The Illusion of Control — and the Power of Impact

One of the most crushing realities I deal with — both in my office and in my own life — is my complete and utter lack of control.

Human beings have zero control over how their lives turn out, how their relationships turn out, or even, in many ways, how they themselves turn out. This is a large part of why I have a job. People come to me because they are in tremendous pain from things that have spun beyond their reach and become completely unmanageable. They feel out of control — of their circumstances, their relationships, their emotions, their own behavior.

And here’s the thing that might surprise you: my job is not to help them regain control.

Self-control is absolutely a fruit of the work we do together — a desired outcome, something that grows over time. But it is not the starting place, and grasping for it too early is one of the things that keeps people stuck. My job, instead, is to help people shift their focus from control to impact. Not: how do I make this stop? But: what can I actually do, here and now, that will matter?

Picture a father sitting across from me at five o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon, crying over his daughter who won’t get out of bed and go to school in the morning. He’s tried everything. He’s reasoned with her, pleaded with her, raised his voice, lowered it. Nothing works. He is desperate. He is exhausted. And he is, in his desperation, making things worse.

The question I’m sitting with isn’t how we get her to school. The question is: what can we do, in this moment, to have the most impact on this father’s heart and on his relationship with his daughter — something that could bring about lasting change?

The answer — and this is the part that surprises almost everyone — begins with fully acknowledging the loss of control. Not fighting it. Not strategizing around it. Acknowledging it.

Nearly every useful recovery program I’ve encountered starts here. In Emotionally Focused Therapy, my core model for change, we do this by helping people map the feedback loop they’re caught in — the patterns of emotion and behavior that, despite their very best efforts, they cannot seem to escape. And then we slow down into that loop. We look at it. We have compassion for ourselves and for the other people caught in it with us.

It’s when this father realizes that he cannot make his daughter go to school — that the harder he pushes, the harder she digs in — that something opens up. He stops pushing. He starts grieving. And in that grief, he finds compassion for his daughter — for the pain she’s in that is keeping her home, keeping her in bed, keeping her from a life she wants to be living.

When they’re both able to own that their emotions are overwhelming — that the fear and the pain are too much, and that it’s causing them to react in ways that hurt themselves and each other — something shifts. They release the grip. And in that release, compassion has room to move. Love has room to move. And the feedback loop, which seemed impenetrable, begins to change.

Control is a response to pain. It makes sense that we reach for it. But the reaching tends to tighten the very thing we’re trying to loosen.

Impact is something different. Impact asks: given that I cannot control this, what can I offer? What is mine to do? How do I show up in this moment in a way that actually moves something?

Where are you in your desperate attempts to control your life and ward off pain? Is it possible that the effort itself has become a feedback loop — one that’s robbing you of the kind of impact you most want to have, on your own life and the lives of the people you love?