Session 38: Monkey

I have a question.

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Shoot. 

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What’s my single biggest problem?

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Addiction to control.

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Not depression?

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Well, that’s related to the addiction.

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Not anxiety?

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Related to the addiction.

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My overeating?

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Related.

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My overworking?  Fear of other people?  Fear of my wife?

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Related.  Related.  Related. 

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All my problems are related to control addiction?

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Pretty much.

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I sound pretty screwed up.

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Actually you’re pretty ordinary.

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How so?

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We’re all addicted to control.  And it causes most of our emotional problems.

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Explain.

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There’s a part of each of us that craves control. 

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bert-11

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It’s always awake, usually scared, and constantly trying to control stuff.

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What stuff?

Everything.  External stuff, like people, places and things.  And internal stuff, like our own feelings, thoughts and behavior.

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Because it can’t accept reality as it is, it spends all its time fighting reality.  Which, of course, is a war it can’t win.  Which leaves us depressed, anxious and addicted.

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bert-14

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I call this part the Inner Monkey. 

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Interesting.  But it doesn’t sound like me at all.

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therapist-15

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bert

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therapist-16

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bert-17

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Have you looked in a mirror lately? 

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* * *

Session 37: Garbage

I remember my panic attack on the first day of kindergarten.

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therapist-1

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I remember the bully who made me eat ants on the playground.

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therapist-2

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I remember dad getting drunk and fighting my uncle on our front lawn.

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therapist-3

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I remember running away from summer camp because I was so homesick.

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therapist-4

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I remember telling a girl I loved her, and her answering “Thanks.”

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What the hell are you doing?

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Remembering.

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Why?

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I don’t know.  Bad memories just come up when I feel stressed.

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Well, stop chewing on them.

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Why?

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It’s bad mental hygiene.  You’re like a cat poking through a garbage can.

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So?

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There’s nothing nourishing there.  And you’ll just stink up your present.

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But I’m only…thinking.

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Not really.  Most of what we call thinking isn’t thinking at all.

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What is it, then?

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Random mental activity.  Automatic, aimless, illogical.  Remembering, projecting, ruminating…

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bert-12

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…obsessing, fantasizing, worrying — waste of time, mostly.  Some of it does more harm than good.

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How?

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By triggering bad feelings that have absolutely nothing to do with your current reality.

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Oh.  That.

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It’s the main reason we’re such neurotic monkeys.

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Can I do anything about it?

You can train your mind.  Meditation’s the best long-term solution.  And there are short-term tricks you can learn, like Thought Stopping.  But remember two things.

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What two things?

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Your mind has a mind of its own.  And even the sanest mind is a little nuts.

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So…

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So chew gum, not garbage.

* * *

Session 36: Balls

bert 1

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How are you?

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Overwhelmed.

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By what?

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The usual.  Work.  Bills.

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therapist-3

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The marriage.  The kids.  The house.

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therapist-4

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Plus a hundred other things.

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therapist-5

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The leak under my sink.  The hole in my roof.  The racoon in my attic.

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therapist-6

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My car needs a tuneup.  My lawn needs reseeding.  My dog needs a vet.

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therapist-7

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I’m fat and should exercise.  I’m anxious and should meditate.  I eat crap and not enough vegetables.

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therapist-7

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And on and on and…

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You do seem to be juggling a lot right now.

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bert-9

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How have you handled this is the past?

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I try to keep all the balls in the air.

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23

How’s that work? 

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I exhaust myself.  The balls drop.  I get depressed.

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23

I see.  Want a suggestion?

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Please.

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Drop the balls now.

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Deliberately?

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Yes.  For today.  Drop all but two.

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Which two?

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First, get more rest.  Second, lean on someone. 

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Lean how?  On who?

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Someone who’ll give you permission to be selfish.  

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Isn’t selfish bad?

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No, selfish is essential.  Selfless is bad.  Depression’s worse.

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Can I lean on you?

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Sure.  

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bert

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Now go take a nap.

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23 

* * *

The birth of Bert

(Steve speaking:)

Not long ago a new Monkeytraps reader sent me an email asking, “So where did Bert come from, anyway?” 

I took that as an invitation to repost Bert’s story of his own birth, which originally appeared here in 2011 in two parts under the clever title “Bert’s born.” 

It’s a little long.  But Bert likes to tell it because, well, it’s about him.  And as we say,  scratch a codependent, find a narcissist.

*

Steve was born in 1950.

Me, I’ve no idea when I was born. I do, however, remember my first public appearance.

It was on Steve’s first day of kindergarten.

Actually no, it was Visiting Day, the spring before kindergarten started, when kids visited for half a day to get their first taste of public education.

Steve has vague memories of the classroom — bright banks of windows, colored plastic chairs, fingerpaintings on a corkboard, voices rattling off the walls — but no clear memory of how he felt. Not hard to deduce, though, given what happened.

He panicked.

Walked in, froze up. Stood rooted to the tile floor like a stump in a stream, while the other kids bustled and flowed around him.

After a few moments the teacher called the kids over to her desk, and they clumped and moved obediently in that direction. Except Steve, who stayed rooted.

He was shy kid, inexperienced, insecure, especially in new situations. This was certainly one of those, and he found himself flooded with feelings he had not expected and could not begin to control.

At which point, Ta Da, I took over.

“Go to the corner,” I whispered.

He did.

Piled there beside the coat rack was a stack of oversized building blocks, hollow wooden cubes painted bright colors.

“Take down on the blue one,” I told him.

He did.

“Put it on the floor.”

He did.

“Sit on it,” I said.

He did.

“Now don’t move,” I said.

He did, staring blindly ahead.

The teacher came over. Nice lady, print dress. Soft voice. Steve never saw her face because he was staring at her shoes, which were brown.

She said something to him. He shook his head. She said something else. He shook his head again. She waited a moment, then walked away.

We spent the rest of the morning together there in the corner. First we sat perfectly still and tried to be invisible, convinced that if we moved or even breathed loudly someone would notice. After thirty minutes it became clear the nice teacher was content to ignore us, and we began to relax. The roaring in our ears died away. Our hands warmed up. We looked around at the room. We watched the teacher playing with the kids. We watched the kids playing with each other.

After another hour this got boring.

I noticed him eyeing a triangular block, off to one side. It was yellow.

“If you put that behind you,” I whispered, “you could lean back on it.”

The idea of reaching for the block and becoming visible scared him all over again, so we argued about it for a while.

I can’t remember how I changed his mind. But eventually he bent his upper body sideways, grabbed the yellow block and slipped it behind him. Then he leaned back and waited for someone to notice.

Nobody did.

He found this interesting.

Maybe this place was more tolerable than he thought.

Ten more minutes passed.

“You could put your feet up,” I whispered.

He stood and reached for another block.

                                   *

The next block Steve reached for was red. He placed it on the floor in front of the blue one, sat down and put his feet up on it. Feeling highly visible, even daring, he waited for the room to react.

The room ignored him.

“More,” I muttered.

He found a yellow block next, and put it beside the red one. Then he found a green one and put it on the other side.

He made a line of blocks, a little wall. Then sat nervously down to await developments.

None developed.

No one in the classroom noticed, or if they did, they didn’t let on.

He went on building. He made a second tier of blocks, and then a third. When he was done the little multicolored wall rose to his waist and enclosed a small triangular space that felt oddly safe and protected. He sat back down and examined the wall happily. It felt like some sort of achievement.

I think Steve wants to add something here.

Coming to mind is a passage from a Hemingway story. It’s about a traumatized war veteran making camp in the Michigan woods. “Nick was happy as he crawled inside the tent. He had made his camp. He was settled. Nothing could touch him. It was a good place to camp. He was there, in the good place. He was in his home where he had made it.”

Yes. It was that sort of achievement. No small thing, creating safety for yourself in a dangerous world.

That’s about it for my story. Nothing else interesting happened. We stayed behind the wall until we went home.

So why did I tell you this?

Well, I’m introducing myself. As I told you last week, I’m Steve’s inner monkey. The part that seeks control. The part that tries to protect him by changing reality, transforming it into something more like what he wants, or needs, or prefers. You just saw me at work.

But I’m also introducing the subject of this blog, which is not a simple one. Control is a slippery fish.

I’ll let Steve have the last word on that:

For a long time after I began examining control I didn’t distinguish between the simple impulse to control and the addiction to controlling. I saw it as a problem, not a solution. A confused attempt to avoid discomfort or pain. Trying to change realities beyond their control seemed to be the main way people made themselves (and others) sick, exhausted and miserable.

But it’s more complicated than that. Controlling is defensive, sure. But it’s adaptive too. Building that block wall may have cut little Steve off from the class, but it also gave him a way to stay in the room.

So controlling can be both irrational and necessary, avoidant and creative. A problem and a solution.

As Bert says, a slippery fish.

* * *

The meaning of control

“A blog about control,” it says at the top of this page.

So what are we talking about here?

What is control, anyway?

What does the word mean? What does the idea mean?

We must think we know. We use it often enough.

This morning, for the hell of it, I Googled “control.” Google replied with 225,000,000 items. That’s million.

I tried the same thing at Amazon.com. Amazon coughed up 168,459 books with control in their titles.

So what is this thing that so fascinates us?

Good question.

There’s an old story about blind men brailling an elephant. One feels the elephant’s side and says, “Ah, I get it. An elephant is just like a wall.” Another feels the elephant’s leg and says “Ah, I get it. An elephant is just like a tree.” Another feels the trunk and decides an elephant is just like a snake. Another feels the tail and decides an elephant is like a rope. And so on.

Control is an elephant. Big, big elephant. Many parts, many contradictions. After fifteen years of studying it I sometimes still feel like a blind man, groping my way towards the truth, one wrinkly body part at a time.

Join me.

                                                                              ***

control: The capacity to manage, master, dominate, exercise power over, regulate, influence, curb, suppress, or restrain.     ~ Judith Viorst

That’s fairly broad, as definitions go. My definition, which you won’t find in any dictionary but stands behind everything I write here, is broader:

                    The ability to dictate reality.

Dictate as in  direct, determine or define. 

Reality as in, well, everything. Everything under the sun. All the nuts and bolts of the world as we experience it, both the external world (of other people, places, and things) and the internal world (of our own thoughts, feelings and behavior).

By control, then, I mean nothing less than the ability to edit reality, transform it into whatever we need or want or prefer.

And by controlling I mean everything we do towards that end, whether or not what we do is effective, or healthy, or if we even know that we’re doing it.

First question: Is control the best word for what I’m describing?

I don’t know. But I’ve tried and can’t think of a better one.

The Buddhist term attachment probably comes closest to what I mean. As does a Tibetan word Pema Chrodron writes about, shenpa. But control is so much more important in English (Google lists only 16 million items for attachment) it seems the best label for what I’m interested in describing here.

Next question:

What are the most important parts of this elephant?

Well, the first two things you notice about control are

(1) It’s enormous.

and

(2) It’s invisible.

“Some things you miss because they’re so tiny,” Robert Pirsig writes. “But some things you don’t see because they’re so huge.”

Control is one of those invisible huge things.

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, Donald Trump or Mom. But that’s like mistaking the trunk for the whole elephant.

We’re controlling whenever we scratch an itch. Comb our hair. Mow our lawn. Salt our soup. Spank our child. Balance our checkbook. Change channels. Stop at a red light. Vote. Punch someone’s nose. Flatter someone. Seduce someone. Lie. Disguise our true feelings. Get drunk. Worry. 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 secretest crannies of our mind. We chase it consciously and unconsciously, creatively and destructively, wisely and stupidly, from birth until death.

We can’t help it. 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. The need 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?

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.

Session 35: Stuck

I’m stuck.

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How so?

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I don’t like myself.  I really want to change.

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therapist 2

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But as hard as I try, I can’t seem to.

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Change yourself?

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Right.  Any advice on that?

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Yes.  But you won’t like it.

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How do you know?

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Nobody likes it.  Nobody listens.

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Why not?

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It’s counterintuitive.  Contradicts what they want to believe. 

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Well, I’m desperate.   Try me.

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If you insist.

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Bert 8

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The way to change yourself is:

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Bert 9

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Stop trying.

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Stop trying what?

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Stop trying to change.  That’s how you change.

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You’re confusing me.

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It’s called the Paradoxical Theory of Change.  “The more you try to change yourself,” it says, “the more stuck you become.”

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Bert 12

1

“But the moment you accept yourself as you are, change happens by itself.”

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That makes no sense.

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Didn’t you just say that pushing yourself to change has gotten you nowhere?  

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Yeah.

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There’s a reason for that. 

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bert

Force yourself to change, and another part of you rises up in resistance.  An internal war starts.  Neither part wins.  You end up still stuck, just more tired.

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That does sound familiar.

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On the other hand, accepting yourself frees up all sorts of energy.  You feel stronger. Braver.  Hopeful.  Creative.  Growth follows.

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That makes sense, I guess.

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therapist

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But I like believing in will power.

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therapist.

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I like thinking I can chart my own course.

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therapist

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That I’m the master of my fate.

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therapist

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That I’m the captain of my…

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See? Nobody listens.

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………………. * * *

 2

 

Session 34: Holes

Bert 1

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4

What’s with the hat?

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I just felt like wearing it.

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“Hole”?

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It’s how I’m feeling lately.

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therapist 3

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Like something’s missing.

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Something in you?

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Yes.

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What triggered this?

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Remembering my childhood.

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4

Oh.

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Dad’s drinking.  Mom’s depression.  How they fought.

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therapist 7

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How they weren’t really there.

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And the hole that left in you.

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Right.

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Well, I have a present.

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A present?

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Yes.  See that box by your foot?

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Yes.

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Open it.  It’s yours.

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Thanks.  Not sure it fits.

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Just listen for a moment. 

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Bert 13

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We all have holes.  All of us. 

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bert

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But you’re nobody’s kid now.  Your parents are gone. This is your life. 

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Bert 14

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And you can wear any hat you want to.

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Really?

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Really.

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I don’t know.  This still feels a little large.

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You’ll grow into it.

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……………….  * * *

Session 33: Irritated

Bert 1

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What’s wrong?

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Nothing.  I’m fine.

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You don’t seem fine.

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What do you mean?

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You seem irritated.

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I’m not.  I’m fine.

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Okay.

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Bert 5

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If you say so.

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Bert 6

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therapist 6

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What?

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therapist 7

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Jeez, let it go, will you?

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therapist 8

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Okay.  Okay.  I’m irritated.

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How come?

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Hell, I don’t know.  I’ve felt irritable for two days.

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What are you doing about it?

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Nothing.  Ignoring it.

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3

So I gathered.  You own a car?

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Sure.

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2

 You know the red light on your dashboard?

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The one that lights when my engine overheats?

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Yes.  What do you think of a driver who covers that light with duct tape?

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Stupid.

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For ignoring the warning, right?

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Sure.

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Well, irritability is your body’s red light.

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What’s it mean?

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Something wrong under the hood.  Some imbalance.

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bert

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My point is, don’t tape over the damn light. 

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bert

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2

Don’t mask it with work, or food, or alcohol, sleep, or tv, or giving to other people.  

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 1

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Pay attention to yourself.

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Or end up on a lift or something?

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You wouldn’t be the first.

1

                              * * *