelings and pretended to be like everybody else.

And in this way tried to control how you saw me and how you treated me.

We are what we think.

All that we are arises

with our thoughts.

With our thoughts

we make the world.

~ Buddha 

We can now understand how monkey mind creates monkeytraps.

It does it by seeding our consciousness with worst-case scenarios, watering those seeds with anxiety, then searching frantically for solutions to these imaginary problems.

It creates a frightening fantasy world, and then struggles to control the people, places and things that inhabit that world.

Monkey mind is all about bringing scary stuff under control.

Remember the laundry list I mentioned earlier? Those thirteen symptoms common to untreated adult children?

We can see it, now, as nothing more than one monkeytrap after another.

Let’s take a deeper look at the internal dynamics behind that list.

 

We are locked into our minds,

but we do not really know them.

We are adrift and struggling,

buffeted by the waves of our minds,

having not learned how to focus.

                          ~ Mark Epstein 

Ever tried to meditate?

If so, what you experienced was the normal state of this anxious brain we inherited.

It’s that ceaseless river of thoughts and feelings, fears and fantasies Buddhists call monkey mind.

Research suggests we have more than 6,000 thoughts per day, many of them clustered around the same topics.

Think of each thought as a branch on a tree, and the mind swinging from thought to thought, minute by minute, hour by hour, all day long.

What if I get sick? Will I have enough money? Is my boss mad at me? Is my boyfriend cheating on me? Do I look fat in these clothes? Did my joke offend someone? What does X think of me? Are they talking about me behind my back? What if my tire blows on the expressway? What is X gets reelected? Did I turn off the stove?  

If you have a normal human mind you know exactly what I mean.

Being caught up in this flood of paranoid chatter is enormously stressful. It keeps us anxious, tense, on guard, and exhausted.

That’s because most of the time we’re unable to remember that These are just thoughts.

We respond to them, emotionally and physically, as if they were events in the real world.

It’s like watching a horror film and forgetting it’s just a movie.

The Stoic philosopher Seneca said,

We suffer more from imagination than from reality.

Psychologist Eric Maisel writes,

We are not mad, most of us, but our minds nevertheless resemble lunatic asylums. It is real bedlam in there. 

And from novelist Leni Zumas:

Shut up, she tells her monkey mind. Please shut up, you picker of nits, presser of bruises, counter of losses, fearer of failures, collector of grievances, future and past.

They are all describing monkey mind.

So was Mark Twain when he wrote,

 I’ve lived through some terrible things, some of which actually happened.

The belief in personal control may be

essential to one’s sense of competence

and is basic to human functioning….

When one’s belief in control is threatened,

the result is severely incapacitating. 

~ psychologist Ellen Langer

.

So how did we get so confused? 

Why do human beings end up chasing control when what we really need is power?

Yes, the socialization process and family conditioning drive us into compulsive controlling.

But our conditioning did not start there.

It began millennia ago, when we were an at-risk species struggling to stay alive in a hostile environment, and control-seeking was essential to our survival.

Psychologist Rick Hanson offers a description of how this happened.

“Imagine,” he writes, “some of our earliest mammal ancestors, little rodent-like creatures scurrying about in the shadows of the last dinosaurs.”

The ones that became absorbed in the pleasant sensations of a good meal, warm rocks, and sweet-smelling flowers CRUNCH got eaten because they missed the sound of a slither nearby.

The ones that lived to pass on their genes were nervous and jumpy, quick to notice potential threats and to remember painful experiences.

That same circuitry is active in your brain today in the amygdala, hippocampus, and related structures.

It’s hard-wired to scan for the bad, and when it inevitably finds negative things, they’re both stored immediately plus made available for rapid recall.

In contrast, positive experiences… are usually registered through standard memory systems, and thus need to be held in conscious awareness 10 to 20 seconds for them to really sink in.

In sum, your brain is like velcro for negative experiences and teflon for positive ones.

We are descendents of the “nervous and jumpy” ones that lived, the ones that emerged from this dangerous prehistory both gifted and burdened with a brain whose normal state is essentially paranoid – a brain which constantly remembers old threats and anticipates new ones, an anxious brain obsessed with defending us against potentially dangerous people, place and things.

We are, as Hanson says, hard-wired to scan for the bad.

And we simply cannot stop scanning.

.

The most interesting thing about

the control-mad people is that they

always end up being controlled.

~ Frederick S. Perls

.

The second important difference between control and power lies in how they operate in the real world.

Power is straightforward, but

control works paradoxically.

People who depend on control to feel safe and happy don’t feel safe or happy much of the time. 

That’s because, even when you get control, you can’t keep it for long. 

Chasing control is like chasing a train you can never catch.

In fact, I have noticed three paradoxes of control in my work with clients.

The first paradox:

The more control you need,

the less in control you feel.

The second paradox:

The more you try to control

other people, the more you

force them to control them back.

The third paradox:

To get control in one place,

you must give up control

in another.

These paradoxes are the main reason control addicts tend to be frustrated, anxious and unhappy.

I’ll explore them in more detail later.

For now, it’s enough to point out that, unlike control, personal power is something you really can develop and practice.  

Like a muscle which, when you exercise it, grows stronger over time.

And unlike control, power, as we’re defining it here, really can make you happy.

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.

If I define power simply as “control,”

I will never be able to let go of control

without fear of losing power, [and

so] trapped by this concept

into paranoid vigilance.

~ James Hillman

Here it is important to distinguish control from power.

The two words are often used interchangeably, but they are not the same thing.

In some ways, they’re opposites.

One difference is that power is possible, but control is usually an illusion.

Another is that power can set you free, while controlling can make you crazy.

A third is that power tends to result from intelligent choices made by our inner Adult, while controlling usually stems from the desperate maneuvering of our anxious inner Kid

Again, we’re defining control as the ability to edit reality and force life to meet our expectations. 

But power, as I use the word, means the ability to get your needs met.

To take care of yourself. To not just survive, but to heal, thrive and be happy.

And as difficult as it may be to attain this sort of power, it’s easier than forcing reality to meet your expectations.

Here’s an example of the difference:

Imagine your rich uncle dies suddenly and leaves you control of his multinational corporation.  You wake up one morning the CEO of Big Bucks, Inc.

You go to your new job. You sit behind a huge desk. Four secretaries line up to do your bidding.

You have tons of control. You can hire and fire, buy and sell, build plants or close them, approve product lines, mount advertising campaigns, manage investments, bribe congressmen, you name it.

How do you feel?

If you’re like me, you feel crippled by anxiety. Bewildered and overwhelmed by your new responsibilities. Disoriented. Panicked.

Anything but in control.

Now imagine you decide, “To hell with this.  I quit.  I’m going home to eat a sandwich and take a nap.”

How do you feel now?

Notice that in this situation you gain power only by giving up control.

Now try a thought experiment:

Take a moment to remember the last time your attempt to control people, places or things made it impossible to get your needs met, to take care of yourself.

See the difference?

Often we seek control when it’s power that we really want and need.  But since we never distinguish the two, we end up chasing the wrong one.

And that can be disastrous.

Since it leaves trapped in what James Hillman calls paranoid vigilance.

9-10.

Some things you miss because

they’re so tiny. But some things you

don’t see because they’re so huge.

~ Robert Pirsig

Control is an invisible huge thing.

The urge to control explains a ridiculously wide range of behaviors.  

Often we think of controlling as bossing, bullying or nagging, or a controlling person as someone like Hitler or Trump or Mom.  

But that’s like mistaking the elephant’s trunk for the whole elephant.

We’re controlling whenever we

scratch an itch, 

comb our hair,

mow our lawn, 

salt our eggs, 

spank our child, 

balance our checkbook, 

change channels,

stop at red lights,

vote, 

tell a joke,

punch someone in the mouth, 

flatter someone, 

seduce someone, 

hide our true feelings,

lie,

worry,

obsess,

fantasize,

dream.

You get the idea.

We’re all controlling, and we’re controlling all the time.

We chase control all our lives, waking and sleeping, out in public and deep in the most secret crannies of our minds.  

We chase it consciously and unconsciously, creatively and destructively, wisely and stupidly, from birth until death.

As I said, we can’t help ourselves.  Control-seeking is the default position of our species.

At the same time, because it’s such a given of human experience, we barely notice we’re doing it.

Control isn’t like a tool we pick up and put down.  It’s more like breathing, or blinking, or the way your knee jerks when the doctor taps your patellar tendon.  Constant, automatic, involuntary.

Nor is the wish for control like a faucet we can turn on and off.  An urge to control flows through us continuously, saturates all our behavior and feelings, infuses everything we desire and fear.

It not only drives our behavior, it structures our thinking.  

What is most of our thinking, if not an attempt to somehow change some circumstance, shift some piece of reality closer to what we’d prefer?  What else do you call problem-solving, planning, analyzing, fantasizing, worrying, obsessing?

It also structures our emotional lives. 

Yoga teacher Stephen Cope writes,

Each of us has our own silent War With Reality.  Yogis came to call this duhkha.  Duhkha means, literally, “suffering,” “pain,” or “distress.”  This silent, unconscious war with How It Is unwittingly drives much of our behavior:  We reach for the pleasant.  We hate the unpleasant.  We try to arrange the world so that we have only pleasant mind-states, and not unpleasant ones.  We try to get rid of this pervasive state of unsatisfactoriness in whatever way we can — by changing things “out there.”  By changing the world.[i] 

Like our family conditioning, the idea of control makes up the psychological sea in which each of us swims.

And most of the time we barely notice we’re wet.

The individual’s most fundamental

orientation toward his environment

is that of attempting to control it

in order to meet his needs.

~ sociologist Paul Sites

We should pause here to examine the idea of control and what it means.

Two definitions to start with: control and controlling.

Control means the ability to edit reality – to make people, places and things behave the way we want.

A craving for control is hardwired into us. It’s rooted in our big brains – brains that remember and anticipate, analyze and plan, worry and obsess – brains which, in fact, have a life of their own and cannot stop doing any of those things. 

It works this way: 

Moment to moment, we each carry a picture in our heads of the reality we want.  And we constantly compare that picture to the reality we have.

Everything we do to bring those two into alignment — the reality we want and the reality we have — is what I call controlling.

We seek control constantly. 

We do it in our heads, our speech and our behavior. 

We do it out in the world and we do it in our fantasies.

We do it in ways big and small, obvious and disguised, healthy and unhealthy. 

Some of our controlling is conscious and intentional, but most of is both unconscious and automatic.

We can’t help ourselves.

Control, we believe, means safety, order, predictability, and comfort.

It’s our first line of defense against an uncertain world.

 

Addiction is associated

with the belief that “I must

have (money, power, praise,

or whatever) in order to

be happy.… Because it says

that I must have things

a certain way, it reduces

flexibility and choices.

~ Roger Walsh

We come now to the last of the three metaphors: control addiction.

It’s my favorite explanation for human behavior. 

I like it because it explains so much of what we feel and do as adults.

Whenever I meet a new client I can usually explain their presenting problem by asking myself questions like

What are they trying to control?

What do they think they absolutely must have in order to feel better than they do now?

How are they trying to manipulate their environment in order to get this something?

And especially,

How are they trying to control the people around them in order to meet their needs for safety, acceptance, approval or love?

I like this metaphor, too, because of how it combines the first two metaphors in a theory of how we develop our emotional problems.

Plan A, remember, consists of adaptations we developed as kids for dealing with feelings, relationships and life in general.  And the inner Kid is that authentic part of us which gets driven into hiding over the course of being reshaped by those adaptations.

Well, every Plan A is based on control.

And every wounded inner Kid gets triggered into compulsive controlling.

Since everyone has a Plan A, and everyone carries a wounded Kid inside, we are all, ultimately, control addicts.

This is another idea that bears repeating:

We are, all of us, control addicts.