Calming Your Inner Control Freak

Have you ever tried to control a situation or a person (including yourself) in an attempt to increase your own happiness or freedom, only to find that your efforts were wasted ... or even made things worse? Without understanding the true roots (and ironic limitations) of control, we rarely succeed; yet, it is so common to try to find safety and comfort this way, we often don't even realize we're doing it. No wonder we feel frustrated and ineffective! This session provides a fresh perspective and introduces my "totem pole" technique for finding deep, genuine release.

Transcript

Hi,

This is Ron Levine from Mindfulness in Blue Jeans,

And this talk in Guided Meditation is part one of the three-part Control Freak series.

And appropriately enough,

This is called Calming Your Inner Control Freak.

What we'll be focusing on in this practice is obsessive thinking.

Whenever this topic comes up,

I'm always brought back to my last year of college.

I was in the Senior Psychology Honors Program,

Which included doing a year-long experiment,

Writing a thesis,

And ultimately presenting a thesis defense for the Psychology Department faculty.

I was completely obsessed with the thesis defense for the last couple of months of that school year.

Several of my grades depended upon it,

The ability to get into grad school and further my career,

As well as just forgetting everything and looking like an idiot in front of the entire Psychology Department.

My way of dealing with this was writing out my speech well in advance and rehearsing it endlessly.

I didn't just pick it up once or twice a day and review it.

I would wake up first thing in the morning and run through it mentally,

Beginning to end,

Have my breakfast,

Drive to school,

Rehearse the entire speech on the drive to school,

Get into school,

Sit through my classes,

Rehearsing the speech while I was sitting through my classes,

Running through the speech in my head again on the drive home.

You get the idea.

For about a month,

I was either verbally or mentally rehearsing this entire speech continuously.

My intent was to get to the point where I could get up in front of everybody and not even have to think.

The talk would just fall out of me.

It was my attempt to maintain some kind of control over this scary situation by removing as much unpredictability as I thought I could.

When it came time to give the speech a funny thing happened,

I had two jokes that I was going to tell over the course of the talk.

And it wasn't until after I finished the speech that I suddenly realized I couldn't remember telling the second joke.

And when I thought back,

I realized that not only had I skipped the second joke,

But the reason I hadn't told it was because I had literally skipped the entire section of the speech that included it.

I had so overprepared that when I got up there and my mind just skipped over a section,

I didn't even notice it.

It was actually a pretty critical part of my presentation.

Fortunately,

That section was very self-contained,

So anyone who wasn't very familiar with the work that I had been doing wouldn't have realized that anything was missing.

The professor I had been working with all that year probably had some thoughts about it though.

The important thing to note is that for all of my effort,

A lot of which was unskillful,

Something unpredictable and undesirable still happened.

I could have spent a lot less time and energy on all that rehearsing and still gotten good results.

In fact,

I might have even caught the part that I missed.

This is just one example of the kind of obsessive thinking that at some point or another plagues all of us.

In the course of learning to work with this,

I find it helpful to consider where this kind of thinking might come from and why we continue to engage in it even though it's not particularly pleasant and ultimately doesn't really help.

There are a few factors at play here.

One is that we have a hardwired aversion to uncertainty.

This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective.

Those of our ancestors who had a strong aversion to uncertainty were the ones who took greater care to try to remove unpredictability and surprises from their environment.

And this was at a time when unpredictability and surprises could kill you in the form of the proverbial saber-toothed tiger.

Predictability meant safety and safety meant survival.

And the trait of aversion to uncertainty got passed on.

For most of us,

Our environment is very different today,

But our subconscious minds and bodies still operate as if we were out on the African savanna 50,

000 years ago.

Added to this hardwired aversion is what psychologists call a negativity bias.

We are naturally drawn to the downside of things.

In the world that we've built for ourselves and we inhabit today,

That can seem pretty annoying.

But this too was a feature,

Not a bug,

50,

000 years ago.

Those with a greater inclination to look for problems,

Danger,

And risk were the ones who survived.

The combination of aversion to uncertainty and the negativity bias is quite potent.

Because of our aversion to uncertainty,

We mentally try to fill in the gaps and imagine or predict how things will play out.

But because of the negativity bias,

We tend to insert the worst-case scenarios into those gaps in the hopes of being prepared in case that ends up being the reality,

Even though it almost never is.

And even if it was,

It's still not really going to prepare us.

This whole process has a way of becoming an endless cycle because we're also hardwired for dissatisfaction.

When we've solved one big problem,

We will always find the next one.

There will always be something to be uncertain about.

There will always be something that we can see the negative side of.

We never solve all of our problems and then never have another problem or worry again.

It's easy to think that we have a stack of problems and if we just keep working through that stack,

We'll eventually get to the bottom.

And it doesn't really work that way.

Our inner control freak tries to use obsessive thinking to resolve issues that may or may not be real by using imagination.

Not only can that never work,

But it's focusing on entirely the wrong area.

No amount of external focus will ever make a dent in what's truly bothering the inner control freak.

In this guided meditation session,

We'll go through a technique for working with this more skillfully.

As always,

If you're in a seated position,

Be sure to have your hips elevated higher than your knees.

And I like to imagine that I'm being suspended from the ceiling by a string that's attached to the top of my head.

Sitting straight and tall,

But relaxed,

Allowing any part of your body that isn't holding you up to let go in its own time.

If you feel particularly tense right now,

Just notice that.

There's no need to interfere with it.

Let's begin by coming to the breathing.

Notice the quality of the breathing.

Is it long,

Short,

Deep,

Shallow?

Just notice how it is.

We're not trying to change anything.

We're just checking in and seeing what things are like right now.

Take a couple of minutes just to observe the breathing and any changes that you might notice in the breathing.

Come back to the breathing if you've lost it.

Notice the in-breath,

Any pause at the end of the in-breath,

The out-breath,

And any pause at the end of the out-breath.

Allow the breathing to happen naturally and without direction or control.

If you notice that you're trying to direct or control the breath,

Notice that you're doing that.

It's very difficult not to try to change the breath when you're observing it.

Now I'd like you to imagine a totem pole.

And at the top of that totem pole is a situation or event that you've found to be a cause of obsessive thinking.

Just under that on the totem pole is our perception of that situation or event.

The situation or event is entirely external,

But at this second step with the perception this is when it is just starting to cross over into our inner world.

The next step down after perception is concept.

Here in the middle of the totem pole we have the thoughts and memories and judgments and experiences that come to mind when we experience this perception of this external situation or event.

We're now fully inside and in our thoughts.

The next step down on the totem pole is feelings.

All of the feelings that arise in response to these concepts,

These thoughts,

These memories,

Which themselves are a response to the perception of this external event.

Finally,

At the bottom of the totem pole we have our reactions to our feelings,

Which are often simply more feelings about our feelings.

So from top to bottom we've gone from an external situation or event to our initial perception of it,

To our thoughts about it,

To our feelings about it,

And then to our feelings about our feelings about it.

For example,

We may be imagining an upcoming interaction with a person that we don't get along with as we work our way down the totem pole.

We experience our memories of this person and we have emotional reactions to those memories and then emotional reactions to those emotional reactions.

If we start getting angry when we think about this person that we're going to have to see,

We may get so agitated that we become angry about being so angry and agitated.

For the next few minutes I invite you to think back to a situation or an event in the past and the totem pole that grew out of it,

Or perhaps a situation or event that is upcoming and a totem pole that is being built right now.

Is there a particular spot on that totem pole that's any clearer than the others to you?

Or perhaps you're able to see the process as one step leads to the next?

Let's take a few moments with that and then we'll work on a technique that I've found very effective for deconstructing these totem poles.

What we typically do with obsessive thinking is try to work on the top of the totem pole,

Attempting to find a way to resolve this external situation or event.

Now there certainly may be things that we can and should be doing to prepare for external situations and events.

But with obsessive thinking we cross the line into an exhausting vicious cycle of anticipation and unskillful effort,

Like I did with my thesis defense.

Even if the situation or event at the top of the totem pole gets resolved,

That's still not going to help with obsessive thinking when the next totem pole gets built.

Long term,

Sustainable,

Skillful effort comes from working at the bottom.

Every one of these totem poles very likely has a collection of very similar feelings at the bottom.

If we focus our efforts at the bottom,

Then it matters less and less what the situations and events at the tops of all of these totem poles are.

When we work at that deep inner emotional level at the base of the totem pole,

Each successive layer above it begins to lose its power over us.

In the external situation or event that you're thinking of for this exercise,

If you work your way down the totem pole from the perception of the event to the thoughts and the memories,

To the feelings that come up from those thoughts and memories,

And then to the feelings about those feelings,

What do you find at the bottom?

What's there?

We spend so much time focusing on the top,

It's often very surprising what we find when we turn our attention to the bottom.

Let's spend some time there.

I recommend using this practice relatively often so it may become habitual to focus on whatever internal issues may be at play.

With the clarity that comes from that seeing,

We can move from reacting to responding and give our inner control freak a bit of a break.

We can take skillful action to more successfully work with the actual external situations and events.

This is Ron from Mindfulness in Blue Jeans,

And thank you for sitting with me.

Reviews

I find Ron to be a an amazing teacher and guide. This method is eye opening. I’m would love to see that totem in a visual form that I can reference.

Thank you for your detailed explanation what is at the bottom our emotional issues and reactions to the outer situation. Feelings and emotions run my life . Understanding that and addressing that makes a lot of sense how to deal with control freak inside . Very grateful to you ! 🙏❤️

WAIT!!!!WHAT???💥💥THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING FOR ME!!!EVERYTHING!!!❤️NAMASTE WISE TEACHER💫 AND THANK YOU 🙏🏼

An excellent visualization. (I just wish he spoke a little slower during the meditation.)

This was really helpful. At the bottom of my totem pole is almost always fear- thank you 🙏

Great insights and guidance. You explained it and broke it down in such a clear way. Thank you!

I love it, what a magnificent, paradigms shifting, thought-provoking, valuable redirection of our primordial thought processes. Deeply insightful wisdom.

I cannot wait to listen to part two and part three of this process. it will become A regular part of my examination of the self

Namaste Ron

Very concrete and clear and applicable

The "totem pole" was immensely helpful! Thank you.

Thank you for this unique and effective approach! I'm looking forward to listening to the rest of this series and exploring more totem poles!

Very interesting and useful. The technique presented reminds me of cognitive behavioral therapy but it is presented in a novel way. Thank you for this.

Interesting approach , very helpful.

Extremely insightful! I’ve been battling my inner control freak for 50 years, but never thought of it this way. #BeginnersMind

Powerful imagery.
I was reminded of Krishnamurti's image of the tree when he speaks about fear.
Different branches same roots.

Thank you Ron.
You're meditations provide such an enormous depth.
I'll let that sink in now.

I had a break through. I Realize i have the negativity bias and want to solve a problem that really isnt there. I am working on finding the good in a negative bias feeling.

Thank you. It was amazing! ❤️

Nicely done. I really enjoy this format.

Great exercise to combat obsessive thinking for my fellow control freaks out there.