The Roots of Control

Codependents' Guide to the Twelve Steps
by Melody Beattie

(Page 3 of 4)

The belief that we have power over other people is a powerful belief — a destructive illusion that many of us learned in childhood.

Listen to how some recovering people were trained to believe they had control over others.

"When I was in high school, my mother started the habit of trying to kill herself," said Marcia, a grown woman now recovering from codependency. "She kept trying to gas herself in the oven. I was terrified for her. Every day at school I'd call her between classes. When she didn't answer the phone, I knew she was doing it again. I'd race home, turn off the oven, air out the house, put Mother to bed, and race back to school.

"At a young age, I learned I had an enormous amount of power over people. I learned I had power over my mother's life or death."

A twist to this story is that Marcia's mother also believed she wielded power over Marcia's life. When Marcia was sixteen, her mother parked her car on the railroad tracks on Easter Sunday morning. Then, she waited for a train to hit her, which it did.

Marcia's mother escaped with only a few cuts and bruises, but she was committed to a mental institution for four years because of that suicide attempt. While Marcia's mother was in the hospital, she told Marcia that she wanted her (Marcia) to have a better life, so she was sending her to another city to live with her Uncle Charly.

"Later on, when I was in college, my mother got out of the hospital. She told me that she never intended me to live with Uncle Charly, she had wanted me to live with her cousin Charly. I laughed at the irony of control: to almost kill yourself so your child could have a better life, then find out that the child was sent to the wrong Charly and had a horrible life because of it," Marcia said.

Some of us were raised with more subtle, but equally powerful, illusions about control.

"From the time I was a young child, about three, my mother ingrained in me the idea that 'I made her miserable,'" said Jackie. "I grew up honestly believing that I had this power over her. I also came to believe that I held the power to make her happy. Then, I spent my life alternating between the two ideas: acting out to make her miserable or turning myself inside out to make her happy, which I never succeeded at. I felt guilty, trapped, and in bondage by both ideas.

"As an adult, I lived with this belief for years. And it wasn't just about my mother. It spread to everyone I had contact with. I really believed I had the power to make people miserable, make them happy, make them feel. It was a tremendous responsibility, an inaccurate one, and it kept me walking on eggshells and feeling crazy most of my adult life, until I began recovering from codependency. I turned myself inside out to control how others felt or to avoid making them feel a certain way. I got so I hated to be around people, because controlling their feelings felt like such a big, tiresome job. I couldn't relax and enjoy being with people. My energy was out there — trying to make them feel, trying to control them. And I was out of touch with what I was feeling.

"I didn't know it was okay to have feelings," said Jackie.

Many of us grew up believing it wasn't okay to have feelings. That was part of the control we were taught to have — repression of our emotions. Now we are learning that whatever we try to control gains control of us. If we try to control our feelings in an unhealthy way — which many of us were taught to do and learned to do to survive — our feelings will gain control of us and create unmanageability.

"From the time I was old enough to listen, I was told not to feel," said Jackie. "It didn't take me long to begin telling myself that. I was told to stand tall, sit straight, and ignore my feelings.

"Actually, this advice was helpful. I lived in a cold, sterile environment. I received no nurturing and little love. From the time I was born, the people I expected to love me, disappointed me. I wasn't hugged. I wasn't told I was beautiful. I wasn't allowed to be afraid, to be angry, and of course, I didn't feel joy. I was told to be more, be better, try harder, and be stronger. Be in control.

"I learned that no situation merited falling apart or indulging in feelings. Feelings were a waste of time, a childish, weak, human, unnecessary display.

"By not feeling, I survived in this family. I survived life. And in short order, I learned to treat myself as I had been treated — neglecting, avoiding, criticizing, demeaning, and berating myself for having feelings and needs, for being human.

"Shutting off this part of myself made me strong, stronger than I knew. It helped me endure and survive the fact that my needs weren't being met. But my feelings, needs, and humanness caught up with me. That part of me refused to be ignored any longer.

"Now I've been recovering for a while. As I look back, I can see that although I didn't feel my feelings — because I didn't feel them — they, and my unmet needs, controlled me. They drove me, they propelled me. I lived in fear, and my response to that fear was to try to control everyone and everything around me."

Fear is the undercurrent, the force, for much of what we do that we call control — control of others, ourselves, situations, circumstances, and timing.

"In this past year of attending CoDA," said Jane, "I got to see how terrified I've been all of my life. All that time, I've lived through fear."

Sometimes, this fear is expressed as anger.

"I've been alone, disconnected from people most of my life," said Brad, whose father is an alcoholic. "I was always lonely, stressed out, stretching too much. I couldn't make a relationship work. I think I was really angry for most of my life before recovery. Anger was my source of life energy. I didn't get angry. But it was an underflow that ran my life."

For some, this undercurrent escalates into panic, sometimes terror — of life, people, circumstances, ourselves, and our feelings. We don't know how to relax and detach. Some of us aren't aware of how afraid we are. I can now see how much fear I lived with for most of my childhood and adult life. I didn't see or feel it at the time, but it controlled most of my actions.

What I did was focus on others: caretaking, controlling, and obsessing about them. What I didn't do was take care of myself in a loving manner.

Step One gives us permission to relax, stop controlling, deal with our fear, and take care of ourselves.

Not being able to take care of ourselves with people gives them control over us. Just as many of us have learned well how to try to control others, we have also learned to allow them to control us.

"I was raised with the belief that I would be killed if I said no," said Marcia, who talked earlier about rescuing her mother from suicide attempts. "I was raised Catholic. I was taught to honor my father and mother. And a great deal of fear was instilled in me about ever telling anyone no. From television, I learned that you follow people around and do for them. I learned the concept 'Love thy neighbor and forget thyself.' I learned that if I did what was expected of me, I would be loved and taken care of."

Sherri explains her version of codependency: "I believe much of what I call codependency in my life is a result of feeling frightened, trapped, and stuck in relationships because I don't know how to take care of myself with people."

When we love others too much, when we so desperately want and need what they have — whether that is acceptance, approval, love, or friendship — we may forfeit our ability to take care of ourselves with them, out of fear that we may not get what we need. We may hope that if we hold things in place by willpower, we will finally be safe and get what we need.

We won't.

These ideas are illusions. We aren't defective. Most of us have simply been doing what we learned, sometimes at a young age: protecting ourselves by trying to control others or by allowing others to control us. We grow up to be caretaking, controlling adults who have lost touch with a true and appropriate goal: loving and accepting ourselves and trusting the flow of life and goodness.

We grow up to do codependent behaviors.

It may be normal to want to control people and events and cut our losses, but it is not necessarily healthy. It's not good for us; it's not good for others.

And we may be so shut off from ourselves that we barely notice until life comes tumbling down around us. Our lives become unmanageable.

The First Step gives us permission to stop controlling and taking care of others and begin taking care of ourselves,

"I was angry when I started attending Al-Anon and people told me I needed to start taking care of myself," said Joannie. "I had been taking care of myself and everyone around me all my life!"

That's not the kind of self-care we're talking about in recovery. The kind of self-care that accompanies recovery and these Steps is gentler, more loving, more freeing, and more focused on tending to our own responsibilities. It's a healing, rejuvenating, renewing kind of self-care, one with room for feelings, needs, wants, desires, goals, plans, and lives of our own — lives with meaning and purpose, ones that make sense.

Copyright © 1990 by Melody Beattie

About the Author

Melody Beattie is the author of numerous books about personal growth and relationships, drawing on the wisdom of Twelve Step healing, Christianity, and Eastern religions. With the publication of Codependent No More in 1986, Melody became a major voice in self-help literature and endeared herself to millions of readers striving for healthier relationships. She lives in Malibu, California.