Downhill

.

In group.  Liz comes in fifteen minutes late. 

“Sorry,” she says to everyone.  “Traffic.” 

Everyone nods, except Nancy.

“So glad you could make it,” Nancy mutters.

“Whoa,” someone says.

We look at Nancy.  Nancy notices. 

“What?” she says.

“You’re pissed,” someone says.

“No I’m not,” Nancy says, and bursts into tears.

I wait while someone passes her tissues.

“What’s up?” I ask.

She wipes her eyes and shrugs.  “I’m all nervous and angry lately.  I don’t know why.”

“Since when?”

“Two, three days.”

“What happened three days ago?” 

“Nothing.”  She looks up.  “Wait.  My inlaws came to town.”

“Bingo,” someone says.

“Your alcoholic inlaws,” I say. 

Nancy nods.

“Bingo bingo,” someone says.  There are chuckles.

“What?” Nancy asks again.

“You’re a victim of gravity,” Liz smiles.  “As in shit rolls downhill.“

“I don’t understand,” Nancy says.

“Old saying,” I say.  “Shit rolls downhill.  Boss yells at Dad, Dad yells at Mom, Mom yells at Sister, Sister yells at Brother, Brother kicks the dog.”

“Oh,” Nancy says.

“Nancy, how does your husband get along with his parents?” Liz asks. 

“They make him crazy,” Nancy sniffles.  “Nervous, frustrated, angry.”

“And how does he act with you?”

“Like I can’t do anything right,” she says glumly.

“And then how are you with the kids?”

“Controlling,” Nancy admits.  “If they don’t do exactly what I say I just…lose it.”

She looks at me in surprise.  “Shit does roll downhill.”

“Why does that happen?” someone asks me.

“There are several ways to explain it,” I say.  “One is simple displacement.  Shit rolls downhill because people take their anger out at the next person below them on the food chain.

“Another is boundary confusion.  In alcoholic families the boundaries between members get impossibly blurred.  We can’t tell where I end and you begin.  Feelings leak from one person into another.   Your bad day becomes my bad day.  Your anger or anxiety become my problem.”

Nancy frowns.  “So my husband catches his parents’ emotional problems, like the flu?”

“Maybe,” I say.  “But there’s a third explanation.  Being around his parents probably triggers old feelings in him, old pain and fear, helplessness and anger.”

“Like PTSD,” someone says.

“Yes,” Nancy says sadly.  “I see that.  He regresses.”

“So what should Nancy do?” someone asks.

I smile at Nancy.  “She can start by apologizing to her kids.”

“Yes,” Nancy says.

“And tell them that she’s been in a bad mood lately, and it’s not their fault, and she’s working hard on getting out of it.”

Nancy nods.

“Then she should probably try to talk to her husband about how they can support each other for the next — Nancy, how long?”

“They’re staying a week.”

“The next week or so.  For example, they could carve out debriefing time every night, and use it to vent to each other about whatever happens that bothers them.”

Nancy nods.  “We can do that.”

“Finally, she can promise herself that for the next week she’ll lean on her support system to process whatever comes up for her.  Bring it to group.  Call you guys when she gets confused or angry or anxious.”

“Call me,” Liz says.

Nancy smiles.  “I’m sorry about before.”

Liz shakes her head.  “I went through this for years.  Whenever his family visited my husband and I would fight like cats and dogs.  Finally we got into therapy and learned to manage our temporary insanity — which is just what it felt like — without resorting to divorce or homicide.”

“And your inlaws still visit?”

“Yes,” Liz sighs.  “But one thing that helps is a little ritual we created.  The day before we see them I tell my husband, ‘I apologize in advance for the next five days,’ or however long Mom and Dad are in town.  And he says the same thing to me.  And we hug.  And the hug is like a promise that we’ll stay connected, no matter how much shit rolls downhill.”

 

Me and my hammer

*

*

Particularization means mistaking some specific way of satisfying a need with the need itself.

It means confusing ends with means — mistaking what we want with one particular way of getting it.

“The genesis of particularization is habit, or conditioned response,” explain sociologists Snell & Gail Putney:

A person who has satisfied a need in one particular way since childhood is likely to have only a vague awareness of the need; his vivid consciousness will be of the familiar means of satisfaction. When feeling needful, he thinks instantly of the usual mode of fulfillment, bypassing recognition of the need itself….

But if for any reason the habitual behaviors are not very effective — as in many case they are not — particularization renders it difficult for the individual to recognize this fact…. Habit prevails, and he tends simply to try again in the familiar way.

The result is analogous to bailing a boat with a sieve.

~ From The adjusted American: Normal neuroses in the individual and society (Harper Colophon, 1964).

I see this all the time in people who grow up in alcoholic, abusive, or otherwise dysfunctional families.

Early on they learn to see life as unpredictable and dangerous (Will Dad drink or be sober? Will Mom hug me or hit me? Will everyone get along or fight until bedtime?) and blame their inner anxiety on events in their immediate environment.

Inevitably they try to manage their anxiety by controlling that environment (hide Dad’s beer, clean Mom’s kitchen, keep everyone laughing or distracted).

And there it is: particularization.  As kids they equate something they need (feeling safe) with one particular way of getting it (controlling people, places and/or things).  And they grow up convinced I must control things in order to feel safe.

Which leaves them no choice but to keep trying to rearrange the world around them.

Over and over and over.

And that, gentle reader, is how you create a control addict.

This happens to all of us, regardless of what our family was like. Why? Because we all start out as children. And children, having no power, are forced to rely on controlling the grownups around them.

“When the only tool you have is a hammer,” Abraham Maslow wrote, “everything looks like a nail.”

So we’re all adult children.  We’re all control addicts.  And we all enter adulthood with the same hammer in hand.

Some of us, though, get sick and tired of secretly feeling and functioning like kids.

At which point the crucial question becomes:

Is there another way to rearrange how we’re feeling inside?

A sense of control

Another thing we control addicts tend to get wrong is the difference between actual control and what I call a sense of control.

I’ll explain.

Like you, I want to feel certain feelings.  I also want to avoid feeling others.

For example, I want to feel column A and avoid column B.

And so on.

Sense of control refers to those moments when we feel only the items in column A.

It’s in those moments that our internal universe seems to be under our command.

And we hunger for those moments.  We hunger for happiness and safety, confidence and love.  Those experiences are what we live for.

In fact, our whole lives are arranged in an attempt to repeat these experiences as often as possible.

Think about it.  Doesn’t every choice you make boil down to an attempt to answer questions like What will make me happy, not sad?  Comfortable, not uncomfortable?  Connected, not alienated?

Our preference for Column A experiences is rooted in survival instinct, and so hardwired into us.  That makes it the inevitable basis for all our conscious choices, and all our unconscious choices too.

And often we conclude that what will enable us to choose comfort over discomfort is to get actual control — control of the external world around us.

And that’s a valid conclusion sometimes.   Of course I’ll feel better if

~ My car stays on the road (instead of hitting that tree),

~ The boss raises my salary (instead of firing me),

~ My kid aces English (instead of failing it),

~ This attractive woman agrees to have dinner with me (instead of slapping my face).

All these experiences, and a million others like them, leads us to conclude that the way to get a sense of control is to get actual control.

A natural conclusion, but a flawed one.

Because one (the internal feeling) is a goal.  And the other (control over the external world) is just one means to that goal.

They’re.  Not.  The.  Same.

And it can be dangerous, self-defeating, and crazy-making to conclude that they are.

Nice

Please don’t

You haven’t asked

Men who can’t

(This is an updated version of a post I originally published in 2011.  It continues to get the most weekly hits of anything on Monkeytraps, and the problem it describes continues to emerge in sessions.  Hence this reposting.)     

Three times last week I gave my speech on Men Who Can’t Love Women.

Twice I gave it to wives of men avoiding therapy. 

Once I was talking to a man who’s a husband himself.

The speech I created spontaneously about six months ago, to address a relationship problem that kept cropping up in sessions.

It goes something like this.

I see this more and more lately: 

Men who can’t love women.

No, they’re not gay, impotent, or anything like that.

 They’re not even men who don’t want to love women.

Or don’t try to.

Usually they’re men who believe that they can and do love the women they’re with.

The women they’re with, sadly, tend to see it differently.

Because those women know there’s a fundamental truth about healthy relationships that these men simply don’t grasp:

Giving is getting.

These guys don’t get that.  They don’t see relationship as collaboration, where what’s good for you is good for me.  Instead they seem to see it as some sort of competition.  

They tend to act, often without realizing it,  as if relationship were a zero-sum game, where there’s only so much good stuff to go around, and where a gain for one means a loss for the other.

It’s as if on some deep level they believe, “When you win, I lose.”     

I hope (your husband, boyfriend, lover) isn’t one of these.

Because — due respect to the members of my gender – these guys can be damned hard to retrain.

The idea of giving-as-getting is something most women know in their bones. That’s probably because they’re socialized to value relationships in a way men aren’t.

We train men to compete, not to partner.

Worse, we also train them to work, not to feel.  Which leads to another missing piece in their relationships, something else that many men don’t get.

It’s the idea that love isn’t just an emotion —  it’s behavior.

Most of my male clients struggle with relationships with women.  And at some point I usually ask them, “Do you love her?”

They almost always say, “Yes.”

And then I ask, “How do you show it?’

And they stare at me as if I’ve just lapsed into a foreign language.

Some don’t understand the question.  “What do you mean,” one asked blankly, “by show it?”

Some shrug.   The shrug usually translates as, Hey, I know how I feel.  I assume she knows too.  Don’t women just know this stuff?

Others argue that they already communicate their love adequately.  I go to work, pay bills, mow the lawn, drive Jimmy to soccer practice, put up with her mother, even wash dishes occasionally.  Isn’t that enough?  Shouldn’t it be?

If I suggest otherwise, some get angry at me.

My work with these men usually heads in one of two directions.

Some men — usually those who’ve come close to losing the woman in their lives and come into therapy genuinely frightened — are able to face their limitations.  We then have a series of conversations about the nuts and bolts of loving behavior (ways of communicating acceptance, attention and affection), which they work to internalize and practice.  These are the lucky ones.

Others stand pat.  Hey, this is me.  She can take it or leave it.  Interestingly, it’s not that they’re less frightened than the first group.  They’re just more scared of changing than anything else.  Some stand pat all the way to divorce court.

Some stand pat through multiple marriages and divorces.

My heart goes out to these men.   They’re not bad guys.  They’re not trying to hurt anyone.  They’re just undereducated and overdefended.  (Also emotionally wounded in four specific ways, described here).

But the hurt happens anyway, and it can be devastating to all concerned.

So, some questions to chew on:

Have you ever known a man who can’t love women?

Have you ever been in a relationship with one?

Are you such a man yourself?

Are you sure?

Wonderful/terrible

Love is a wonderful terrible thing.

Wonderful because it connects us to others in the ways we most need to be connected.

Terrible because that connection leaves us horribly vulnerable.

You can’t love someone and protect yourself emotionally. Not really.

Real love means hurting when the other person hurts, and being subject to all sorts of doubts and disappointments, disillusionments and frustrations.

And yet many people I know try to make love safe.

They try to control the other person’s feelings, or viewpoint, or behavior.

They operate out of their heads, hoping to keep their feelings buried and beyond danger.

Or they hedge their bet, limiting their emotional commitment in the hope this will keep their vulnerability manageable.

These tactics always fail.

Because you can’t love someone and protect yourself emotionally.

And because you can’t protect yourself without the person you love noticing.

And because, by its nature, love is a wonderful terrible thing.

 

And because, by its nature, love is a wonderful terrible thing.

* * *

Now on YOUTUBE:

the new trailer for

MONKEYTRAPS (THE BOOK):

click here.

Meet me, already

 

Coming December 2015.

Sample chapters here:

MONKEYTRAPS (THE BOOK).

 

Image courtesy of khunaspix at FreeDigitalPhotos.netx

(THE BOOK) Chapter 29: Me-monkeys

Once there was a handsome young shepherd so self-absorbed he could love nobody else.  The gods punished him by making him fall in love with his own reflection in a pond and stare into it until he starved to death.

His name was Narcissus, and every third or fourth day one of his distant cousins shows up in my office.

They’re not there for therapy.  What they really want is magic. 

They want someone to help them control the people in their lives, whom they experience as unappreciative and ungiving.  They want me to teach them how to get those other people to love them better.

They’re my toughest clients.

Most people mistake narcissism for vanity or self-love.  It’s not.  

It’s the opposite.

Narcissists are hungry blind people.   

They’re hungry because (usually) they didn’t get fed enough as kids.  Most grew up in families unable to provide adequate attention, acceptance, approval or affection, the four emotional staples known as narcissistic supplies. 

And they’re blind because they carry that hunger into adulthood, where they’re so preoccupied with getting themselves fed that they ignore the needs and feelings of those around them.

I explain it this way to clients:

Narcissism is like trying to drive a car that has a mirror instead of a windshield.  You look out over the dashboard and you don’t see streets or traffic or pedestrians; you see only your own needs, feelings and preferences.  You’re so fixated on the mirror you don’t see where you’re going, or who you run over to get there.  When you hit someone you barely notice the bump.

Me-monkeys take many forms, some easier to spot than others.  The most obvious are the showmen, loud, demanding, self-conscious Donald Trump types who constantly polish their image, trumpet their viewpoint, and leave me feeling less like a therapist than an audience.

Then there are the victims, eager to tell me their tales of abuse and betrayal, and desperate that I agree that absolutely none of it was their fault.

Then the addicts, so busy struggling with their tangled unmanageable feelings that they’re simply unavailable for healthy relationship with anyone else.

Finally the codependents, who always seem to be putting everyone else first, but whose caretaking, people-pleasing and avoidance of conflict are actually subterfuges meant to protect them from rejection and win a few emotional tablescraps in return.

Again, my toughest clients. 

There are two reasons for this.

The first: narcissists are terrified.  The starvation they suffered as kids left them convinced there was something wrong with them, and they’ve carried that belief ever since.  The false self they construct and show the world – be it codependent or Trumpesque – was built to hide their shame, sense of incompleteness, and their secret conviction they’re unlovable.  It’s hard to do therapy with them, because therapy requires trust, and many of them trust no one.  (How trust others if you can’t trust your parents?  If you can’t trust yourself?)  Many are just too frightened to come out of hiding and reveal the person inside. Some have hidden behind their false front for so long they can no longer distinguish it from their real self.

The second reason: I’m a me-monkey myself.

Earlier I mentioned that it was Bert’s idea I become a therapist.  A nifty way, he thought, to put my codependent Plan A to work.  I would help others solve their problems, win narcissistic supplies in return, and get my emotional needs met without having to reveal either my needs or my emotions.

That was decades ago.  I’m well into my Plan B now, which is less about image and insulation than honesty and risk.  

But every Plan B is an ongoing project, and I still have plenty of work to do on mine.

Carl Jung:

We cannot change anything unless we accept it.  Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses….  If a doctor wishes to help a human being he must be able to accept him as he is.  And he can do this in reality only when he has already seen and accepted himself as he is.  Perhaps this sounds very simple, but simple things are always the most difficult.  In actual life it requires the greatest art to be simple, and so acceptance of oneself is…the acid test of one’s whole outlook on life.*

We teach what we want to learn.

____________________________

*Quoted in Psychotherapy East and West by Alan Watts (Ballantine Books, 1961).

 

 

(THE BOOK) Chapter 28: Monkeyparents

 

When I first opened my private practice I needed clients, so I went into local high schools to give talks about parenting.   

Everyone’s favorite talk was titled “How to Parent Your Child Through Adolescence Without Committing Murder.”  Each delivery generated new clients. 

But most of them weren’t parents.  They were teenagers, nervous and sullen, dropped off in my waiting room by Mom or Dad with a tag tied to their toe:

Fix my kid.

I jest.  Well, partly.

Adolescence brings out the worst in many parents, for a reason which by now should be obvious: it challenges their sense of control. 

Before this they could convince themselves they were in charge.  Eat your broccoli, they’d say, and Junior complied.  It’s late, come in now, and here comes Junior. 

Or they could kiss the booboo and give Junior a hug and Junior would stop crying and hug them back.  Problem solved.    

Then Junior hits puberty and everything changes. 

The kid starts acting strangely.  Refuses your broccoli; won’t even touch your dinner.  Comes home late, or not at all.  Stops giggling at your jokes.  Acts like you’re a moron.  Rude, defiant, loud, silent, stubborn, irresponsible, self-centered and incredibly sloppy. 

Mom’s baby has morphed into an Orc. 

This predictable family crisis is called separation and individuation.  It’s a psychological threshold kids need to cross.  Once they do they start detaching from their parents, develop their own identity, express their own views and values, and start feeling and functioning like grownups.

All this is essential to healthy adult functioning.  Without it, no matter how old or how big someone gets, inside they feel incomplete and childish.    

But many parents misunderstand separation and individuation.  Even those that do understand usually find it uncomfortable. 

And to parents with control issues, it can feel like an earthquake.

Some misread this normal developmental stage as disrespect, disloyalty, rejection, parental incompetence, or a sign their kid no longer loves them.

Some misinterpret it as psychopathology.  They start hunting for signs of substance abuse, or Googling bipolar disorder.

Some panic.  Often these are people for whom parenting was the one part of life where they felt somewhat in command, could expect to be respected and admired, listened to and obeyed.  To such parents a child’s defiant No can feel like being tossed into deep water without a life preserver.

Some react with hurt, anger, judgment or withdrawal.

Some try to regain control by imposing new rules, demands or punishments.

Some become emotionally or verbally abusive.

Some become violent.

Some fight with their spouses about it.  Some get divorced.

Some get depressed, or develop anxiety disorders. 

Some drink, drug or overeat. 

And some enter therapy.

Where, if they’re lucky, they start to learn alternatives to monkeyparenting.

 

(THE BOOK) Chapter 26: The addicted

Everyone I see in therapy is addicted.

So is everyone I know.

When I first became a therapist I distinguished between addicts and nonaddicts.  That distinction no longer makes sense to me.

Now I think we’re all addicted to something.  It’s just that some addictions are more obvious than others.

As I said (see Chapter 12), addicts are people who can’t deal with feelings, and so feel compelled to find something that makes feelings going away.   This may be a substance (alcohol, drugs, food) or a behavior (work, sex, tv, shopping, video games, etc.).  Anything that alters your mood can be turned into an addiction.  That includes behaviors not inherently unhealthy, like exercise or meditation or volunteering.

The variations may be infinite, but they share the same root: the need to alter or control how one feels. 

My own addictions came in both flavors, substances and behaviors.

Sugar was always my drug of choice.  In grade school I ate it by the spoonful.  I also drank maple syrup.  In grad school I smoked a pipe until cumulus clouds formed in my office and my tongue morphed into hamburger.

My compulsive behaviors included watching television (an alternate reality where I spent most of ages twelve through eighteen), reading books (the alternate reality I still find preferable much of the time), and writing (in my thirties and forties I carried a spiral notebook everywhere with me, compulsively filling page after page whenever I felt confused or stressed out or scared.  There are thirty-one dusty spirals stacked in a corner of my garage).

And I’m still addicted to work.  But I can’t write intelligently about that here, since I remain in denial.

These were the main paths I followed into what I call the Garden of Numb.

You know that place.  It’s where your focus narrows, and the world goes away, and anxiety recedes, and tension and worry slough off like dirt in the shower.

Great place to visit.  Necessary, even.  We all need vacations.  The world can be a frightening and painful place, and living a human life is no picnic.

The problem comes when you find you can’t live outside the Garden.

Each of my addictions eventually took on lives of their own.  Each stopped being something I was doing and became something that was doing me.   I lost control of my need for control.

So now, whenever I meet a new client, I look for two things:

(1) What they do, repeatedly and compulsively, to get themselves into the Garden,

and

(2) How impaired this controlling behavior leaves them.

The signs of (2) are pretty predictable:

~ Bad feelings.  Since they have no way but numbness to manage feelings, and since nobody can stay numb constantly, addicts are emotionally uncomfortable much of the time.

~ Bad choices.  Since their unconscious priority is feeling-management, addicts tend to follow the path that is least threatening emotionally, and their decision-making reflects this — instead of, say, an awareness of reality, determination to solve problems, or concern for the needs and feelings of others.

~ Bad relationships.  Addicts struggle with relationships simply because addicts aren’t all there: their feelings are missing.  So they can’t be fully honest and authentic, can’t tolerate honesty and authenticity in others, and can’t communicate in a way that promotes real connection and mutual understanding.

See yourself in this?

Don’t feel too bad.

We’re all control addicts.

If you’re human and breathing there’s no avoiding it.

(THE BOOK) Chapter 25: The depressed

For the anxious, constipation is a problem.  For the depressed, it’s a lifestyle.

Usually it starts unconsciously and in self-defense.  All my depressed clients grew up in dangerous families where it was unsafe to be themselves.  (See Chapter 14.)  Kids in such families have little choice but to self-constipate. 

Ever been physically constipated?  Remember how, the longer it lasted, the more distracted and uncomfortable you felt?  How eventually the internal pressure and tension came to sap your energy and occupy all your attention?

That’s just what happens to the depressed.  It’s no accident that people in recovery use excretory metaphors (my shit’s coming up, can’t get my shit together) to describe emotional processes.  Feelings are a kind of waste material, the emotional byproducts of experience, just as feces are physical byproducts of what we eat.  And just as physical waste must be expelled from the body, feelings must be expressed — not hidden or stored up.  When they aren’t we get sick, emotionally, physically and spiritually.

Humans either express themselves or depress themselves.

The best book I know on all this is Alexander Lowen’s Depression and the Body, which explains depression as a physical symptom, an exhaustion that comes from fighting oneself by suppressing feelings that need to come out.  Lowen writes,

The self is experienced through self-expression, and the self fades when the avenues of self-expression are closed….  The depressed person is imprisoned by unconscious barriers of “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts,” which isolate him, limit him, and eventually crush his spirit.

For control addicts – who experience life itself as one long litany of shoulds and shouldn’ts — some depression is inevitable.  And since everyone is addicted to control, it is not surprising that depression is called the common cold of mental illness.

I’ve had my cold for six decades.

I caught it in grade school.  Nobody called it depression then.  This was the fifties.  I’m not sure if back then anyone even knew that kids got depressed.

All I knew was I always felt sad, shy, nervous, worried.  Different.  Inadequate.  Flawed. 

I preferred being alone.  Preferred books to people.  Preferred tv to real life.

“Moody,” mom called me.  “Difficult” was dad’s diagnosis.

I also felt bad about feeling bad.  It must be my fault, I thought.  Teachers were always writing on my report cards could do better if he’d try.  So I decided feeling crappy meant I was somehow doing Life wrong, that I’d feel better if I just tried harder.  I just didn’t know how.

I felt bad through high school, college, and into adulthood.  Through courtship, marriage and fatherhood.  Through college, graduate school and into professional life. 

Along the way I got some therapy, and some medication, and read lots of books.  Lots of books.  The idea of happiness, always mysterious to me, became a preoccupation, then a challenge, then a sort of quest. 

I read everything I could that might cast some light on what had become my life’s central question: How do you feel good about life? 

It was only after I began to work as a therapist that I found an answer.

Doing therapy with control addicts taught me that I hadn’t gotten depressed because dad drank, or mom was unhappy, or because they fought or divorced when I was eight.  It wasn’t because I never had as much money as I wanted, or the body I wanted, or wrote the book I always wanted to write.  Or because of anything that had happened to me.

I was depressed because of how I reacted to what happened.  

Or rather, didn’t react.

We express ourselves, or we depress ourselves.

 

 

(THE BOOK) Chapter 24: The anxious

The anxious are all different and all the same.

Big and little, old and young, rich and poor.  Worried seniors, controlling spouses, insecure employees.  Obsessive parents, stressed teenagers, scared kids.

Their symptoms are both painful and remarkably common.  They can’t stop worrying.  Their thoughts race.  They either can’t fall asleep or can’t stay there.  Their appetite comes and goes.  They’re self-doubting, perfectionistic, agonize over mistakes.  They get irritable, cranky or tearful.  They’re self-conscious around other people.  Even when alone, with no jobs to do, they can’t relax or enjoy themselves.

Some develop physical symptoms: restlessness, muscular tension, teeth grinding, indigestion, nausea, headaches.

Some suffer social anxiety.  Others have panic attacks.  Still others report obsessive thoughts and/or compulsive behaviors.

But behind all these differences they have three things in common:

(1) They try to control the future.   

They do this mainly by thinking about it.  Anticipating it.  Planning it.  Worrying about it.   Obsessing about it.   Forming expectations.  In other words, by surrendering their thoughts to the not-so-tender mercies of monkeymind.

This highly efficient system keeps anxieties growing like weeds.

Because the more the anxious worry about the future, the more anxious they get.  And the more anxious they get, the more they worry about the future.  And so on.

(2) They try to control other people. 

They do this by insisting — secretly, in the privacy of their monkeyminds– that other people always like them, accept them, approve of them, agree with them, admire their clothes, hair, physique, income, intelligence or sense of humor.

They convince themselves that they really need other people to do this, and that life will be intolerable when they don’t.

Thus they scare the crap out of themselves, and set off on a desperate course of seeking a degree of interpersonal control nobody can ever have.

(3) They overcontrol themselves.

This habit is an inevitable outgrow of the last.  Anxious people try to control other people mainly by editing themselves — hiding the parts they think others won’t like.

Most importantly, they bury feelings instead of expressing them.

That last sentence defines the heart of anxiety.

That’s because feelings are – excuse this analogy – like shit.  Feelings are supposed to be expelled and expressed, not buried and hidden.  When they’re buried, they don’t go away.  They collect.  The person becomes emotionally constipated, lives in a constant state of self-interruption, internal pressure and emotional pain.

And anxiety is the name we give to this pain.

(THE BOOK) Chapter 23: Five weeds

After the workshop described in chapter 13 — the one where I redefined codependency as control addiction —  I went back to doing therapy with clinic clients.  

Mine was still a typical outpatient caseload, filled with the same problems every therapist faces.  

But now something was different.

Did you ever buy a new car — a new Honda, say — and take it out on the road, and wherever you drive you see other Hondas?  Suddenly the world is filled with Hondas you never noticed before.

That’s what happened to me. 

Suddenly my caseload was filled with control addicts.

The clients hadn’t changed, of course.  I had.  It’s like I’d put on new eyeglasses.  My vision had refocused or sharpened or something, and now I couldn’t help seeing how relentlessly and self-destructively controlling they all were.

They?  I mean we.  Everyone.

Controlling, I realized, was a universal addiction.  It was everywhere I looked.  Not just in clients I’d labeled codependent, but in every client.  Not just in clients, but in colleagues, and friends, and family, and on the nightly news, and in whatever I read or watched on tv or in the movies. 

And, of course, in myself.  (I’d discovered Bert.) 

Like a red thread in a carpet, the idea of control snaked through every problem, every motive, every personality, every life.

Most surprisingly, I noticed that the five most common problems clients brought to therapy all had compulsive controlling in common.

Anxiety, depression, addiction, relationship problems and problems with parenting — all seemed to grow out of the same dysfunctional urge to control what either couldn’t or shouldn’t be controlled.

Like five weeds growing out of the same root.