How To Be In Control Without Being Controlling

Few things give me more satisfaction than finishing something. It doesn’t matter what – completing a work task, crossing something off my mental to do list, cleaning my apartment – the list goes on and on. I am all about order and control so when everything I want to accomplish is done, I can breathe. When something goes awry, I furiously work to arrive at whatever outcome I want to achieve, because always reacting or responding makes me feel in control. But try as I may, there are a good many things that are beyond my control. My challenge has been to learn how to accept.

When I began therapy, I instinctively shut down rather than feel anything. It was a trained response that likely started in childhood. Emotions made me feel powerless, out of control, vulnerable. All of which were to be avoided. Rachel, my therapist, specializes in Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), a technique that is supposed to help you work through issues by dealing with them in a less emotional state. The thinking is that if you can focus on your physical reaction to stress, it lessens the emotional impact and allows you to process whatever feelings you have.

As Rachel and I began sifting through my history, I felt nothing. After several months I began to have physical sensations of feelings – numbness in my arms and hands, pounding in my chest, swirling in my stomach – nothing I could put words to or tolerate for more than a millisecond. We kept at it and made great progress as I tiptoed through the stages of first feeling something in my body, a somatic response, until it seemed safe enough to gradually register and recognize the emotions in their own right. But it was a long process to get there. My fear was that if I allowed myself to feel, I would be overwhelmed and sucked under. I would drown in my sadness or sorrow. Rachel tried to reassure me that wouldn’t happen. If I could learn to tolerate the unease, the lack of control, it would pass through me and over me.

Despite all my progress in therapy (and I cannot recommend it and EMDR strongly enough to anyone with a history of trauma), letting go of control was exceedingly difficult for me. Rachel would lament how much frenetic energy I expended in my efforts to take control of situations that were clearly beyond it. So how does a controlling person cede control without losing their mind?

For me, it started with meditation. In my quest to cure my chronic running pain I had several sessions with an acupuncturist. She thought I was literally running my body into the ground and asked if I meditated. When I replied no, she suggested I consider it as it's about learning compassion. Her rationale was that if I could learn compassion for myself, I wouldn't push my body so hard. It was food for thought but I dismissed it.

After I wasn’t magically cured by the acupuncturist, I made my way to physical therapy. He, too, suggested meditation as a way to relieve tension which I carried in my body like a coat of armor. My muscles never seemed to relax. A massage therapist once likened me to a rubber band that immediately snaps back once released. Even though I didn't necessarily feel stressed, my neck and back were always so tense and I was carrying that tension with me when I ran. More than that, I had no real sense of my body. I registered nothing except pain.

I’d like to say that was enough for me to explore meditation. But it wasn’t. Only after I exhausted absolutely everything on my list of ways to manage my chronic pain that included acupuncture, physical therapy, sports massages, coconut water, Epsom salt baths and twice daily stretching sessions, did I decide to try meditation. As noted, I will constantly pivot to achieve the outcome I want because it makes me feel in control. But this wasn’t something I could control, no matter how hard I tried. So, I started meditating.

Several people recommended Headspace which is meditation for dummies, and I mean that in the nicest possible way. At that time, Headspace began by trying to help you close out other thoughts and focus on your breathing so that you could begin meditating. The prep was effective, and I got into it right away.

Here’s what I learned. Meditation is all about now. This moment. Not yesterday and not tomorrow. Only now. Learning to be in the moment means that you’re not ruminating about what was or worrying about what will be. It’s being present. And present was something I rarely was. I spent a good amount of time and energy hypothesizing about what could be. It didn’t matter what, I was always thinking ahead, trying to plan and control the future course of events.

There’s a saying amongst runners about running the mile you’re in. It was during a 12-mile run as part of a race training plan that I was able to appreciate and apply that philosophy. Mile four was hard and all I could think about was how godawful mile nine was going to be based on that moment. Until I told myself to worry about mile nine when I got to mile nine and just run the mile I was in. As it happened, mile nine was fine, as were the others leading up to it. Making assumptions about what was before me based on how I felt in the moment was a waste of time and energy because how I feel can change in an instant. What is hard can become easy just as what is dark can become light. Running the mile you’re in is about embracing now and dealing with things as they happen.

It was through meditation that I realized what causes me anxiety is my fear of being out of control. The only way I knew to tamp it down was by taking control. I had to learn (and believe) that not being in control didn't mean I'd get hurt. Just because it did long ago didn't mean that it always would. My unforgivable sin was not being able to control the sexual abuse I endured as a child. As a result, being out of control is an untenable feeling because it may lead to my ruin. And ruined is how I felt for most of my life.

Gradually, through therapy and meditation, I was able to distinguish between what is in and out of my control. While a good many things in life are beyond my control, I am always in control of how I react. So, when life throws me a curveball or something unanticipated, I acknowledge the unease it brings up. Because generally it’s about uncertainty. My tightly controlled world is becoming unpredictable in some way and that makes me uncomfortable. Rather than try in vain to control a situation that is out of my hands, I simply acknowledge the unease and remind myself of what I can control: me. In fact, just about the only thing I can ever really control is me.

Once I was able to recognize what my discomfort was about, there was the matter of what to do with it. Rachel said that if I could acknowledge whatever awful feelings I had, they would pass through me and over me. I had to learn to tolerate the unease.

I started meditation at about the same time I was in my physical therapy merry go round. Releasing the knots in my muscles was incredibly painful, and I have a high threshold to pain. Worse, it was triggering. In those days I had an aversion to being touched and I was well outside of my comfort zone with acupuncture, massages and physical therapy.

During a session with Rachel, I described how the physical therapist massaged my bare ass, which was vaguely terrifying, then moved on to my psoas. I was lying on my back with my leg up, ankle by his ear with him holding my leg with one hand and pressing on my psoas which is near the crease of the leg in the pubic area. In short, his hands were all over me. And while I genuinely trusted and liked him, our time together was very intimate and made me extremely uncomfortable. Rachel and I talked about whether my body had a conditioned fear reaction to be vigilant and on alert even though my mind knew it was safe. Or, the flip side, that my body knew it was safe, but my mind didn't.

Rachel asked how I felt in that moment describing the scene. I was sad and nauseous, and my head was killing me. She asked me to hold my hands over my heart. She said it is proven to comfort, just the warmth of your hands over your heart is soothing to the body. As I sat there with my hands on my heart for a few minutes, all my symptoms faded. This has become a go to for me and I do it whenever I’m stressed or anxious or wake up during the night.

With my mind soothed, I had to focus on my body. All the work done on me was very painful and my natural go to, tensing until it passes, only made it worse for both me and the physical therapist. I had to learn how to relax so that it could pass through me and over me. I started deep breathing and when the pain was at its worst, I would picture amazing rock formations formed over thousands of years by water passing over them. I would deeply inhale and visualize water cascading over rocks as I exhaled and relaxed. It worked. The less I railed against it, the more the tension could be released.

Learning how to focus on my breath through meditation, yoga and running carried over to other areas of my life. I breathe primarily through my mouth, especially when running, which stimulates the sympathetic nervous system. This is responsible for the fight or flight response. Because the sympathetic nervous system is engaged, your body doesn’t shut off or rest, it’s always stimulated. And because running is so physically taxing (at least for me), my body is always stressed. To combat that, I take five deep breaths in and out of my nose as part of my cool down after every run. It stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system and turns off the fight or flight response and relaxes the mind and body.

Now when something happens that makes me feel out of control, I can identify and sit with the unease. By acknowledging it I am better able to let it pass through me and over me like water over rocks. That doesn’t mean I like the feeling or that the simple acknowledgement that it’s there makes it vanish. But the feelings aren’t as strong and I continue to remind myself that, yes, I feel the unease and, yes, it sucks, and it will pass. I also hold my hands over my heart and take deep breaths through my nose to calm my body. And for those times when I’m super stressed out, I walk or run in the park, and pound out my anxiety with every step.

After incorporating meditation into my daily life, I like to think that I became a relaxed Type A and Zen. To a certain extent, I did. I’m much less rigid and more relaxed than the old me. But I still find control comforting. I don’t generally like surprises unless they are in the form of sweet treats from the universe. But I’ve come so far. I no longer have to run as far from the feelings as I can to escape them. I can recognize every feeling for what it is and examine it and see how and why it makes me feel as it does, enabling me to be in control without being controlling. Now I can ride out my feelings without drowning in them and sigh them all out into the universe.