Have you ever thought about how control is impacting your life? It can feel like safety and security while simultaneously being the very thing that brings chaos into your life. We seek to have power as trauma survivors because it brings a sense of ease, especially when we come from a chaotic background. However, control can also spiral into perfectionism, which leads us to evaluate the minutia of life against how we can do it better, stronger, and faster.
In childhood, we could not control abuse, homelessness, hunger, hurt, or pain. As adults, we can prevent most if not all of the same experiences that haunted us as children. The problem with control is that it can become a mechanism for attempting to create an immeasurable environment in everything we do. Perfectionism beings to show itself in the way we dress, brush our teeth, work, sleep, workout, date, have sex, study, and even drive our car - that dial that falls on odd numbers won’t kill you.
In some aspects, the journey to healing trauma is within the art of letting go. There is only so much that we can control, and the rest is a farce that we measure against ourselves and others to prove or disprove how we feel about ourselves in the world. One of the best questions we can ask ourselves is - does this moment warrant my attempt at controlling it?
Until next time my friend…
Be Unbroken,
-Michael
Comments (0)