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Control means the ability to dictate reality — to make people, places and things what we want them to be.
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It is easily the most important idea in our lives.
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Why? Because controlling is a built-in function of the human mind.
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It works like this:
Moment to moment, we each carry around in our heads a picture of the reality we want.
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And we constantly compare that picture to the reality we have.
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Anything we do to bring those two closer together — to change the reality we have into the one we want — is what I call controlling.
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It’s controlling whether we do it in speech, in behavior, or only in the privacy of our imagination or dreams.
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Our controlling may be overt or covert, conscious or unconscious, choiceful or compulsive, creative or destructive, healthy or unhealthy.
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Studying control has led me to four conclusions:
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(1) We are all addicted to control.
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(2) This addiction causes most (maybe all) our emotional problems.
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(3) Behind all controlling is the wish to control feelings.
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(4) There are better ways to handle feelings than control.
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These are the Four Laws of control.
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Now, this view of control can be confusing, partly because so often control is clearly a good and necessary thing.
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I won’t willingly surrender control when I’m driving my car on wet pavement, or my kid gets sick and needs a doctor, or garbage piles up in my kitchen, or a mosquito tries to bite me, or in any of a million other daily situations.
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But there are two areas where controlling tends to cause more problems than it solves: feelings and relationships.
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Overcontrolling feelings tends to make us sick — anxious, depressed, addicted.
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Overcontrolling other people tends to anger, scare, and alienate them.
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What does all this mean?
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It means anyone who wants to be emotionally healthy and reasonably happy needs to examine the role control plays in their life — to learn to
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(a) notice when they’re controlling,
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(b) decide if their controlling is healthy or not,
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October 24th, 2016 at 10:16 pm
[…] Source: Control: an introduction […]