Each weekday morning my wife’s alarm goes off at six o’clock.  Usually I ignore it.  Today it wakes me immediately and totally. 

I swing my legs out of bed and sit up.  I sniff the air. 

I groan. 

 My bedroom smells of bananas. 

Oh good, he whispers.  You’re up.

“I’m not up,” I mutter.  “Dead man walking.   Give me a minute.” 

I stumble off to the bathroom. 

Out in the kitchen Mr. Coffee gurgles at me, implying there may be hope after all.  I fill my cup (ah, sweet nectar of life) and let the gravity of habit pull me down the stairs to my office, to my cluttered desk and my cluttered mind.    

Are you up now? Bert asks.

***

So.  Last time you said something about listening for instructions.

Yes.

I have no idea what that means. 

I know. 

It means turning your attention inward.  Listening to your body.

Why do that?

It’s where the feelings live.

Oh.  Well, I already do that.

The hell you do.

(Startled:)  Why so cranky?

If you were listening I wouldn’t be here now.  I’d be upstairs in bed.

Oh.  (Defensive:)  But we have work to do.

Sure.  There’s always work to do. 

And that’s why you’re cranky? 

No.  I like working.  Cranky is how I feel when I stop listening. 

Oh.  (Pause.)  Most people I know are cranky, on some level.

Right.

Why is that?

Most people don’t listen.  They’ve been trained not to.  Actually they’ve been trained to act like they have no bodies at all.

Trained how?

As kids.  We learn early on to stop listening to our bodies, to follow rules instead.  To eat on schedule, sleep on schedule, poop in the right receptacle, and so on. 

You’re saying that’s bad?

I’m saying it’s the thin edge of the wedge. 

What wedge?

The wedge that eventually separates us from who we are.  We stop listening to our internal voices — feelings, instincts —  and as we get older the distance between us and the voices gets wider and wider.  School widens it bigtime.  Work widens it further.  Eventually most of us forget how to listen.  And end up permanently cranky. 

On some level.

Yes.  Not always a conscious one.

Does this wedge have a name?

Socialization.

Is there an alternative?

To socialization?  Maybe, if you go live on a mountaintop by yourself.  If you live with other people you get socialized.

I remember how shocked I was during my training when a supervisor told me that the healthiest anyone ever gets is neurotic.  I didn’t understand.  Or maybe I did and didn’t want to believe it.

What’s that mean, “neurotic”?

Split.  Split by the wedge of socialization, into controller and controlled.  Divided against yourself.

So.  What’s the answer? 

Answer?  To what?

To the problem of neurosis.

You’re not listening.  There’s no “answer.”   Neurosis is inevitable.

I’ll ask it another way.  How do I achieve happiness?

Same answer.

What?  Unhappiness is inevitable?

Pretty much.  What was it Freud said?  Something about the goal of analysis being to transform neurotic misery into ordinary unhappiness.

But then Buddha said the same thing two thousand years ago.  “Life is suffering.”  The first Noble Truth. 

Are you trying to bum me out?

No, no.  This is actually good news.

How can you say that?

Look.  Most of us don’t know what the hell we’re doing, or why we’re doing it.  We have this idea that we’re supposed to be Happy, and if we aren’t, well, we must be screwing up somehow. 

It’s a sort of secret perfectionism.  We keep comparing how we feel to how we want to feel, and when the two don’t match we decide something’s wrong.

Nothing’s wrong.  Life just hurts.  

And we have to live with it.  Like we live with bad weather.

Right.  And there is great relief in giving up this perfectionism.

Where does listening to the body come into all this?

It’s something to rely on instead.  It replaces chasing some mythic Happiness with the more achievable goal of getting our simplest needs met.   Tired?  Rest.  Hungry?  Eat.  Sad?  Cry.  Like that. 

Does sound simple, all right.

Simple, but important.  

I’ll give you an example.  Let’s say a client comes into my office all twisted up over some problem or other.  And he’s looking to me for magic.  To make the problem vanish somehow, so he can feel better. 

What do you do?

I offer him a cup of water.

That’s it?

No.  I push my hassock over to him and tell him to put his feet up on it.  I may suggest he take off his shoes.            

Then I put a pillow behind his head on the sofa and invite him to lean back.

Then I tell him to breathe.  Just breathe.

Then what?

Then I wait.  

And what happens?

He feels better.  

This works?

Almost always.  Takes about five minutes, for most people.  Some take longer. 

Of course some people won’t even take the water, or put their feet up.

Why?

It scares them.  Listening to feelings means not controlling them.   And they think they need to stay in control. 

Why?

Usually they’ve been traumatized.  These are the seriously scared ones, the ones that never relax. 

(Silence.)

What’s the matter?

Nothing.  I’m thinking I’d like to stop now.

Stop talking?

Yes.

Really.  Why?

I’m a little tired.

(Smiling:)  May be hope for you yet.

Bert replies to “War with what is”:

Didn’t like that last post.

Why?

Too long.  Too many quotations.

Yeah.  I tried to shorten it.  Ran out of time.

And I’m afraid you may have pissed people off.

How so?

Are you kidding?  You called them crazy.

I did?

Look at your freakin’ last line.

“Because everyone you know is just as crazy as you.”  Oh.  Well, I didn’t mean that literally.   Figure of speech.   

Really.  Do you tell your clients they’re crazy?  Even when they are?

Not directly, no.

Be diplomatic, moron.  You’re a social worker.

I’ll try to remember.

(Pause).  You don’t think I’m paranoid, do you?

Well, sure. 

You do?

A little.

I’m not paranoid.  I’m careful.

That’s what they all say.

All my controlling is absolutely necessary.

They all say that, too.

How is it not necessary?

Most of what you’re scared of isn’t real. 

Bullshit.

Like just now.  You were worrying I pissed people off.

So?

People you don’t even know.   You act like you can read their minds.

I know some of them.

Not the point.  The point is you have no evidence that they’re pissed off, outside your fevered imagination.   You’re projecting all over the place.

It feels real.

Projections do.  Doesn’t mean they are.

Another example.

Friday night, at the wedding.

I was fine at the wedding. 

You didn’t dance.  Cait wanted you to, but you avoided it.

But I don’t dance.  

I know.  Why not?

 I look silly.

The family says you look fine.  They like it when you dance.

I’m still afraid I’ll look silly.

Why is that?

People will judge me.

How do you know?  Has anyone ever said you look silly when you dance?

No.

Has anyone ever watched you dance and laughed at you?

No.

Mocked you?  Threw food?

No.

Then how can you be sure anyone has ever thought that? 

I just know.

No, you don’t.  You can’t, unless you ask them.  You can’t even be sure they would notice you.  But let’s take it a step further.  What if you did ask, and they did say you looked silly.  “Yes, Steve, I watched you dance, and yes, you looked like a jerk.”  What then?

I don’t follow.

Why would it matter?  Ninety percent of the people at that wedding were total strangers.  You’ll never see them again in your whole life.  If  they notice you dancing, and if they think you look silly, who gives a crap? 

(No answer.  His brow is furrowed in pain.  This means he’s thinking.)

So as I see it there are two problems here.  One is, you scare yourself with your own projections, which are pure fantasy.  Remember: “We see things not as they are, but as we are.” 

Again with the quotations.  Who said that?

Anais Nin.

Was she at the wedding?

No.  The other problem is you think you need to control other people in order to feel good about yourself.   Emerson had a good line about that.

I’ll bet he did.

“Why should the way I feel depend on the thoughts in someone else’s head?” 

Good question.  Why should it?

It shouldn’t.  But it does.  Because we’re monkeytrapped.  All of us, control addicts.  It’s just how we’re wired.

Yes, but:  Remember that button people wore back in the sixties?  “Even paranoids have real enemies.”

True enough.  But it’s a problem when you can’t distinguish real enemies from imaginary ones. 

Previously I compared control to an elephant, a large one with many parts, and myself to a blind man.   

I’m still trying to braille my way to a grasp of control, one wrinkly body part at a time.   

Here’s another piece of the beast:   

(3) Control is paranoid.

Control comes from the Latin: contra rotullus.   

This I learned from the Jungian psychologist James Hillman, who in his book Kinds of Power  implies the term originally referred to fighting gravity.   

“Control is agency, yes, but of a  restrictive kind,” Hillman writes.  “The word comes from contra rotullus, against the roll.  Since the free flow of inertia follows the path of least resistance, the easy path downhill is controlled by restraints.”  

Against the roll.  I found myself imagining the first “control” as some sort of wheel block, some lump of wood or stone used to stop ox carts from rolling downhill.   

I really liked this idea.   

I liked seeing control as rooted in the idea of prevention.  It confirmed my sense of how controlling functions in me and the people I know: as a bulwark against surprise and misfortune.   

Control, I realized, is defensive.  We control not to make things happen, but to stop them from happening.    

Hillman writes,   

When we look closely at what we want when we want to be in control, we find mainly preventive desires.  We want not to be bugged, not to be demeaned, not to be blocked and criticized.  We want obstacles removed that compete, like other divisions in the company and other gangs in the ‘hood.  Control means preventing interference.  It has a conservative effect.    

The most controlling people I know are obsessed with conserving, protecting and preventing.  They expect bad things to happen.  (Usually because bad things have already happened to them.  Abuse and trauma victims, for example, are famously controlling.  As is anyone who grew up in an alcoholic or otherwise dysfunctional family.  Which aside from Beaver and the other Cleavers pretty much covers everyone else.)  So they fear the unpredictable, the unexpected, the unplanned.  They rely on control to fend off danger and discomfort.  They live, whether they admit it or even realize it, like frightened people.  

Control, for all its self-assured position of command, relies on a defensive vision, and [its] traits — enforced loyalty, exactitude, suspicion of the hidden watchfulness — are paranoid traits.   

Paranoia, of course, is an extreme form of craziness.  Paranoids imagine the world’s out to get them.  I’ve worked with paranoids.  They were scared most of the time, unable to trust anyone, led lives of confusion, uncertainty and occasionally panic.   

But so do control addicts.   

They experience the world as dangerous, people as unreliable, relationships as competitive, emotions as scary, honesty as risky, and control as their shield against wounding by all of the above.  They hate change, especially change they haven’t asked for.  In therapy they’re almost always expressing resistance to something — some unfolding of events, some anticipated consequence, some expression of the innate tendencies of people around them.  Often they’re anxious or angry without knowing why.   

Yoga teacher Stephen Cope:  

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.   

Alexander Lowen points out, “Because we are afraid of life, we seek to control or master it.”  Logical, maybe.  Effective?  Not so much.   

No, worse than that.  Self-destructive.  Because the War With What Is is actually a problem disguised as a solution.    

Why?  Three reasons.   

First:  Fighting reality is hard work.  (Try swimming against the tide of a stream or a river.  Fight the flow, and see how long you last.)  So control addicts end up stressed, strained and exhausted.   

Second:  The war is unwinnable.  It’s not that control addicts don’t try hard enough.  What they’re trying to do simply can’t be done.   So they end up feeling depressed and inadequate.     

Third (and this is a big one):  Control addiction is self-perpetuating.  Think about it.  To be scared of reality is to organize your life around fear.  You tense up, go into defense mode and stay there.  “As long as we are defensive, we are going to be frightened” (Lowen).  So fear makes you defensive, which makes you more frightened, which makes you more defensive, and so on.  Like any addiction.  The more you control, the more you need to.    

Control addiction, then, is a sort of garden-variety paranoia.   A form of everyday craziness you don’t notice much.  

Because everyone you know is just as crazy as you.　   

Last time I wrote about how the idea of control simultaneously (a) plays a huge role in our lives and (b) is invisible to most of us.  Later I realized that one of my favorite metaphors perfectly captures this weird duality.   Here:  

Peary relates that on his polar trip he traveled one whole day toward the north, making his sleigh dogs run briskly.  At night he checked his bearings to determine his latitude and noticed with great surprise that he was much further south than in the morning.  He had been toiling all day toward the north on an immense iceberg drawn southwards by an ocean current.   ~ Jose Ortega y Gassett

Here’s why the idea of control fascinates me.   It’s an emotional iceberg,  constantly carrying each of us southwards — away from where we want to go or think we’re headed.  Its size and invisibility make it easy to overlook.   But ignoring it is dangerous.   Hardly matters how hard you mush towards your goal when the iceberg is moving you in the opposite direction. Conclusion:  Lost?  Stuck?  Exhausted?  Stop mushing.  Examine the ice underneath.