What’s so hard about taking what you get and liking it? Everything. Nobody is perfect, we know that; problem is, we like perfect, crave it, want it, wish it were reality. We’ve hit the conclusion that we’re not reaching perfection ourselves, so we might as well start working on somebody else. Maybe we’ll have more success with them.
Yeah, right.
The Opposite of Acceptance
But we still try, don’t we? Especially on our husbands. Sometimes (okay, often) on our children. If they resist, we work on our friends, our extended family, our employees. And we still wave the perfection flag at ourselves as well, inwardly, and deal with the continual guilt and self-imposed pressure of never living up to our own expectations. Our mental catalogs fill with pages full of criticism, disapproval, worry, and fear.
Control and Why We Want to Have It
There’s a truth we know about people from experience: they are stupid. They mess up. They let us down. They don’t get it. They lie, they disappoint, they break hearts, they say hurtful things, they put themselves first. We see ourselves as the victims (and sometimes we are). They’re stupid, and we have to deal with the consequences. They mess up, and we pick up the mess. They disappoint, and we get blindsided. They break our hearts.
So we find a way to deal with it. We decide, consciously or not, that the only way to avoid being the victim again is to be the one in control. We step in and take over. We start directing people; first the people closest to us, who can hurt us most, and then, eventually, everyone within reach. The habit of control never stops extending.
Control and Why It Doesn’t Work
We bump into reality again. There’s another truth about people: they don’t like to be controlled. They resist our authority, those subversive rascals, and we keep raising the stakes, changing our methods, getting louder. We’re also getting more stressed out and overwhelmed, but we try not to admit that. Admitting that would be admitting that having control is more trouble than it’s worth, and that would get us right back to where we don’t want to be: vulnerable, helpless, a victim in waiting.
The Truth About Victimization
The truth is that controlling other people has nothing to do with whether or not you become a victim. Control itself turns you into a victim, locking you into a stressed-out, overwhelmed, worry-filled, fear-driven, critical version of your true self. That’s not who you really want to be, is it? It’s no fun. Nobody else likes being around that version of you. In striving to protect yourself, you drive people away. You end up victimizing yourself and destroying all your relationships in the process.
Quit Being the Victim
Here’s how to quit being victimized, whether by yourself or by other people.
- First, realize that we’re all standing on level ground. Yeah, I know you’ve been marching to the Equality Tune for a while now, but you haven’t really understood what it means. Equality means, yes, that no one else is inherently better than you; it also means you are not inherently better than anyone else. Even your spouse, your mother-in-law, or that witchy woman two cubicles down.
- Second, realize that we’re working with a world of imperfection and preference. Imperfection means that you will never, ever find someone who does what you want, when you want, as you want, all the time. (Would that really be perfection, anyway?) Preference means that a lot of stuff – stuff you like to fight over – really isn’t a matter of right or wrong. It’s a matter of opinion, priority, taste, timing, preference. The universe will not shift on its axis one way or the other.
- Third, realize that sometimes you have to pretend you don’t have any rights. Oooh. You don’t like that one, do you? The problem with rights, though, is that everybody has ‘em. That means that at some point, my right to do what I want and your right to do what you want will be in, er, what do we call that? Conflict. Big, bad, ugly conflict that only ends when somebody wins and somebody else loses, on the terms that the winner’s rights matter and the loser’s do not. You can choose to either fight it out until you win (via the control method) or give up and be a loser (in the victim seat again). Those were your only choices in the past.
- Realize that you have another option; you can choose to willingly lay down your rights and treat someone else as more important. You can do that without being threatened now, because you know we’re all on level ground. And you can let him have his preference over yours (even if his is stupid) because you know the universe will keep on going anyway.
Where Does This Leave You?
What happens when you really let go of control? When you decide to quit being a victim?
You find out that you’re free to be happy.
More on that tomorrow.
Image courtesy of lepiaf.geo on Flickr.