Why your need to control things maybe isn't a toxic trait

Religious traditions & new-age wisdom often tell us to "release control"-- but for those who've lacked control over their own lives, it may be more important to *find* control, first.

"The psyche is a self-regulating system that maintains its equilibrium just as the body does. Every process that goes too far immediately and inevitably calls forth compensations, and without these there would be neither a normal metabolism nor a normal psyche."

—Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 330

One of the truisms of my life is that when things feel chaotic— out of control— beyond my ability to manage— I will attempt to control something, anything in my life, in an attempt to maintain a sense of order and agency. For many years, this took the form of disordered eating. Restricting calories, counting macros, recording exercise, counting steps, etc. Starting a new “plan” felt like a way to wrap my mind around something that I could control (even though I never really could— our bodies are pretty brilliant about making sure we get what we need one way or another— but that’s another post).

On a symbolic level, it makes sense that we will want to find control over our lives when large swathes of it are beyond our ability to change. Instead of feeling helpless, we invest in a new skin care regime, or buy a new wardrobe (creating a new sense of ourselves), clean out the garage or that cabinet under the sink (getting rid of clutter, finding more space); put ourselves on a strict new budget or aggressively meal prep (sheet pan dinners being a way of achieving some level of control in our lives).

In full disclosure, in these first four months of the 2025 presidential administration, to cope with its broad, terrifying, sweeping changes, I have obsessively trained for a 2k row (tracking all my metrics, and yes there was an Excel spreadsheet), started an elimination diet to finally deal with my IBS (this post is FODMAP-friendly), and begun a transition to natural fabrics (because of this study, and others). By God, I will control something in my life, if only my underwear (I really like these, btw).

“Let go, and let God?”

But Laura, you’re thinking. What about your Buddhist training? Where’s your radical acceptance? WHAT ABOUT EQUANIMITY?

As part of my daily meditation practice, I practice shamatha- “calm-abiding” meditation. This is a simple practice of sitting with the moment, just as it is, without trying to change anything. We don’t need to try to get rid of thoughts; we don’t need a special place to do it; we’re just resting in the present moment. (You can watch my teacher, Mingyur Rinpoche, talk about this practice here).

Meditation has helped me to accept both external circumstances and my internal experience in ways that I previously found impossible. It’s one of the best tools I can offer others who are learning to tolerate the intolerable in their own lives. I can recognize that all things are impermanent, and that any kind of control I try to achieve is bound to be illusory.

And yet— just because we are human, even with hours and hours of dedicated meditation practice— we may find ourselves still feeling helpless when things are out of our control. This is especially true for those of us who have historically had less control in their culture— whether that’s through a history of developmental trauma (which can lead to a lifetime of feeling powerless) or simply living with a marginalized identity in a white supremacist culture. Especially if one’s body doesn’t conform to narrow beauty standards, it’s easy to understand why someone would want to control their body— to wrestle it into a semblance of greater cultural acceptability in order to feel safer.

So while I fully support working toward equanimity as a healthy means to working with life’s challenges, we also can’t ignore our essential human need to feel some sort of agency in our lives— the ability to make change in our lives. If we ask folks to give up control (whether that’s to leave it in God’s hands, or to trust in the universe, or to practice radical acceptance) when they’ve never really felt they had much control in the first place— we’re avoiding a larger issue. From a larger perspective, this acts as a form of spiritual bypassing that perpetuates imbalanced power systems. And on an individual level, whether it’s conscious or not, we’re going to continue to experience ourselves as powerless— not in service of a higher power, but as part of an oppressive system that seeks to control us.

(Does this mean I think that meditation doesn’t work to achieve true equanimity, or that we can’t root out our need for control? No— but I think it takes an enormous amount of time and depth work to achieve, which is why Buddhist monks engage in lengthy, grueling, years-long retreats. 20 minutes in the morning before work is helpful, but it’s not a replacement for the kind of work that’s needed to get there. Working with a depth-oriented professional is another way; there are certainly more).

Instead of trying to control ourselves…

Our need to control something is often a healthy response to a feeling that we are not in control of things elsewhere in our lives. It’s a form of compensation; a way to achieve greater wholeness or balance in our psychic systems. So, rather than simply assuming your need to control things is a toxic trait, you might ask yourself: what in my life, or circumstances, either now or historically, hasn’t felt within my control?

If you know that you have an automatic reaction to default to a control pattern when under duress, you get to decide whether it’s working for you or not. In fact, it can be a great use of excess (fight/flight) energy. Doing something feels better than doing nothing, because that’s how our nervous system works when we’re under threat. It’s science.

It’s when this need to control something becomes aggressive self-management that we might cross into self-harm territory. The DSM-V is full of “disordered” behaviors— or, as Jung would have said, our psyche’s attempts at self healing— that share a common need to manage something that’s beyond our control.

An alternative might be to make a more thoughtful choice around what we want to control, and why. In my personal and client practice, I like to use external tools— Indian clubs, mace, or kettlebells, for example— as a means to experience ourselves in control of something external to us.

In the video above, I’m controlling both the kettlebell and my movements— a coordinated dance of strength and rhythm. I can feel how my body pushes this weight into positions that allow me to control it. For individuals who have not felt themselves capable of controlling things outside themselves, this is a powerful way to change our ideas about who we are and what we can do in the world. And for those who have felt that their bodies weren’t welcome in the world, or which didn’t always work the way we wanted them to, there’s an opportunity to experience our own strength, power, and essential capability. Sure, this is a complex flow— it doesn’t have to be this fancy. Just throwing a ball and catching it is enough to start to recognize how impactful it is to take conscious action in our lives.

Be like Penelope

In an unequal system, there will always be those who maintain overt control. Consider Penelope, of Homer’s Odyssey. While Odysseus was off adventuring, his wife Penelope was left at home, surrounded by men who wanted to marry her— taking over Odysseus’ estate. Penelope famously promised to marry one of them when she was done with the shroud she was weaving. Each night, she plucked out the threads of that day’s work— stalling until her husband returned.

Penelope by John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, 1864

Had Penelope felt as internally powerless as she was seen to be externally, she would have had no control over the situation, and soon found herself married against her will. She took control in a covert way— embodying the Trickster archetype— to save herself.

Take control so you can release it

Equanimity is not the same thing as passivity. Understanding that there are things in our life outside my sphere of influence doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to make change where we can. While the Buddha didn’t speak directly about social justice, he did suggest both a scrupulous self-inventory and a compassionate point of view.

“Do your work, and step back,” Lao-Tzu says in the Tao Te Ching. I would like to suggest that if we are failing to acknowledge our own lack of agency; if we are not addressing the complexes that hold us back— we are not actually doing our work. If we attempt to release control before we’ve acknowledged our lack of it, our unconscious psyche will compensate for us in the form of controlling behaviors elsewhere in our lives. Whether these manifest as dietary changes or passive-aggressive jabs at our partner, they’re the compensation for not having actually been able to let go of control. Our self-regulating psyche will make sure of it.