Perceived Chaos and the Need to Control

People who are compulsive and perfectionistic struggle mightily with disorder and unresolved situations. These may feel chaotic to them, like catastrophic threats to the security they’re trying to create in their world. So they feel an urgent need to control situations–to bring order to the disorder.

But this need to control works like a deafening alarm that’s hardwired to go off way too easily. So the stable world that they had originally wanted to protect or create is now, ironically, filled with internal chaos.

Understandably, people experience this in regard to COVID 19, politics, and the climate crisis. We are confronted with real catastrophes that have huge impact on our well-being.  Of course we want to get all these problems over with and get back to “normal.”

I won’t try to comment explicitly on COVID in this post, but you can follow these links to previous posts on the virus if that would be most helpful:

Psychological Research to Help You Stay Calm During COVID 19.

Wisdom From Folks Who’ve Been Through Pandemics Before.

But there are many situations that feel like chaos, but are not.

Planning for a Perfect World

I like resolution. I’d say I crave it, but I’ve made some progress and have learned to tolerate it some. Still, when something isn’t right—a conflict with a colleague or family member, an incomplete project, a pandemic—it’s hard to relax.

I believe that this is one of the defining characteristics of people who have compulsive traits: The Unresolved can feel chaotic, and we want it fixed, fixed right, and fixed right now. And we persist in trying to get there, no matter how chaotic it actually makes us feel to try to fix it.

That deafening alarm goes off again.

This need to control or to resolve isn’t all bad. Compulsives take care of a lot of things for the people around them and for the world. People come to me as a therapist to help them resolve problems. But with both my clients and the rest of life, not everything can be resolved and we often need to find a larger perspective which can encompass the things that are unresolved instead.

Even when it’s adaptive in the outer world, the need to fix everything can prevent any sense of peace inside. This happens when we’re too dialed in to having everything just right.

There are two keys to dealing with this:

1. Identify what’s really most important (e.g. good relationships, serenity, making a contribution).
2. Use the need for control in an adaptive way, to achieve what’s really important, rather than trying to control things that aren’t really important.

I’ll explain these in reverse order.

But someone—I never found out who—someone couldn’t tolerate the disorder of dead branches on the forest floor. So he or she took on the Herculean task of piling all these branches in large stacks, and the result was pretty ugly.

I figure this person either had either OCD or OCPD. Why would someone need to take something so beautiful and try to “organize” it? The project was doomed to failure. Those branches were never going to stop coming down.

Yet still, I get it–the inclination to control the chaos. But I try to channel the need to control instead.

One way I do this is by doing hiking trail maintenance. I remove branches and fallen trees from hiking paths so the paths stay clear and people can enjoy the outdoors with a little more ease. I get to exercise my need to bring some order to chaos, but in a way that’s helpful and doesn’t detract from the scenery.

My examples might seem trite in the context of our world right now. They are. But my experience is that starting small and practicing can help achieve more significant changes in perspective and personality that help us navigate the bigger challenges.

The Sound Of Chaos and The Need to Control

One of my struggles is that I don’t like auditory chaos—people talking over each other, loud restaurants, contentious meetings. I can cope, but I don’t enjoy it. It makes me want to be a conversation traffic cop, directing who speaks when, so that people listen to each other rather than talking over each other.

Once I was in a situation like this and the guy next to me said: “It’s so chaotic! I love it!” I realized, to my amazement, that some people love this sort of disorder; it feels alive and creative to them. It’s fertile ground for new ideas and solutions.

It forced me to reconsider my take on chaos.

Learning to Let the Chaos Happen

For years when I gave workshops I’d organize the participants into breakout groups of four so they could share their experience on a more intimate level. I gave very careful and explicit instructions for each person to speak about their experience for four minutes while others listened carefully, and then do another round the same way. I’d chime a bell every four minutes to ensure compliance.

You probably won’t be surprised to hear that this led to confusion and resistance. But I felt strongly that everyone should have chance to speak in these small groups, and I persisted. I could tell they weren’t always following my directions, but I was determined.

I was at war with chaos.

The really important thing in these breakout groups is for people to have an experience that helps them to grow where they need and want to grow. But I had lost track of that. It doesn’t have to happen in tightly controlled four-minute segments.

Finally, after years of trying vainly to win the war on breakout group chaos, I called a truce. I explained to the participants what I thought was most important and suggested that each group do its best to try to make sure everyone had a chance to speak.

It’s been a relief to me, and to the people in the groups. The groups are more spontaneous and productive now.  And, perhaps not surprisingly, there’s actually less chaos.

Carl Jung: Outgrow Problems by Identifying What’s Important

The groundbreaking psychiatrist Carl Jung had some ideas about all of this on a more philosophical level: “The greatest and most important problems of life are all in a certain sense insoluble…. They can never be solved, but only outgrown…. This ‘outgrowing’, as I formerly called it, on further experience was seen to consist in a new level of consciousness. Some higher or wider interest arose on the person’s horizon, and through this widening of view, the insoluble problem lost its urgency. It was not solved logically in its own terms, but faded out when confronted with a new and stronger life-tendency.”¹

The way I see it, this new level of consciousness Jung refers to reaches beneath the immediate concern to what motivated it in the first place. We can then identify what’s really most meaningful. What were you trying to get at originally by trying to control the chaos and resolve the unresolved? With this in mind, the immediate situation that feels out of order or incomplete becomes less important than psychological well-being.

Then we can enlist our need to control in the service of the things that will be most satisfying.

Channeling Control: What’s Most Important?

Remembering what’s most important is probably one of the most healing things compulsives and perfectionists can do. Too often they get caught up in the details and miss the forest for the trees.

Because there is one thing we can count on: change is gonna come.

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