Defining Control

For a month’s worth of posts, I (Scott) am critiquing my own past blog posts. I’m viewing this as an experiment in being willing to admit when I’m wrong, change my mind, and to do so publicly.

How do we define control?

Control can, of course, mean many different things.  When I refer to things we can  legitimately control I'm using "control" to mean something akin to the exercise of responsibility.  The things that we (appropriately) control in life are things we have both the permission and the capacity to influence (there are surely other factors, but for our purposes I think these two frame the conversation in such a way as to allow us to go fairly deep fairly quickly).  

We become (overly) controlling through distorting one of those two factors:  we either falsely believe we are justified in controlling something that isn't ours to influence or we falsely believe we have the capacity to influence when, in fact, we do not.  A substance use disorder represents a distortion of both factors at once.  When we say, for instance, that we COULD stop but simply do not want to then we are believing two lies:  1. That the s.u.d. itself does not exercise control over us (and, thus, has given us permission to be in charge) and 2. That we have the capacity to influence our s.u.d.  

The same factors apply elsewhere in life.  The limits of control are permission and influence and they vary greatly depending on circumstances.  These two factors combined let us know whether or not something rightly falls within the realm of what is "ours to do."  

My response to me:

I think I agree with this definition- but not so much the example. Substance use does not have unending control over a person- people can change. It requires a focused, dedicated effort and likely to the help and support of a community (be it 12 Step, a counselor, family, friends, whoever). 

And so the issue of what we have the “capacity” to influence is an interesting one (at least to me). We may not always have the capacity to make changes to certain things over night- but we can often start moving in the direction of change. For instance, a person might attend an AA meeting for several months before they have some sobriety time. There was real change on display long before the sobriety happened. This person wanted to make a change, sought help, altered their schedule and routine, etc. etc. in order to change how they relate to alcohol. 

Or- to refer back to yesterday. If something really tragic happens to us, we may not be able to change our difficult feelings immediately- but perhaps we have some acceptance exercises that we rely on that shift us from something like complete resentment to something resembling peace. We did not have the capacity to “change” the thing that happened, but we did have the capacity to change how we related to the thing that happened.

So we may have the capacity to do a lot more than we think (or a lot more than I once thought).