Softening Our Control
By Katie Wise, Marriage and Family Therapist Associate; Supervised by Terra Mattson, MA, LMFT, LPC
Planning and preparing are good skills - they help us stay organized and make sure those around us have what they need. They make our leadership feel reliable and help our organizations and family calendars run smoothly. Some of us are even inherently wired to bring these qualities into our relationships and communities for greater flourishing.
But when our motivations for planning and preparing shift, they can morph into controlling behaviors that run interference on our ability to trust God, ourselves, and others. A hypervigilance that doesn’t let us rest. Our surface-level calm can actually be anxiety in disguise.
Anxiety in Disguise
Control often masquerades as planning, double - or triple - checking, seeking reassurance, perfectionism, organizing, researching, or trying to anticipate every possible outcome. It can look like fixing everything in sight or numbing out on your phone when things become overwhelming. Sometimes it shows up for us as never taking a break, asking for help, or delegating.
Commonly, our control is a high-functioning busyness that the world around us celebrates as ambition, success, and accomplishment. But underneath the surface, our success is run by a hypervigilant fear response that keeps us on edge, exhausted, and chronically anxious as we try to manage our world in ways that we weren’t meant to.
And while control usually has the good intention of soothing our fear alarm or protecting us from perceived failure, embarrassment, or harm, there can be a cost.
Control as a Trauma Response
Our tendency towards control sometimes develops because control truly did keep us safe in the past.
Trauma inherently has an element of “out of control.” Something happened that we didn’t expect. We felt blindsided. We felt powerless when our personal agency or voice didn’t matter, and we got hurt. Someone who we trusted the most caused us deepest pain.
Our brain’s natural safety response is to make predictions about what could happen, trying to help protect us from future experiences of getting hurt again. This is our body’s wisdom to keep us safe, and our bodies are designed in this way on purpose. It’s a protective mechanism that helps us survive the hardest parts of our story.
Engaged Surrender
However, sometimes, when we are out of danger, our bodies and brains continue to try to maintain control in these ways even when we’re safe. The control that kept us safe and protected us in the past now keeps us from trusting again in healthy relationships today, running with a 90-mile-an-hour motor all the time without being able to slow down, or unable to rest securely when we make mistakes or face uncertainty.
There is another way. Softening our control is not the same as giving up agency or becoming passive. Instead, it’s learning to trust ourselves to respond to what happens and trusting our own capacity to navigate the outcome. We can grow our tolerance for discomfort and learn to sit in the unknown spaces of fear. It’s learning how to trust God’s care and the care of others in the hard and growing our ability to vulnerably let safe and trusted others in.
Where to Start
What if the goal wasn’t to know all the answers or ensure an outcome but instead to trust yourself (e.g. your problem solving, your instincts, your own wisdom) more deeply to handle what unfolds? And, what if the goal wasn’t to suddenly give up complete control but to soften it, even just a little bit? Softening our control doesn’t mean we give up, lose our agency and voice, or stop caring, but rather that we embrace the process without having to guarantee the outcome.
Practice small doses of uncertainty.
Don’t reread the text five times before sending it. Let someone else make the decision. Allow yourself to say, “I don’t know yet” or “I’m not sure” out loud to someone else.Invite one person in.
Identify a safe and trusted person in your world who you can be honest with about the hard things and who can be an anchor when the unforeseen arrives. We are not meant to muscle through hard alone. If you are having a difficult time identifying someone you trust to walk in the hard with you, you might consider finding a therapist.
Delegate.
If you are someone who has a hard time letting go of the reins, start small. Pick a small task - such as choosing the restaurant or giving someone else the responsibility of setting up the calendar invitation - and practice asking for help (even if you can do it yourself).
Name what is in your control - and what isn’t.
Naming can help get us grounded. Create a list. For instance, we can control our responses, choices, boundaries, behaviors, pacing, and care for self. We can’t control how others respond or feel; the future; the outcome; or what has already happened.
Therapeutic Support
Sometimes, surrendering control takes healing our story, and this is work we don’t have to do alone. If you sense that your control has deeper roots, know that I and our team at Living Wholehearted are here and would be honored to walk alongside you.
To schedule an appointment, email Katie directly at katie@livingwholehearted.com.