Original article: Dr Sara Llorens, translated with AI.Read the original in Spanish
"I've got everything under control"
Needing everything under control leads to frustration and anxiety. Who tends to do it, how it links to uncertainty, and how it's tackled in therapy.
We all need a certain degree of control over what happens around us, because it gives us a sense of security and stability. The problem comes when I need to have everything under control in order to feel good and safe.
Why is this a problem? Because having 100% control over my life is an illusion: it isn’t possible and it will never happen. Assuming it can would mean ignoring many other factors that play an important part in what happens in our daily lives and in our lives in general. And ignoring reality isn’t usually very helpful; very often it gets us into trouble.
And what happens when I insist on achieving something (having everything under control) that isn’t possible for me as a human being? I get frustrated, overwhelmed, anxious and/or deeply distressed… If I realise that it isn’t in my power to control everything, I’ll change my perspective and have more realistic expectations, which will lead me to use other methods and strategies and to expect more flexible results, and over time that will improve my quality of life. If, on the other hand, I don’t accept that this is how things are, I’ll keep banging my head against a brick wall, trying again and again to reach impossible goals and suffering because of it.
What kind of people tend to do this? They’re usually quite insecure people who need to have “everything tied up” in order to feel calm and at peace. They also tend to be people with a certain mental rigidity, what we’d colloquially call “black-and-white” or rigid thinkers. They don’t cope at all well with change, because change means something unknown, and I can hardly control something I don’t know. Low tolerance of uncertainty and the need for control always go hand in hand. Like two best friends: where you find one, you’ll find the other.
Is an extreme need for control linked to more serious disorders? Sometimes it’s simply a personality trait that can make life more or less difficult, depending on what happens. For example, it’s very typical of perfectionists. However, it’s true that the need for control and its best friend are a breeding ground for anxiety disorders.
How do you work on the need for control? I work on it through psychoeducation, helping the patient understand that the feeling of control is largely just that, a feeling, not a reality. We work on distinguishing which situations or things are under my control (for example, I can make sure I’m not late for my meeting) and which aren’t (for example, I can’t control what other people think of me, how someone else feels, or what others decide to do…). We also do exposure work, facing the patient with situations they can’t control, and then we look at the consequences together to show them that these were nowhere near as catastrophic as they’d imagined. And we also use exposure to improve tolerance of uncertainty, creating unexpected situations so that, over time, the patient’s mind learns to cope better with change and to suffer less when it happens.
