The Spell of Control and the Pain of its Unraveling

Photo by Elgin Akyurt on Unsplash

The tiny baby shifted its body in my arms and I tempered my breathing so as to not wake him. Despite the cramp in my left shoulder, and tightness in my hips from sitting cross-legged for over 30 minutes, I knew that I would endure another hour so that I could watch him sleep. In that moment, I somehow knew that I was exactly where I was supposed to be, doing what I was meant to do and I was only 12 years old. I had been caring for children since I was only a child and had an innate knack for understanding their unspoken needs, anticipating when an upheaval was arriving, and how to quell their fears with stories and magical re-imaginings of reality. I was born with this skill set and it felt natural for me to utilize my hyper-vigilance and externally focused awareness on the other. This was the way I felt safest and most needed.

Although I was but a child myself, I was entrusted with caring for a 2 week old baby and his two older sisters. It was natural for adults to see the wee wisdom that lived inside of me and the ultra responsibility that made me feel far older than I was in human years. I was an accomplished babysitter and had my own entrepreneurial business all throughout middle and high school. I was called upon as a dog-sitter (even for two yellow lab puppies before I was even 20 years old.) I was mature and carried myself with an integrity that put me in multiple leadership roles such as captain of my high school and college field hockey teams, vice president of the school student council, editor of the literary magazine for two years, and a trusted confidante to many seeking counsel about deep moral decisions. This was expected of me by my family and thus I absorbed it as my identity. I was willing to be of service, to endeavor to always do the "right" thing and to balance the scales of my own conscience before taking any actions. The weight of my actions felt heavier than most because deep down I feared that if I made a misstep, I would forever upset the equilibrium of my life trajectory. It was a constant inner battle between wanting to be good and pure and knowing that I needed to honor the flow of my natural rhythm and intuition. The cost of this false sense of safety was tension, exhaustion, fear and constantly doubting myself and my thoughts. I felt trapped within my own mind and could not determine who or what was actually in charge of my choices.

The consistency of my perceptions of my own inadequacies was a default that I referred to for 4 decades of my life. It was within this glass house filled with faulty mirrors that I uncovered the tension that was holding my nervous system together and therefore keeping me in a perpetual loop of suffering.

The drive to succeed and make an impact on the world is a noble one and I recognize that not all humans have this as their crowning achievement. Not everyone has a connection to their divine blueprint and thus the seed of their own essence. This essence made manifest into the world is beyond an actual physical creation, it is the complete freedom to feel and express the true self without inhibitions. It is this that has us all creaking and groaning at the blockages and self-imposed prisons that we contain ourselves in, and, it is the conditioning that has been placed upon us by the unhealed world at large. Every system we have on the planet at this time has used control as manipulation. If one stops working, they stop making money, they stop being able to provide for their own basic needs, thus they become ostracized by society and are no longer seen as valuable contributors to the world at large. One must maintain a stake in the game, be a shareholder in the larger illusion of belonging, lest the tender threads of the nest drop us off into oblivion.

I felt that I had "control" when I was in charge of other people's lives, whether it be a child, an animal, a classroom, a client, a plant. I knew what my duty was and I enacted my skills. It gave me a sense of purpose and responsibility and a way of validating my own existence. On a deep subconscious level, I was reiterating the statement that I had to control myself and be of service to others in order to be loved and accepted. I hadn't realized just how rigid and controlled I had become in my own life as a protective mechanism against hurt and vulnerability. I had let this guard down so many times only to have it backfire. I experienced so much emotional chaos growing up and thus those same situations were drawn to me, and I to them, throughout my adult life. I knew chaos. I could work with chaos. I could calmly control chaos and bring it back to stasis through loving kindness. And because of this, I would not allow myself to be seen in my own mess. I was so adept at wrangling chaotic emotions and sitting with the pain of unmet desires, needs, longing, dreams, that I hadn't actually seen that I was putting an essential part of myself in a suspended state. The part of me that was wild and curious, that thrived in the explosions of the creative process and that preferred to remain untamed. While this part never full went away, it was only in unique moments that I allowed her to be shared with others.

There is a divine paradox between understanding oneself so deeply on a spiritual and emotional level and then navigating complex trauma for several decades. It changes your brain and sets up meticulous traps within the psyche in order to distort truth and challenge reality. Because of the work I have done regarding this, I have been able to ascertain what aspects of myself are in fact supporting growth and which ones are attempting to protect me from further harm. I have to remind myself, often, that while I cannot live the rest of my life without getting "hurt," there are certain things that are no longer a part of my story. I have finally called the wounds to the light in order to rewrite the narrative. I am no longer a subject to abuse: sexual, mental, emotional or physical. It has been my work to stop this in my bloodline and to clear a pathway for healthy relating. The caveat is that now that I have broken the spell of control from others, I had to undo the spell that I had woven for myself. The one that allowed me to do the deep work of healing, and the one that gatekeeps the final step towards my freedom.

There is an immense pain that comes from accepting the lessons that the inner guru wants to impart. The dispeller of darkness is like a mighty wizard using the honed sword of truth to cut through the flesh of the heart. 

We are often crossing thresholds in our lives without being fully aware. It can feel as though we are standing in the center of a vortex surrounded by blurred images, and an inertia that keeps us from taking the next step into the great unknown. Sometimes these threshold moments make it impossible to see or feel the helping hands reaching out to us or creating a safety net for us to fall into. And sometimes, more often, we must cross the demarcation line on our own. We must walk away from something, someone, some place, in order to create space for the new. It is scary because of its unpredictability and because of the complexity of our emotional worlds that add layers of story through felt sensation and superfluous thinking. We must, then, accept the pain and navigate the way in which we feel and process it so that we can breathe again. (I even went so far as to google why being a human is so very hard.) I laughed as I received some AI generated response which inevitably remarked on the emotional landscape of the human. Our trademark. Our burden. Our gift. I wouldn't want to have it any other way. A passionate life is one of incredible depth and feeling along with a myriad of relational experiments.

To be honest with oneself, to know thyself, is a stepping stone to maximizing the potential this short, precious life gives us. There can be diplomacy in vulnerability and as we continue to evolve as a species, I believe that humans are only ever seeking this level of emotional liberation so that we are no longer affected by the judgements of others, least of all, the judgement of ourselves.

Believing that we are enough, stitching up our heart wounds and bravely showcasing the journey of our unbecoming is a hero/heroine's journey. May we return to the analog spaces of deep interconnection, presence and sharing without the curated, glossy visuals of media. May we hold hands, hug tightly, say I love you and mean it. May we actually listen and hear each other rather than quickly create a comeback or immediately remark on how we relate to the experience. May we hold ourselves well and, with grace, witness one another in the unraveling. Only then can we build something new.