1: Tools for Handling Control Issues

Goals of Tools for Handling Control Issues

In the next fifteen chapters you will be exploring the various forms of
control of other people, places and things you may be currently involved in. You
will be given an overview of what the control issue is, why it is a control
issue, the negative results of using this control technique, and how to handle
or eliminate this technique from your behavioral repertoire so that you can
grow in personal self-esteem, accepting personal responsibility for your own
life and growing in personal self-control of your thinking, emotions, and
actions.

An important message in this book is that the more you let go of the control
over the people, places, and things in your life, the more control in your
personal life you will gain. In order to let go of control over others, you
must first be convinced that they are the uncontrollables and unchangeables in
your life and that the only one you can control and change is yourself.

Control issues impact your relationships with others and for this reason the
Tools for Relationships is a companion to this material. Since letting go of
control results in loss and negative emotions, the Tools for Handling Loss
and Tools for Anger Work-out are essential cohorts of this material. In order
to transmit to others a change in the level of your control in their lives,
you may also need the Tools for Communications. You cannot pursue letting go of
control over others unless you are fully committed to your growth in
self-esteem. The Tools for Personal Growth is an important companion to this
work.
Finally, to better understand why you have a need for control over others, you
need to explore the dysfunctional background in your life as discussed in
Laying the Foundation.

In order to let go of control over others, you need the support of others
and a program of recovery with a lifestyle which supports this recovery. The
Self-Esteem Seekers Anonymous B The SEA's Book provides for you a twelve step
approach to succeed in growing in self-esteem and thus letting go of control
over others.

The Tools for Handling Control Issues was the last book written in the
original eight book Tools For Coping Series and, for this reason, it is a
synthesis of all the concepts and principles contained in the other seven books
(The
SEA's Book, Laying the Foundation, Tools for Handling Loss, Tools for
Personal Growth, Tools for Relationships, Tools for Communication, Tools for
Anger
Work-Out).

It is my belief that this book is a spiritual enhancing guidebook for you to
grow in the ability to hand over to your Higher Power the need to control
others so as to ensure things go the way you want them in life. It is humbling
to admit our humanness and that only one being has power over us all.

Use this tool book to grow in personal awareness, emotional serenity, and
responsible action toward yourself and others.


The LET GO System - For letting go of the need to control others

In order to progress in your recovery from the behavioral consequences of
low self-esteem, you need to let go of the need to control the people, places,
and things which are the uncontrollables and unchangeables in your life. In
your past state of low self-esteem you once needed to control people, places,
and things in your life in order to maintain your sanity in the midst of
severe emotional distress. This need to fix, control, change, rescue, enable,
give
advice, and correct led to greater low self-esteem and increased severe
emotional distress. So to be successful in recovery, you need to use the SEA's
LET GO System:

L - Lighten Pressure

E - Exercise Rights

T - Take Steps

G - Give Up Need

O - Order Life

L - Lighten Pressure

The first thing you need to do is to lighten the pressure when you feel the
psychological need or compulsive drive to control, change, fix, rescue,
enable, give advice, or correct other people, places, or things. To do this,
use
the TEA, ALERT, ANGER and CHILD Systems to help you become more rational and
realistic about your current pressure or compulsive drive to control.

E - Exercise Rights

Second, once you have regained a healthier, more rational and realistic
perspective on the current person, place, or thing you want to control, you need
to exercise your right to declare that you can only change or control one
thing and that is you.

T - Take Steps

Third, once you have accepted your personal responsibility for your own
life, you need to take steps to cease your attempts to control, fix, change,
rescue, enable, give advice, or correct other people, places, or things. You
need
to allow others to experience the natural consequences of their own
thoughts, emotions, and actions.

G - Give Up Need

Fourth, once you have handed back to people, places, and things
responsibility for their own thoughts, emotions, and actions, you need to give
up the
need to control to others in your life. You need to let go of the
uncontrollables and unchangeables in your life by embracing the spirit, words,
and meaning
of the Serenity Prayer.

Serenity Prayer - By Reinhold Niebuhr

God, grant me the serenity

to accept the things I cannot change

Courage to change the things I can,

Wisdom to know the difference,

Living one day at a time,

Enjoying one moment at a time,

Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace,

Taking as Jesus did this sinful world

as it is, not as I would have it.

Trusting that you will make all things right

If I surrender to your will.

So that I might be reasonably happy in this life

and supremely happy with you forever in the next.

Amen

O - Order Life

Fifth, once you have embraced the serenity gained from letting go of the
need to control other people, places, and things, you need to order your life
accordingly. In the Tools for Handling Control Issues by Jim Messina, Ph.D. the
many faces of the need to control are discussed in great detail. These tools
can help you to order your life in the serenity of accepting personal
responsibility for your own life. In the Tools for Handling Relationships by
Jim
Messina, Ph.D. many issues involved in nurturing healthy relationships also
contains tools to help you let go and order your life with others in a healthy
way.

Need to Control: A Self-Assessment

DIRECTIONS: Review the following reasons you may feel the need to control
people, places, and things in your life. Put an "X'' next to those reasons
usually true for you.

___ 1. If you control other people, they will do what you want them
to do.

___ 2. It's a way to keep everything orderly, precise, and
predictable, so that you don't go crazy or insane.

___ 3. You hate to be out of control or to lose your control.

___ 4. If things don't go your way, then you feel you'll have to
work harder or have to struggle to reorganize and correct them.

___ 5. You have a hard time seeing people you care for hurting
because their lives are out of control.

___ 6. You hate to have people see your true feelings especially if
they are angry, unpleasant, or negative so you struggle to control them and
keep them in so as not to upset others.

___ 7. You are on the watch for being taken advantage of by others.

___ 8. You are afraid of being manipulated or led into doing
something you really don't want to do.

___ 9. When you see something or someone who needs to be fixed, you
often step in.

___ 10. You came from a dysfunctional or crazy homelife and you have no
desire to repeat it in your current homelife.

___ 11. You have an image, dream, or ideal of the way things are
supposed to be and you work at trying to get it to be that way.

___ 12. You are afraid that if you don't take care of things, things
will never get done.

___ 13. You feel if "you don't do it, then no one will.''

___ 14. You are afraid that everything you have worked for will be
lost, so you take control to ensure this doesn't happen.

___ 15. When you feel intimidated, you compensate by taking more
control of the situation.

___ 16. You find it difficult not to help when you are presented with a
person or thing which appears helpless and out of control.

___ 17. You tend to hold to an "it's my way or the highway'' approach
with people who don't do what you want them to do. You hope this will ensure
they change their bad behaviors.

___ 18. You are frightened, scared, or nervous when things seem to be
crazy or out of control so your first impulse is to take charge.

___ 19. You want everybody in your immediate life to be happy and
you'll do whatever it takes to make it so.

___ 20. You know how hard life can be on those who go into it
unprepared and unaware, so you do whatever it takes to make sure the people
you care
for are not taken advantage of.

INTERPRETATION: If you checked 3 or more, you have a tendency to
overcontrol the people, places, and things in your life.


Control Mechanisms: A Self-Assessment

DIRECTIONS: Here are some ways in which you control people to do for you
the things you could do for yourself. Put an "X'' next to those behaviors
usually true for you.

___ 1. You act helpless, incompetent, or lost.

___ 2. You make the other person feel very important and essential in
your life.

___ 3. You tell them reasons which are a lie why you couldn't get
things done.

___ 4. You feel self-pity and act out the belief that you have done
everything for everyone in your life so it's your turn now to be taken care
of.

___ 5. You act tense, anxious, and stressed out and incapable of
caring for yourself.

___ 6. You resort to threats of suicide or self-destruction to get
others to care for you.

___ 7. You give others a set of conditions they must do for you
before you will give them acceptance, care, or approval.

___ 8. You offer them rewards if they will do what you want done.

___ 9. You threaten others with withdrawal of attention, support,
affection, or approval if they don't do what you want done.

___ 10. You withhold your involvement, attention, and concern if they
don't do what you want done.

___ 11 You play on their sympathy and concern by being a pathetic
martyr, overworked and unappreciated victim.

___ 12. You play on your physical or emotional illness, be it real or
perceived, to get them to do for you.

___ 13. You play on their need to be needed to get them to take care of
you.

___ 14. You play up to their guilt and overresponsible nature to get
what you want.

___ 15. You act dependent in order to give the other a sense of
importance and value in helping you.

___ 16. You fall apart when faced with having to do something which you
would rather not do.

___ 17. You play up to a person who has a need to fix things that
things have gotten so "out of control'' for you.

___ 18. You promise to change or reform the behaviors the other wants
you to change in order to get what you want out of the other, never meaning to
change or reform.

___ 19. When you sense another person is pulling away from you, you
feign a problem or need which you believe will get that person involved with
you
again.

___ 20. You act as if you have forgotten to do something which you know
the other will do for you.

INTERPRETATION: If you checked 3 or more items, you overuse control
mechanisms to get people to do what you could do for yourself. Now find out if
others are controlling you to do things for them they could do for themselves.
Go
back and put an "X'' next to those statements true for people in your life.
If 3 or more are checked, then you are being overcontrolled by others to do for
them what they could do for themselves.


Emotional Response: A Self-Assessment

DIRECTIONS: Here are some ways in which you could control your emotional
response to life. Put an "X'' next to the statements which are usually true for
you.

___ 1. You allow yourself to be free, open, and expressive to the
feelings you are experiencing at the moment.

___ 2. You usually do not try to hide your feelings, be they positive
or negative.

___ 3. You are usually able to accept the consequences of others'
response to your positive or negative feelings.

___ 4. You are able to freely express your anger, in an assertive
confrontation mode with no raging, yelling, screaming, ranting, or raving at
other people.

___ 5. You do not avoid letting others know if you are angry with
them and yet you don't blow your cool in the telling.

___ 6. You can show enjoyment, excitement, and enthusiastic feelings
when the event appropriately calls for such a response.

___ 7. You are able to openly cry and grieve a loss event in your
life.

___ 8. You are able to do anger workouts over old, unresolved anger
in your life so as to free yourself of the emotional burden and drain these
repressed and unresolved feelings have on your emotional energy.

___ 9. You are able to express your violent rage and anger outbursts
privately so that you can return to people in a more composed way to let them
know in a healthy assertive way how angry you are.

___ 10. You are able to analyze your emotions at the time and to see if
they are congruent or in synch with your thinking and actions. If they are
not, you are able to figure out why and what to do about it.

___ 11. You are able to not allow self-pity to be a driving force in
your attitude about freely giving of your time and energy to accomplish what
you want out of life.

___ 12. If people in your life are acting out of control, you are able
to freely express your feelings of disappointment or disagreement and yet
not get hooked into being out of control with them.

___ 13. If you feel intimidated by another person, you freely admit
your feelings to yourself and choose not to let this person control the way you
feel, think, or act.

___ 14. You are able to admit feeling powerless over those things out
of your control to change, fix, or rescue.

___ 15. You are able to feel at ease and have serenity in letting go of
the uncontrollables and unchangeables in your life.

___ 16. You do not feel you are alone in having to deal with the
pressures of life because you feel you have a Higher Power to whom you can hand
the
uncontrollables and unchangeables over which you feel powerless.

___ 17. You feel detached from the behaviors, actions, and negative
aspects of the people in life for whom you care a great deal and yet are not
able to fix, rescue, or change.

___ 18. You are able to feel good about yourself with no guilt or
remorse when you feel detached from the people with whom you have had toxic
relationships in the past.

___ 19. You do not let fantasies, dreams, traditions, or promises of
the way things are supposed to be interfere with your rationally experiencing
life the way it really is.

___ 20. You have no need to be invisible or on guard so as not to be
vulnerable to feeling hurt or pain, because you feel it is better for you to be
vulnerable in life to experience authentic human growth.

INTERPRETATION: If you checked 17 or less, then you need to work on control
of your emotional life so that you cease to use overcontrol of other people
in your life to feel good about yourself. You need to handle your own
feelings and not give others the power to affect the way you feel or express
your
feelings. Your feelings are something which you have the ability to control and
change. They, along with your thinking and actions, are the only
controllables and changeables you can influence, alter, or change.


What is locus of control?

Locus of control means where you place the power to influence how you feel
about yourself and others. It is important to determine if the locus of control
is external or internal to figure out if you are susceptible to being
controlled by others.

External Locus of Control

External locus of control is giving other people, places, and things the
power to influence your feelings about yourself.

External locus of control places approval, recognition, acceptance,
reinforcement, and affirmation of self-worth into the hands of other people,
places,
and things. Unless others approve, recognize, accept, reinforce, or affirm
your worth, then you feel worthless, non-approved, unrecognized, not accepted,
and non-reinforced. This makes you susceptible to being controlled by others'
thinking, emotions, and actions.

Internal Locus of Control:

Internal locus of control is giving yourself the power to influence your
feelings about yourself.

Internal locus of control places self-approval, self-recognition,
self-acceptance, self-reinforcement, and self-affirmation of worth into your own
hands.
In this way it is only up to you and your own efforts at self-love and care
to feel worthwhile, valuable, competent, skillful, creative, knowledgeable,
and capable of living your life for yourself and not controlled by others. You
are then fully responsible for your own thinking, emotions, and actions in
life.

Locus of control is a "power'' issue

Locus of control is a "power'' issue. If you give others power over you, you
overemphasize external locus of control in your life. On the other hand, if
you empower yourself, you emphasize internal locus of control in your life.

In order to handle the control issues in your life, it is better to
emphasize internal locus of control so that you are able to let go of the need
to
control and change others and concentrate on controlling and changing yourself.





HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Be who you are and say what you feel,
because those who mind don't matter,
and those who matter don't mind.
- Dr. Suess


Yahoo! Groups: End_Verbal_Abuse Group Leader
_http://groups.yahoo.com/group/End_Verbal_Abuse_
(http://groups.yahoo.com/group/End_Verbal_Abuse)

Yahoo! Groups: CoDependents Group Leader
_http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Codependents_
(http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Codependents)





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