Garden-variety paranoia

The word control comes from the Latin contra rotullus.

Contra rotullus means “against the roll.”

This I learned from the Jungian psychologist James Hillman, who implies the term originally referred to fighting gravity.   “Control is agency, yes, but of a  restrictive kind,” Hillman writes in his book Kinds of Power.  “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 ancient wheel block, a lump of wood or stone used to stop ox carts or chariots 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 an attempt to avoid surprise and prevent 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 are famously controlling.  So is anyone who grew up in an alcoholic or otherwise dysfunctional family.  Which, aside from Beaver and the other Cleavers, pretty much covers everyone.)  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 all 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.   

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.  That’s why 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 frustrated and inadequate and depressed.     

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 writes.  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.  

Why?

Because we’re all control addicts.

So everyone you know is just as crazy as you.　   

　   

　   

　   

　   

　 

  

 

 

 

Dog

I’d like to introduce you to my dog.

Please look down.  You’ll find him attached to my ankle.

That’s where he lives, more or less. 

Sometimes he draws blood.  But mostly he just hangs on, drooling and chewing occasionally, slowing my progress through life from a stroll to a worried limp.

Of course this is a metaphorical dog I’m describing.  It represents a part of the human personality we each carry inside us, an internal voice named variously by different psychologies. 

Freudians described it as the punitive superego.  

Others named it the Inner Critic.  

Gestalt therapists call it the Top Dog.

I first read about this guy many years ago, in Fritz Perls’ Gestalt Therapy Verbatim. 

The topdog usually is righteous and authoritarian: he knows best.  He is sometimes right, but always righteous.  The topdog is a bully, and works with “You should” and “You should not.”  The topdog manipulates with demands ands threats of catastrophe, such as, “If you don’t, then — you won’t be loved, you won’t get to heaven, you will die,” and so on. 

I remember reading that and wondering how Fritz had managed to overhear my darkest thoughts.

As a recovering control addict I’ve spent many hours (years, actually) listening to this voice.  

I’ve come to know Dog pretty well. 

Here’s what I’ve learned:

Dog means well.  He really thinks he’s protecting me by pointing out my flaws, reminding me of my failures, and anticipating all the awful judgments others might render.  Expect the worst, that’s his motto.  But his warnings don’t make me feel safer.  What they do is keep me scared shitless.    

Dog’s scared to death.  That’s why he scares me.  Dog himself operates out of pure fear.  (Can you imagine scarier words to live by than expect the worst?)  So every word out of him comes from that defensive position.  Which explains why the more I listen to him, the scareder I get. 

Dog is unpleaseable.  No matter how hard I try, he’s never satisfied.  In fact trying harder seems to only make him stronger.  It took me years to realize that he thrives on attention.  So trying to please Dog is like trying to put out a fire with gasoline.  

Dog lies.   He sounds reasonable, since there’s usually some truth in what he says.  But listening to Dog is like looking at myself in a fun house mirror.  By focusing on weakness and failures only he presents a terribly distorted view of me.  And if I mistake it for an accurate one, I’m basically sunk.  

Dog refuses to die.  That’s why I can’t satisfy him.  He exists to warn and to worry.  It’s his reason for being.  Should he ever concede that I’m okay as I am, or that everything will probably work out fine, he’d be killing himself off.

So.  What to do with a dog like this?

Well, it helps me to remember what I’ve learned about him.  That Dog isn’t me, just the scared worried part.  That he’s unappeasable, and that he lies, and that he’ll say or do anything to survive.  

All this gives me some distance from his voice.  It means when he starts growling I can say “Oh, you again.  Shut up,”  instead of taking him too seriously.

And you?  Why should you care about any of this?

Well, check out your own ankle.  

Cave

Years ago I had a friend named Richie whose favorite expression was head up your ass.

As in “Boy, that guy has his head up his ass.”  Or “Relax, Steve.  Get your head out of your ass.”

Colorful. 

But I never quite understood what it meant.

(Probably I got hung up on the visual.) 

Anyway, Richie came to mind this morning.  My wife and I were sitting on the deck with our coffee, and I was thanking her for keeping me afloat, emotionally speaking.   

“If not for you,” I said, “I’d have lost my marbles years ago.”

She was pleased.  “That’s good to hear,” she said.  “Often I feel like I’m failing, because so much of the time you seem distant or worried or unhappy.”

“Oh,” I said, “that’s just me with my head up my ass.”

Apparently at some point over the years I reached my own understanding of what Richie’s trademark phrase meant:  Self-preoccupied.  Obsessive.  Living in my head.  Disconnected from other people.  Disconnected from reality.

I’m like most other men in this way.  Most women I know handle stress by sharing it, bringing it to their relationships; most guys carry it off into isolation.  Where a woman gets on the phone, a man retreats into his cave.

I’m a cave-dweller from way back. 

In grade school I decided that people were untrustworthy and best kept at a distance.  The cave into which I retreated then was my own skull — dark,  cramped, but way less scary than the big uncontrollable world. 

I furnished my cave with books and movies and tv shows and long convoluted conversations with my own puzzled fascinating self.  

I lived there through adolescence and into early adulthood. 

Eventually, when I had to leave the cave to make a living, I looked around for some way to do so which would allow me to stay mostly in hiding. 

So I became a therapist.

Looking back on that choice now, I see two things that made therapy appealing.  The first was knowledge.  I loved the idea of becoming a magus, a magician of the mind, possessor of arcane understanding and skills that would enable me to transmute (and so rise above) the common run of human misery.      

The second was invulnerability.  Doing therapy seemed a terrific way to get really close to people without having to risk criticism or rejection or abandonment.  To make contact without making contact, so to speak. 

Guess what? 

It worked.

Well, sort of. 

I’ve spent decades doing this work.  I still enjoy it.  I’m reasonably good at it, I think.  I know there are lives that I changed, even a couple I saved. 

But I’m also coming to see what being a therapist has cost.  There are parts of me which, constrained by my professional role, never developed as I’d have liked them to.  Spontaneity.  Creativity.  Emotional honesty.  The courage to be vulnerable, take risks, make real contact.  

But that’s how it is with defenses.  You strap them on, thinking they’re armor, and then one morning wake up feeling like canned tuna.

Defenses are indispensible, of course.  Without them we’d go nuts, or at the very least become paralyzed by our own fears and anxieties. 

But defenses can also be monkeytraps: attempts to hold on when we really should let go.  And six decades of living (not to mention two of doing therapy) have taught me to see cave-dwelling as just another futile grab at the illusion of control, another attempt to escape the wet windy weather of emotional life.

So it sort of worked, and it sort of didn’t.  In any case, I find myself tired of living dry and in the dark.

So now occasionally I creep out of the cave.  One step at a time.  With clients, for example, I let more of myself show than I used to.  And with family.  And with the book I just published.  And with this blog. 

It’s scary.  I like it anyway.  I’m learning to actually enjoy the weather. 

It’s wet and sloppy and sometimes chilly out here, but it’s dark, dead and lonely in there.

Celebrating

The comfort zone

There’s a place in your life that’s neither light nor dark, warm nor cold, where things don’t quite work but where you stay because it’s familiar.

You stay because you know this place like the back of your hand, every dark corner, every lump in the carpet, every draft. 

You stay because you can find your away around it with your eyes closed. Which, in fact, is just what you do.

There’s pain here, but it’s the dull, tolerable kind.  The kind you know well.  The kind you’ve known forever.  The kind you cling to rather than risk something worse.  

There’s the signpost up ahead.

Your next stop:

The Comfort Zone.

*

Albert, 58, has been married three times.  His first two marriages ended in acrimonious divorce.  His third marriage is two years old, and his wife recently ended their couples counseling in tearful frustration.   Albert continues in therapy without her.  He reports their life has deteriorated into a series of hurtful arguments alternating with long silences.  Last week she told him she’d leave him if she only had someplace to go.  I ask how he thinks our work together is going.  “Really well,” he says.  “It’s very interesting.  I feel like I’m learning a lot.”

*

Barry, 38, sits on my sofa with his wife Beth.  They are new clients.  I ask why they’ve come.  Beth tells me Barry’s individual therapist thinks couples work is necessary.  “What led you to individual therapy?” I ask Barry.  He frowns.  “I have issues,” he says.  “You drink, you play video games, and that’s all you do,” the wife says.   Barry frowns harder.  “Do you have a problem with alcohol?” I ask Barry.  “I have issues,” he repeats.  The wall appears impenetrable.  After twenty minutes I suggest Barry wait outside while I talk to Beth alone.  He brightens, stands and walks quickly to the door.  Then he turns back to his wife.  “Can I borrow your iPad?” he asks.

*

Carly, 43 and a social worker, is more depressed this week than last.  Last week she was more depressed than the week before.  This slide began last year, with her transfer out of the counseling job she loved into an administrative job she hates, under a supervisor she considers an idiot.  Now she visits her doctor monthly to request tweaks of her medication.  Asked what’s depressing her, she shrugs: “No idea.”   I tell her that I think what she needs is work — real, meaningful work she enjoys, that brings out the best in her and makes her feel valuable.  I suggest she network, go on interviews, or consider private practice.  I also suggest she pursue the hobbies — cooking, dancing, yoga — she once used to feed and express herself.  She shakes her head.  “I’m too tired for any of that now,” she sighs.  “I need to save my energy for the stupid job.”   

*

Debbie, 23, is crying.  “You don’t love me,” she tells her boyfriend David, who’s sitting beside her on my sofa looking miserable.  After three months of Debbie complaining of his silence and begging him to be more open with her, David has finally risked telling her about something he dislikes in their relationship.  “I’m not good with words,” he said.   “We never talked in my family.  So when I try I get nervous.  I’m scared to hurt your feelings.  And the more you push me to talk, the more scared I get.”  “Good for you,” I say.  “David, I know how hard that was.”  Debbie wipes her nose with a tissue.  “So you don’t really love me,” she repeats.

* 

Eddie, 42, is angry at his son Evan.  “He’s scared of everything,” he tells me.  “Scared to go to school.  Scared he’ll fail Math.  Scared to try out for teams.  Scared to ask a girl out.  What the fuck?”  He shakes his head.  I ask what happens when he tries to talk to Evan, who’s 15.  “What do you think?” Eddie snorts.  “He acts scared of me.”  I ask what Evan’s fear looks like.  “He sort of shrinks into himself.  Gets quiet.  Avoids eye contact.  I can tell he just wants me to shut up and leave him alone.”  “How’s that make you feel?” I ask.  “Furious,” Eddie says.  “I’m his father.  I’m trying to help him.”  “And what do you say?” I ask.  “I say, I’m your father.  I’m trying to help you.  What the fuck?‘”

*

* * * 

We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.          

~ Rabindrath Tagore

 

I’ve heard someone say that our problems aren’t the problem; it’s our solutions that are the problem. 

~ Anne Lamott

  

When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

~ Abraham Maslow

 

Only a concerted effort to sort out the specific nature of our personal programming can offer hope of change, of new choices.

~ James Hollis

 

The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.

~ Albert Einstein

 

 

Pink eyes

Last week I had three separate sessions with three members of the same extended family.  Two were cousins; the third was one cousin’s spouse.

Each session felt just like the other two.

I could barely get a word in edgewise in any of them. 

All three clients were anxious and talked fast, as if expecting to get cut off. 

All three had trouble focusing on questions — instead they pinballed from topic to topic to topic. 

And all three seemed determined to get me to see things as they see them, and annoyed when I did not.

All of which reminded me of pinkeye.

You know, conjunctivitis.  That eye disease you catch from towels.

I found myself thinking how — like pinkeye — habits and symptoms are contagious in families.  How hard it is not to end up thinking and feeling and reacting like each other.

Particularly where control is concerned.

Think about it.  Think how hard it is to not feel pulled into copying your family members when they

~ withhold or disguise what they’re feeling,

~ act out feelings instead of using words,

~ obsess or catastrophize about problems,

~ criticize or pass judgment,

~ blame others,

~ worry about how others see them or the family, or

~ focus on externals (people, places, things) instead of their own perceptions and prejudices.

All are controlling behaviors we can catch from each other.  As are symptoms like anxiety, depression, addiction, anger, impatience and abuse.

We’re mostly unconscious of this, though.  We tend to miss even obvious connections between our emotional habits and the family relationships that shaped us.

Because like conjunctivitis, family dynamics distort our vision.

It can be impossible to see clearly through pink eyes.

On help-seeking (the third trap)

1. I have problems I can’t solve without help.

2. I am afraid that if I ask for help I will be rejected.

3. I decide to offer help to others, in hopes it will be reciprocated.

4. Others see me as a helpful person instead of one who needs help.

5. I come to see myself in the same way.

6. So I never ask for help, and nobody ever offers it.

7. I resent the people I am helping.

 

On help-seeking (the second trap)

1. I have problems I can’t solve without help.

2. I have been taught to see help-seeking as a sign of weakness.

3. This view makes me too embarrassed to seek help.

4. I decide not to risk embarrassment.

5. I have problems I cannot solve.

 

On help-seeking (the first trap)

1. I have problems I can’t solve without help.

2. People around me have been unhelpful in the past.

3. This makes me expect to be disappointed if I seek help again.

4. I decide not to risk disappointment.

5. I have problems I cannot solve.

 

On hope

1. I have a problem which makes me uncomfortable.

2. My discomfort makes me hope for a solution to this problem.

3. Unfortunately the problem is unsolvable.

4. Unfortunately I cannot distinguish realistic hope from false hope.

5. My hope blinds me to the problem’s unsolvability.

6. I continue to hope.

7. I remain uncomfortable.

 

Explaining shit

To explain something feels like somehow controlling it.

In the absence of being able to explain something — especially something painful– we feel confused and helpless.  Anxious.  Out of control.

It’s like without an explanation we can’t absorb, or process, or digest this particular fact or experience.

Like there’s a hole we need to fill, but cannot.

It’s uncomfortable, this hole. 

Very.

So uncomfortable we may seek any explanation with which to fill it.

And in our effort to escape the discomfort we often choose explanations that hurt us.

Like the abused child, unable to understand why he or she is being beaten, who fills the explanatory void with “I must deserve it.”

Or the loved one of a suicide victim, unable to explain the suicide, who fills the void with “I should have done something to stop it.”

Or the gay person, rejected by a homophobic parent, who decides “My gayness makes me unloveable.”

Such explanations are not just inaccurate or unrealistic or unfair. 

They’re dangerous.

They create a burden some of us carry our whole lives.

They distort our perception of ourselves, other people, of relationships in general.

They distort our perception of life in general, too.

“Life,” said Joseph Campbell, “is this wonderful, wonderful opera.  It just hurts.”

So:

Beware of your need to — forgive my vulgarity — explain shit.

Because sometimes shit just happens.

And sometimes life just feels shitty.

And it’s beyond our control.

And it’s nobody’s fault.

 

Human parents

This next idea is so obvious it really shouldn’t need stating.

And yet for many parents it does:

You can’t be a healthier parent than you are a person.

That means

~ anxious people are anxious parents,

~ depressed people are depressed parents,

~ alcoholic people are alcoholic parents,

~ angry people are angry parents,

~ ignorant people are ignorant parents,

~ narcissistic people are narcissistic parents,

~ dishonest people are dishonest parents,

and so on.

Obvious, right?

Not so much.

Because many of us kid ourselves. 

We imagine that — because we love our children so fiercely, or value our families, or know how devastating bad parenting can be, or work harder at parenting than anything else in our lives — we can somehow park our pathology at the front door.

That by sheer awareness or determination we can excise our pathology from these most vulnerable relationships, stop it from tainting our parenting and trickling down into our children’s lives.

It would be pretty to think so.

But it’s not so.

What is so?  This: 

(a) all parents are human;

(b) to be human is to be pathological — inadequate, frightened, angry, conflicted, confused, neurotic, blind;

(c) which means there are only two kinds of parents: those who own their pathology, and those who deny it.

 

 

 

 

On shame

1. I experience chronic, debilitating shame — the belief that there is something deeply and permanently wrong with me.

2. My shame makes me afraid that other people will judge, reject or abandon me.

3. My fear makes me hide both my shame and my true self from others.

4. Unaware of my shame, others have no opportunity to challenge it or to reassure me that it is unwarranted.

5. I experience chronic, debilitating shame.

On guilt (the third trap)

1. I have done something I know will make you angry.

2. I fear your anger, so I keep what I have done a secret.

3. Keeping secrets makes me feel dishonest and guilty.

4. Over time I forget the real reason for the secret — that I’m scared — and go around feeling guilty instead.

Boundaries: A quick guide

A psychological boundary is an imaginary line that separates you and your stuff — thoughts, feelings, needs, preferences, problems, responsibilities — from other people and their stuff. 

Boundaries are essential to peace of mind and good mental hygiene.

That’s because, without boundaries, you can’t tell where your stuff ends and the other guy’s begins.

Which makes you entirely too vulnerable to live among other people.  Sort of like a nudist living among cacti.

Most people understand this, if only on the intuitive level. 

What they don’t understand is how to set boundaries.

So here’s a quick guide:

1. Boundary-setting starts in your head.

2. It does not signify lack of love or compassion, that you’ve stopped caring for or about people. 

3. It does signify a decision to take better care of yourself, to treat yourself with the same love and respect you show others.

4. It also requires facing your fear that, if you show who you really are, the people in your life will judge or reject you.

5. Boundary-setting starts with reclassifying stimuli — taking triggers from the MUST FIX THIS box and moving them to boxes labeled BEYOND MY CONTROL or NOT MY BUSINESS.  This redraws your personal boundary as a smaller circle that contains less for you to struggle with.

6. One way to do this is by using the three questions I write about in chapter 65 of Monkeytraps:

~ What am I trying to control here?

~ Have I had any luck controlling this in the past?

~ If not, what can I do instead? (Surrender?  Practice responsibility?  Risk intimacy?)

7. The next step is to practice redefining your boundaries out in the world.  Usually this begins with saying No to something you’ve said Yes to previously.      

8. Boundary-setting takes courage.  (Reread #4 above.)  This is especially true if you’ve trained the people around you to see your boundaries as blurred or nonexistent.  They’ll be used to your trying to help, rescue or fix them, and may feel hurt or bewildered if you stop.  So it’s a good idea to explain beforehand what you’re trying to do and why you’re trying to do it. 

9. Boundary-setting requires support.  Try to find at least one person who understand what you’re doing and able to provide permission and encouragement.

10. You may find that some important people in your life — like family members — refuse to acknowledge or respect your new boundaries.  This is not uncommon.  The most common reason for it is that they themselves lack healthy boundaries, and so are unable to tolerate yours.  If it happens, you may feel hurt and surprised.  You may even feel discouraged about setting boundaries in general.  Don’t lose heart.  Set new boundaries where you can, with the people healthy enough to let you do it.  Each new boundary you set is like making a deposit in your emotional bank account.  Over time the deposits accrue, and you find yourself feeling stronger and more confident with everyone.