Do you sometimes give away the control of your life? It is like giving someone the keys to your car and letting them take you wherever they want to go. How often do you give your keys away? How often do you end up bickering and arguing in your relationship over the smallest, crazy things?
Someone will argue with me over this one. But what is control all about? For me it is the act of wanting to control someone else or something. Hopefully those reading this understand that we just cannot control another person but some people work so hard at it!
Relationship control comes in four forms
1. I want you to do something you don’t want to do
2. You want me to do something I don’t want to do
3. We both want each other to do something neither wants to do
4. We are forcing ourselves to do something we don’t want to do.
You see we are all doing the best we can at the time to get something that we want. When we get that, it will satisfy one or more of our five basic needs – Love and Belonging, Power, Fun and Freedom. Why do we end up using so much external control? That’s easy. It is because we do not know what else to do and right from birth we have learned to control another person.
Here is how it happens. When you are born, you are born knowing what feels good and what does not feel good. You are born with the behavior of crying. We cry to get what we want. We cry when we are hungry. Some warm, caring person comes along and picks us up and feeds us. That felt good so now we know that if we cry we can get some help. We can control that big person to look after us. Right or wrong, this is what we learn.
In reality though, we are driven from within, to satisfy our own basic needs and we are always behaving to meet them. We do that by forming pictures of people, places and things that are important to us and then we go after what we want ( those pictures). We even learn and take on some of our limiting beliefs at this time because we are connected to the people who take care of us and they are our biggest influencers. We could write about this for days. What I have been talking about is the difference between external control and internal control as taught by Dr. William Glasser.
Want more info? www.choicetheorytraining.com or www.maureencraigmcintosh.com
