Why the Need to Control Other People is a Self-Defeating Behaviour

How Trying to Fix What Others Do, Say and Think Makes Us Sick

In sharing with folks who are suffering with chronic illnesses or trauma the things I’ve learned about how to reduce symptoms, I find it useful to provide simplifying pragmatic lenses through which understanding of our own behaviours, and those of other people in our lives, can be gleaned. These understandings then inform us of the changes we need to make in our lives, in order to get better. One of my most important and fundamental lenses, or axioms, is:

our Nervous System is constantly trying to keep us safe and alive, and is driving us towards behaviours, actions and thoughts which are intended to make us more safe, both in the present and for the future.

Many human behaviours don’t make sense, until one really grasps this. Examples of behaviours this drives include the triggering of classical fight or flight responses to fend off predators or flee from dangers, or freezing us so that we won’t be noticed or appear to be already dead.

As social animals, the axiom applies equally to our Nervous System constantly trying to keep us safe and alive within our relationships and encounters with other people, both with those already known to us, and with strangers. When sensing social or relational dangers, our Nervous System can drive us to seek safety in numbers, for example in finding and grouping with other like-minded people, or gathering more social capital and resources to ourselves, whether through collaboration or competition. Conversely, ostracization is to be avoided at all costs, because in our Palaeolithic days this would mean loss of access to essential resources which help us to be safe, vunerbale to being outnumbered and physically attacked, or even death.

Shame, embarrassment, blame and guilt are early warning signs of potential ostracization, which is why these feel so very uncomfortable and anxiety inducing.

When there are power imbalances between people, the fawn and appeasement stress responses come into play, see:

The Fawning and Appeasement Survival Responses

Apart from perhaps in psychopathy, even the pursuit of wealth, fame and power are ultimately driven by the Nervous System quest to make oneself safe.

Another way our Nervous System may attempt to keep us safe is by trying to control our physical or social environments, such that dangers do not arise in the first place. Hence a Nervous System level need to control things, can also arise as a stress response. When this need rises to obsessive-compulsive levels, this can become a maladaptive response.

Repeated checking that the doors are locked, or that the oven is turned off, is really still about the Nervous System trying to minimize the potential loss of resources (contents of house, car), in this case by making sure that all defences are in place, and weak points are covered, before psychologically being able to leave the resource undefended.

Obsessive-compulsive behaviours around repeatedly washing hands and wearing masks in inappropriate places can also be seen as the Nervous System trying to avoid encountering dangers, by controlling and minimizing perceived dangers in the environment, in this case from potential internal invaders.

We get stuck in these obsessive-compulsive like behaviours in the quest for safety when our Nervous System becomes overly fearful, and is over-sensitized, due to the cumulative weight of past encounters with threats and stressful episodes. We may begin detecting dangers which are not actually there. We end up getting stuck in a high alert, or hypervigilance, state, even in situations where it really is appropriate to feel safe and relax.

Indeed, obsessive-compulsive checking can become a vicious circle and a self-defeating behaviour, and can actually cause us to be increasingly self-stressing, maintaining our anxiety levels. Eventually, this even leads to inflammation and toxicity in the brain and body, due to the Nervous System becoming unable to relax, and hence blocking it from entering the calm states required for detoxification. This in turn leads to physical health and chronic pain issues, which dysregulates the Nervous System even more, making it feel even less safe, driving us to be even more obsessive-compulsive in trying to eliminate all the perceived threats.

On the social and relational level, this need to be safe through control of our environment, may drive to us want to control other people, in an attempt to reduce a perceived threat they represent. When the need to control other people is also taken to obsessive-compulsive levels, this can manifest as controlling or abusive “romantic” or one-to-one relationships, in which healthy personal boundaries are breached. This is not only self-defeating, but destructive for both partners.

At its most pathological, the obsessive-compulsive need to control others, including trying to control what other people do, say and even think, manifests in Totalitarian states. That this too is self-defeating is illustrated by the fact that every Totalitarian state in history eventually fell. This is the central theme of a new book “The White Pill” by Michael Malice, which documents the rise and sudden fall of the Soviet Union.

As this is the week of the meeting in Davos, I can’t help but point to the World Economic Forum, as a globalized culmination of a pathological obsessive-compulsive need by a very small group of people to control what the rest of humanity does, says and thinks, in order to keep themselves and their resources safe. I could write an entire article on this is an illustrative example, which I have now done in a sequel:

My Thoughts on the World Economic Forum

Sufficient to say, I don’t think this ends well for them!

From what I’ve learned along the way, the letting go of the need to control everything, and especially everyone, around us, is absolutely critical for reducing our symptoms and our suffering. We simply can not heal while we are stuck in such self-stressing loops and cannot get better when we are constantly worried about what other people are doing, saying or, especially, thinking. We also can’t repair our own personal or energetic boundaries while we are invading those of other people, and, conversely, it also very hard to heal while we are in toxic relationship with a overly-controlling person.