Healthy control is functional because it helps us get our needs met.   Unhealthy control — dyscontrol — is dysfunctional because it makes getting our needs met impossible. The big challenge facing recovering control addicts is learning to tell one from the other.

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The Second Law of Control is Our addiction to control causes most (maybe all) of our emotional problems.  Anxiety, depression, addictions, bad relationships, broken communication — all deeply rooted in attempts to control what either can’t or shouldn’t be controlled.

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Addiction is an attempt to control feelings, to change them or make them go away.  So the wish for control is the mother of all addictions.  And every addiction is an addiction to control.

Everybody’s addicted to something.  Tell me you’re not and I’ll just assume you’re lying to yourself about it.

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The First Law of Control is We are all addicted to controlling.  We control constantly, compulsively, unconsciously, and even when doing it hurts us or people we care about.  Which is exactly what it means to be addicted to anything.

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I can’t help but like someone who’s brave or honest  (which amount to the same thing).  I can’t help being bored by someone who’s neither.

One reader responded to Twelve Truisms by asking me to explain #8: When deciding what you truly need, trust the body more than the mind.

I wrote back,

The body is where feelings live.

And the function of feelings is to inform us about what we’re experiencing.

By “feelings” I mean both physical sensations (hunger, fatigue, pain) and emotional reactions (mad, sad, glad, scared).

Attending to these cues is essential to physical and emotional health — to knowing what we need and taking effective steps towards getting it.

Yet each of us is trained to ignore these essential messages on a regular basis.

Don’t pee in your pants, find a toilet. Don’t eat that, it’s not dinner time. Big boys don’t cry. Don’t take that tone with me, young lady. Stop giggling, you’ll disturb people. You can’t nap now, the workday’s not over. Never let them see you sweat.

This is called socialization, and our living together with other people makes much of it unavoidable.

But if we become overadapted – get too good at obeying social cues, and regularly ignore messages from our animal bodies – we end up needy, sick and cut off from ourselves.

Or as John Conger writes, “Many of us have lived like renters in a small room of a house we consider barely habitable. Disembodied, we have dangerously compromised the fabric of nature that supports us.”

So any effective therapy must teach people to listen to their bodies, and base more of their choices on what they hear.

 Over time every therapist develops a set of working assumptions that he or she brings to each new case.

Here are some of mine:

1. It is healthier to express feelings than to hide them.

2. Unexpressed feelings lie at the root of all emotional problems.

3. Secrets make us sick.

4. Problems in current relationships tend to echo problems in past relationships.

5. What we don’t get from our parents we will seek from our partners.

6. Being deprived in childhood of attention, acceptance, approval or affection leaves us chronically hungry for the same thing as adults.

7. When trying to understand some feeling or behavior, look for the underlying unmet need.

Recently I posted this observation:

And one reader wrote back, “Please say more about this.”

Okay.  Here’s a metaphor drawn from my work with victims (the self-defined kind) and blamers:

Think of responsibility as a circle you draw around yourself.

Everything inside the circle belongs to you.  Everything outside doesn’t.

By “everything” I mean both bad stuff – problems, demands, risks – and good stuff – solutions, rewards, opportunities.

Some people draw a small circle as a way of avoiding the bad stuff.

It’s their way of telling themselves “Not my fault” or “Not my job.”

They believe the small circle will protect them.

But it’s actually a trap.

Because you can’t solve problems that aren’t yours to solve.  So the small circle makes you feel helpless.

And the more demands you avoid, the less capable you become. So the small circle is weakening.

And the more risks you avoid, the fewer opportunities life offers. So the small circle leaves you feeling deprived.

So instead of safe on a cozy island of invulnerability, small-circle folks find themselves afloat in a sea of helplessness, weakness and unmet needs.

“We walk into the restaurant and sit down and right away I’m in trouble.  My mother — she always does this — wants to switch tables.  And my husband absolutely refuses to move.

“And I’m in the middle.  They’re both looking at me, and I can’t please both of them, and I feel like a wishbone.”

She turns to me.

“What do you do?”

“Leave them at the restaurant, go to McDonald’s and get a cheeseburger,” I say.

The group laughs.  But I’m not kidding.

Often the only way out of such dilemmas is what I call healthy selfishness.

Healthy selfishness — listening to yourself, and putting yourself first at least occasionally — is indispensible practice for any codependent serious about recovery.

Without it you live a kind of wishbone existence, perpetually suspended between the pull of your own needs and preferences and the pull exerted by others.

You may hate hearing this, though.   Because if you’re a codependent you probably see selfishness as some sort of sin.

But here’s the thing:

Most people who see selfishness as sinful were taught to do so by selfish people.

By parents, maybe, who preached unselfishness but at the same time made it clear they expected you to put their preferences first always.  Or by partners, who delivered the unspoken but persistent directive Don’t take care of your self.  Take care of my self instead.  

Sinners in sheep’s clothing.

So in recovery your choice is between continuing your wishbonish existence or become honestly, courageously sinful yourself.

Guess which I’m rooting for?

Enjoy your cheeseburger.

“Which jail would be easier to escape from,” I ask.  “One where they feed you, or one where they starve you?”

We’re in group, where two women are describing their inability to end abusive relationships.

“I kicked him out two weeks ago,” one says.  “Now I can’t stop texting him.”

“Me too.  Every hour,” the other admits.

“What are we, crazy?” the first asks me.

I reply with my question about jails.

“The jail that starves you,” the first woman answers. “Because you’d want to escape more.”

“But motivation’s one thing, strength’s another,” I say.  “And how can you escape if you’re too weak to run away?”

They look at me.

“That’s what’s happening here. You’re not crazy.  These relationships have just weakened you to where it’s hard to escape.”

“Weakened how?” asks the second.

“Starved of acceptance, approval, affection, respect — everything that makes someone strong enough to stand on her own.  The same thing happens in dysfunctional families, which starve you emotionally as a way of keeping you attached.”

“Intentionally?”

“Yes, on some level.   Abusive partners and dysfunctional families know just what they’re doing.  They know each time you knuckle under you become less confident, less able to escape.  It’s why they discourage you from entering therapy, attending self-help, even taking meds.  Those things might make you stronger. And they need you weak and dependent.

“Because — more than anything else — your weakness is the lock on the jailhouse door.”