Let Go and Let God.
–TWELVE STEP PROGRAM SLOGAN
People say codependents are controllers.
We nag; lecture; scream; holler; cry; beg; bribe; coerce; hover over; protect; accuse; chase after; run away from; try to talk into; try to talk out of; attempt to induce guilt in; seduce; entrap; check on; demonstrate how much we’ve been hurt; hurt people in return so they’ll know how it feels; threaten to hurt ourselves; whip power plays on; deliver ultimatums to; do things for; refuse to do things for; stomp out on; get even with; whine; vent fury on; act helpless; suffer in loud silence; try to please; lie; do sneaky little things; do sneaky big things; clutch at our hearts and threaten to die; grab our heads and threaten to go crazy; beat on our chests and threaten to kill; enlist the aid of supporters; gauge our words carefully; sleep with; refuse to sleep with; have children with; bargain with; drag to counseling; drag out of counseling; talk mean about; talk mean to; insult; condemn; pray for miracles; pay for miracles; go to places we don’t want to go; stay nearby; supervise; dictate; command; complain; write letters about; write letters to; stay home and wait for; go out and look for; call all over looking for; drive down dark alleys at night hoping to see; chase down dark alleys at night hoping to catch; run down alleys at night to get away from; bring home; keep home; lock out; move away from; move with; scold; impress upon; advise; teach lessons to; set straight; insist; give in to; placate; provoke; try to make jealous; try to make afraid; remind; inquire; hint; look through pockets; peek in wallets; search dresser drawers; dig through glove boxes; look in the toilet tank; try to look into the future; search through the past; call relatives about; reason with; settle issues once and for all; settle them again; punish; reward; almost give up on; then try even harder; and a list of other handy maneuvers I’ve either forgotten or haven’t tried yet.
We aren’t the people who “make things happen.” Codependents are the people who consistently, and with a great deal of effort and energy, try to force things to happen.
We control in the name of love.
We do it because we’re “only trying to help.”
We do it because we know best how things should go and how people should behave.
We do it because we’re right and they’re wrong.
We control because we’re afraid not to do it.
We do it because we don’t know what else to do.
We do it to stop the pain.
We control because we think we have to.
We control because we don’t think.
We control because controlling is all we can think about.
Ultimately we may control because that’s the way we’ve always done things.
Tyrannical and dominating, some rule with an iron hand from a self-appointed throne. They are powerful. They know best. And by God, it will be done this way. They will see to it.
Others do their dirty work undercover. They hide behind a costume of sweetness and niceties, and secretly go about their business—OTHER PEOPLE’S BUSINESS.
Others, sighing and crying, claim inability, proclaim their dependence, announce their overall victimization, and successfully control through weakness. They are so helpless. They need your cooperation so badly. They can’t live without it. Sometimes the weak are the most powerful manipulators and controllers.1 They have learned to tug at the guilt and pity strings of the world.
Many codependents combine tactics, using a variety of methods. Whatever works! (Or, more accurately, whatever doesn’t work although we continue to hope it will.)
Despite tactics, the goals remain the same. Make other people do what you want them to. Make them behave as you think they should. Don’t let them behave in ways you think they shouldn’t, but probably would, without your “assistance.” Force life’s events to unravel and unfold in the manner and at such times as you have designated. Do not let what’s happening, or what might happen, occur. Hold on tightly and don’t let go. We have written the play, and we will see to it that the actors behave and the scenes unfold exactly as we have decided they should. Never mind that we continue to buck reality. If we charge ahead insistently enough, we can (we believe) stop the flow of life, transform people, and change things to our liking.
We are fooling ourselves.
Let me tell you about Maria. She married a man who turned out to be an alcoholic. He was a binge drinker. He didn’t drink every day, every weekend, or every month, but when he did—look out. He stayed drunk for days, sometimes weeks. He started drinking at eight in the morning and drank until he passed out. He vomited all over, devastated the family’s finances, got fired from jobs, and created unbearable chaos each time he drank. Between binges life was not perfect either. A sense of impending doom and unresolved feelings filled the air. Other unresolved problems, residues from the drinking, cluttered their lives. They could never get ahead of the disasters. They were always starting over with a dirty slate. But, it was better—for Maria and her three children—when her husband wasn’t drinking. There was hope, too, that this time it would be different.
It never was different. For years, each time Maria turned around or turned her back, her husband went on a binge. When she went away for a weekend, when she went to the hospital to deliver her babies, when her husband left town on a trip, or when he was out of her sight for any reason—he drank.
Whenever Maria returned or retrieved him from wherever he was drinking, he would abruptly quit drinking. Maria decided that the key to her husband’s sobriety was her presence. She could control the drinking (and all the pain it caused) by sticking close to home and standing guard over her husband. Because she learned this method of control, and because of increasing feelings of shame, embarrassment, anxiety, and the overall trauma that accompanies codependency, Maria became a recluse. She turned down opportunities to travel, and she refused to attend church conferences she was interested in. Even leaving the house for more than a trip to the grocery store began to threaten the balance she had created—or thought she had created. In spite of her determined and desperate efforts, her husband still found opportunities to drink. He found ways to drink at home without her knowing about it, and he drank when she had no choice but to spend the night away from home.
After one particularly disruptive drinking bout, Maria’s husband informed her that the impossible financial predicament they were in caused him to drink. (He neglected to mention that his drinking had caused the impossible financial predicament.) He said if she would take a job and help out financially, he would not feel like he had to drink any more. The pressure would be off. Maria thought about his request, then reluctantly agreed. She was afraid to leave home and felt concerned about setting up appropriate baby-sitting arrangements for the children. She did not feel emotionally or mentally able to work. She especially resented taking a job to earn extra money when her husband was so irresponsible with money. But it was worth a try. Anything to keep this man sober!
Before long Maria located a job as a legal secretary. She did well—better than she thought she would. Codependents make great employees. They don’t complain; they do more than their share; they do whatever is asked of them; they please people; and they try to do their work perfectly—at least for a while, until they become angry and resentful.
Maria started feeling a little better about herself. She enjoyed her contact with people—something that had been missing in her life. She liked the feeling of earning her own money (although she still resented her husband’s irresponsibility with it). And her employers appreciated her. They gave her increasing amounts of responsibility and were on the verge of promoting her to a paralegal position. But about that time Maria began to feel that old familiar anxious feeling—her cue that her husband was about to drink again.
The feeling came and went for days. Then one day, it hit hard. That handwringing, gut-twisting anxiety came back in full force. Maria started calling her husband on the phone. He was not at work where he was supposed to be. His employer didn’t know where he was. She made more phone calls. Nobody knew where he was. She spent the day biting her nails, making frantic phone calls, and hoping her fellow employees wouldn’t see through her “everything’s fine—no problem” veneer. When she arrived home that evening she discovered that her husband was not at home and had not picked up the children from day care as he was supposed to. Things were out of control again. He was drinking again. The next morning she quit her job—walked out with no appropriate notice. By 10:00 A.M., she was back in her house—guarding her husband.
Years later she said, “I felt like I had to do this. I had to get things under control—MY CONTROL.”
My question is this: Who’s controlling whom?
Maria learned she was not controlling her husband or his drinking at all. He and his alcoholism were controlling her.
This point was further clarified for me one evening during a family group facilitation I had at a treatment center. (Many of my clients are wise—wiser than I am. I have learned much by listening to them.) During the group, the wife of an alcoholic talked openly to her husband—a man who had spent many years of their marriage drinking, unemployed, and in prison.
“You accuse me of trying to control you, and I guess I have,” she said. “I’ve gone to bars with you so you wouldn’t drink so much. I’ve let you come home when you were abusive and drunk so you wouldn’t drink anymore or hurt yourself. I’ve measured your drinks, drank with you (and I hate drinking), hid your bottles, and taken you to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.
“But the truth is,” she said, “you’ve been controlling me. All those letters from prison telling me what I’ve wanted to hear. All those promises, all those words. And every time I’m ready to leave you—to walk out for good—you do or say just the right thing to keep me from leaving. You know just what I want to hear, and that’s what you tell me. But you never change. You’ve never intended to change. You just want to control me.”
He smiled a half-smile and nodded when she said that. “Yes,” he said, “I have been trying to control you. And I’ve been doing a pretty good job of it at that.”
When we attempt to control people and things that we have no business controlling, we are controlled. We forfeit our power to think, feel, and act in accordance with our best interests. We frequently lose control or ourselves. Often, we are being controlled not just by people but by diseases such as alcoholism, eating disorders, and compulsive gambling. Alcoholism and other destructive disorders are powerful forces. Never forget that alcoholics and other troubled persons are expert controllers. We have met our match when we attempt to control them or their disease. We lose the battles. We lose the wars. We lose our selves—our lives. Borrowing a tidbit from Al-Anon: You didn’t cause it; you can’t control it; and you can’t cure it.
So stop trying! We become utterly frustrated when we try to do the impossible. And we usually prevent the possible from happening. I believe that clutching tightly to a person or thing, or forcing my will on any given situation eliminates the possibility of my Higher Power doing anything constructive about that situation, the person, or me. My controlling blocks God’s power. It blocks other people’s ability to grow. It stops events from happening naturally. It prevents me from enjoying people or events.
Control is an illusion. It doesn’t work. We cannot control alcoholism. We cannot control anyone’s compulsive behaviors—overeating, sexual, gambling—or any of their behaviors. We cannot (and have no business trying to) control anyone’s emotions, mind, or choices. We cannot control the outcome of events. We cannot control life. Some of us can barely control ourselves.
People ultimately do what they want to do. They feel how they want to feel (or how they are feeling); they think what they want to think; they do the things they believe they need to do; and they will change only when they are ready to change. It doesn’t matter if they’re wrong and we’re right. It doesn’t matter if they’re hurting themselves. It doesn’t matter that we could help them if they’d only listen to, and cooperate with, us. IT DOESN’T MATTER, DOESN’T MATTER, DOESN’T MATTER, DOESN’T MATTER.
We cannot change people. Any attempts to control them are a delusion as well as an illusion. People will either resist our efforts or redouble their efforts to prove we can’t control them. They may temporarily adapt to our demands, but the moment we turn our backs they will return to their natural state. Furthermore, people will punish us for making them do something they don’t want to do, or be something they don’t want to be. No amount of control will effect a permanent or desirable change in another person. We can sometimes do things that increase the probability that people will want to change, but we can’t even guarantee or control that.
And that’s the truth. It’s too bad. It’s sometimes hard to accept, especially if someone you love is hurting him- or herself and you. But that’s the way it is. The only person you can now or ever change is yourself. The only person that it is your business to control is yourself.
Detach. Surrender. Sometimes when we do that the result we have been waiting and hoping for happens quickly, almost miraculously. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it never happens. But you will benefit. You don’t have to stop caring or loving. You don’t have to tolerate abuse. You don’t have to abandon constructive problem-solving methods such as professional intervention. You only need to put your emotional, mental, spiritual, and physical hand back in your own pockets and leave things and people alone. Let them be. Make any decisions you need to make to take care of yourself, but don’t make them to control other people. Start taking care of yourself!
“But this is so important to me,” many people protest. “I can’t detach.”
If it’s that important to you, I suggest that is all the more reason to detach.
I heard some wisdom on detachment out of the mouths of babes—my babies. Sometimes, my youngest son, Shane, hangs on too tightly and too long after a hug. He starts tipping me over. I lose my balance, and become impatient for him to stop hugging me. I begin to resist him. Perhaps he does it to keep me close to him a little longer. Maybe it’s a form of control over me. I don’t know. One night when he did this my daughter watched until even she became frustrated and impatient.
“Shane,” she said, “there comes a time to let go.”
For each of us, there comes a time to let go. You will know when that time has come. When you have done all that you can do, it is time to detach. Deal with your feelings. Face your fears about losing control. Gain control of yourself and your responsibilities. Free others to be who they are. In so doing, you will set yourself free.