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).

We Try...

One cold and rainy Sunday evening I agreed to make a 12-step call to a local psychiatric ward. A young woman checked herself in with the hope of getting sober. Her substance use disorder had become so odious to her that she preferred death to another day of dependence on a drug for survival. Five days in, she was getting sober BUT she could not tolerate the way her body was reacting to the detox process. She HAD to get out. She COULD NOT tolerate this unease for ONE MORE DAY. She was one small step away from ripping out her hair; her body refused to cooperate with her heart’s desire for sobriety. She was unable to manage her body’s complete commitment to using as a way to feel less irritable, restless, agitated, anxious and desperate.

She did not welcome my visit. She knew I was there at the request of her mother and assumed I was there to convince her to finish what she started. I, however, wanted to pick her up and rock her. I wanted to soothe her frayed nerves. I did not want to get her sober or make her stay or manipulate her into behaving. I felt her pain. As I was leaving she said to me, “Hey. I’m out of this place tomorrow. But thanks for showing me compassion. Everyone else just shows up and yells at me.”

In the early years of my own recovery, I mistook 12-step calls for competitions not compassionate care. I thought we were there to snatch someone from the jaws of death. This aggressive evangelistic approach to recovery never worked for me, why did I think that I should work with others?

Today, I focus on the word “tried” in this step. All we do is try. And we do so from the perspective of recovery - with compassion. Other principles that are intrinsic to the steps include: belief and faith in a Higher Power, surrender, humility (not humiliation), forgiveness, wisdom and hope. The twelfth step is about hope. Not perfection. Not about eradicating all our anxieties. My friend is stuck on a psyc ward believing that somehow to get well she must be perfect. Oh how I wish I could convince her that recovery is not so much about change but transformation. Some things do change, some things about ourselves are stubbornly resistant to change. Recovery makes it possible to be good enough, well enough and resourced enough to find help on the days when we are in that freaked out, insecure and neurotic and emotional place (F.I.N.E.) that once triggered our dependencies but today….does not.