How We Get What We Really Want:
The Battle of Control
by
Graham Maxey
I
believe it was Abraham Lincoln (if it wasn’t Abe it sounds like something
cool he would say) who once said, “Most people are about as happy as they
have a mind to be,” meaning that it is not circumstances that allow
someone to feel good or not; it is the way they interact with those
circumstances that makes the difference.
However, most of the products and services offered in today’s
society are not aimed at helping people improve the level of their happiness by
this means. Quite the
contrary--almost every advertisement promises to increase our control over our
situation one way or another. It
is implied to us over and over that if we will purchase something that will
(guaranteed!) make us safer, sexier, healthier, a better parent, partner, or
employee, then that’s when life will become good and contentment will
commence. The fact that there is
an endless succession of these things all competing for our attention and money
doesn’t seem to dull the message that happiness is just another purchase
or acquisition away.
In
the twenty years that I have been involved in mental health work I have seen a
lot of people who had begun to feel that there must be something wrong with
them simply because they weren’t aware of being happy. It’s natural, in light of all the
messages we get about how to obtain happiness from outside ourselves, to make
the assumption that if you lack peace and you already have, for example, gotten
a degree, a job, a mate, some children, a mortgage, a car payment, and a hobby,
you are probably mentally ill. In
the mental health profession, fortunately, serious mental illness is rather
rare. Only about 15% of therapy
cases involve someone with major depression, bi-polar disorder, schizophrenia,
a personality disorder, or similar diagnoses. The other 85% of cases are, one way or another, about our
frustrations with not getting what we want, and the ways we try solve those
frustrations. To over-simplify,
most therapy is about unhappiness.
What usually brings people into therapy is not the unhappiness itself,
it’s the fact that they don’t feel they have enough control over
their situation and want to correct that so they will be happy.
Whether
it is a poor self-image, an unsatisfying relationship, the limits imposed by
poor health, or the hurt and anger we feel from neglect/abuse as a child, the
truly painful part of any of these things is the control we seek to have in the
face of them. We want to have
something other than what we do have, and we seek to control the universe in
some way to affect that control.
Even if we have what we think we want, we want control to keep it.
But
the battle for control destroys our confidence, our trust, and ultimately our
satisfactions in life. It
necessarily puts us at odds with at least some people in our world (we tend to
call them “jerks” or “idiots” or something more
colorful) because they seem to be against our way of keeping control of the
things we want to control in the way we think we would like it. Control even pits us against our own
unconscious wisdom at times because, like it or not, our lives are not and can
not be completely directed only by our ego consciousness. We are much “bigger” than
that, and the unconscious, out of which the ego develops, has its own purposes
for our lives which are not always compatible with our self-image. So, we’re battling ourselves and
others for this control thing. No
wonder we don’t feel peaceful.
Life’s a war.
In
a wonderful book about conscious living and conscious dying by Stephen and
Ondrea Levine entitled Who Dies? There is a wonderful nugget of wisdom within their whole very rich
vein of enlightenment. In
explaining why we sometimes experience genuine, momentary bliss when we get the
thing we think we wanted they say, “Peace is experienced not because of
the object in our hand but because for a moment desire does not obstruct the
joy and quietude of our underlying nature.”
The
reason we want anything is because
we think it will bring us peace.
The wonderful fact is that peace is always available. We can be “as happy as
we’ve a mind to be.”
The real work of therapy AND life is learning that only by giving up
control can we actually get what we truly want.
