Conscious Resilience: A Key to Release From Overcontrol

Do you ever feel physically and mentally exhausted from trying to make things go a certain way? Do people ever tell you that you’re too controlling? Here’s a key to lessening that control.

A 2017 study found that resilience makes you less likely to develop OCPD, Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder. OCPD is characterized by the need for control, order and perfection. Resilience is the capacity to get through difficult situations without falling apart or over-reacting negatively.

Here’s what happens when you don’t have conscious resilience:

1. You believe that a future crisis will leave you terribly unhappy or hurt for a long time.
2. You begin to dread encountering difficult situations.
3. You try to diminish that anxiety by controlling.

How This Need for Control Can Manifest:

• Domineering Behavior
• Overworking
• Extreme People Pleasing
• Obsessing and Procrastinating
• Rigidity with Yourself and Others
• Striving for Perfection Where Perfection Isn’t Possible

But, on the other hand, if you do have a conscious sense of your resilience, if you know that you can handle whatever comes up, you won’t feel the need to control as much. You’ll be more flexible and less perfectionistic.

Conscious Resilience

Notice that I said a conscious sense of resilience–an awareness that you can get through crises. If you do have resilience (and most of us do), but you aren’t aware of it, the time you spend obsessing and trying to control before the crisis hits is still pretty miserable.

So in this post I’m going to encourage you to develop conscious resilience so you don’t waste the next week, months, or years obsessing about, and trying to control, some crisis that either never happens, or you’re able to navigate without sinking.

Winnie The Pooh Gets an Informed Lecture on Resilience

Christopher Robbin was trying help Pooh with this very issue when he gave him his famous pep talk:

“You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.”

Christopher must have been reading the research journal Advances in Experimental Social Psychology at the time. You see, psychologists Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson had published an article in that journal explaining just why Pooh—along with the rest of us–was braver, stronger and smarter than he thought.

It seems that our capacity for emotional forecasting is pretty bad.

Impact Bias: The Belief that Things Will Be Worse Than They Turn Out to Be

Impact bias, for example, is just one of the tendencies that skews our assessment of how we’re going to feel once a particular event happens. It’s the tendency to assume that emotional reactions will impact you more intensely and for much longer than you expect—whether they’re good or bad.

Here are examples of how impact bias leads to different forms of control:

 

• Domineering Behavior: I’ll never recover if Mary Sue breaks up with me so I’ll show her that I know how to do things better than she does, and that she really needs me so that she won’t leave.

• Overworking: If I don’t keep this job I’m eternal toast, so I’ll work as many hours as I need to to convince them that they can’t do without me.

• Extreme People Pleasing: I’ll always be happy if Sam stays with me. He’s all I need. So I’ll do whatever he wants me to do to please him.

• Obsessing and Procrastinating: We’ll all feel secure once we get the right generator. And it will be a disaster if it’s the wrong one. But should I get the diesel one or the gasoline one? I have to get it right so I’ll do some more research…next week.

• Rigidity: We have to follow the suggested itinerary exactly or else we’ll get lost and never find our way there. It will ruin our vacation and we could even get divorced if it goes badly.

• Perfectionism: I have to play every note perfectly in this concert or I’ll never get to perform with this group again. If I do get it perfect, I’ll never feel insecure again.

The reality is that not too long after the crisis or non-crisis—whether you get what you want or not—your mood will return to its baseline, something similar to what it usually is.

This is a backwards way of saying, “You can handle it.”

Caveat—Some Control is Necessary

A lot of the research done in this area covers not just the minor disappointments we fear, but also some pretty horrendous catastrophes. We recover more quickly than we imagine we will, even in awful situations. And in some cases we even experience post-traumatic growth.

But still, we need to acknowledge that some traumas do have long-lasting negative impact. We do need to use foresight to avoid getting hurt. That’s the wise and responsible thing to do.

But those of us with obsessive and compulsive tendencies tend to go too far in that direction.

Developing Conscious Resilience

So what is a better strategy than obsessive and compulsive control?

A more effective strategy is to change our mindset to one in which we know that we can handle whatever comes up so that we don’t have to go crazy—or drive others crazy—by using control to try to prevent bad situations.

It’s more like building a sturdy boat than trying to hold back the inevitable flood.

Here are a few ways to do that:

• Observe When Dread Leads You to Try to Control

Develop an awareness of the connection between dread and control. See if you can feel it in your body when you tense up and and go into hyper-drive. Shoulders? Chest? Hands?

• Remember The Consequences of Trying to Control

Has control caused you suffering? Has it kept you from enjoying the good things in your life? Has it gotten in the way of relationships?

The “cure” of trying to control things is often worse than the “disease” you’re trying to prevent. Always trying to prevent problems (holding back the inevitable flood) is exhausting and unsustainable.

Efforts to control can lead to stress, and to the release of too much cortisol. Cortisol is the hormone that sets off alarms and releases energy to deal with perceived danger–even if there is no real danger. Think of all the cortisol you send floating around your brain when you try to control the uncontrollable. As I’ve written in a previous post, obsessive control takes a huge hit on your health.

• Recall Times That You’ve Gotten Past Dreaded Outcomes

The next time you find yourself dreading something and trying to prevent it with overcontrol, remember times that things went badly but you recovered.  Chances are that these difficult times actually prepared you to deal with future circumstances. You may not want to go through it again, but you can if you have to.

• Welcome Adversity to Build Resilience

We develop resilience during struggles. If you succeed in preventing them, you will rob yourself of the benefits of resilience.

Parents know that they need to let their child fall a few times so that they learn to stand. And to know that even if they fall, they’ll be fine.

When you go through tough times be aware that you will get through them, and that they may help you develop resilience. This can have meaning in terms of your growth and and your purpose in life. And, the more mindfulness you bring to it, the more you will be able to call on your resilience when you next need it.

The Resilient Heart

Resilience is a great resource that can serve us even in the worst of circumstances. Remembering that can help us to control less and savor more.

Poet Gregory Orr expressed this wonderfully in his book How Beautiful The Beloved:

Squander it all!

Hold nothing back.

The heart’s a deep well.

And when it’s empty,

It will fill again.

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Up next will be a post about how overcontrol leads to problems with self-expression, communication, and relationships. Put your email address in the “Subscribe” window all the way at the bottom of the page and you’ll get a link when it comes out! Be sure to reply to the email you’ll receive to confirm your subscription!

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