Are you striving to be in control of your life? It can be holding you back…

My family was recently struck by a brutal stomach virus. It took us one by one, and while nothing could be more predictable in a household with a child who recently started daycare, the biblical brutality of the symptoms took me by surprise. I think I’ll leave it at that.

While I’ve recovered physically, I’m still reeling from the psychological vulnerability of feeling so helpless, of not having control over my own body. So I’ve been thinking about control, how terrifying it is to feel out of it, how we fool ourselves into believing we’re in it. People often talk about feeling out of control—over their thoughts, their emotions, their relationships—and it’s something that comes up a lot in therapy, whether I’m the patient or the therapist. The assumption seems to be that in order to build a better life, you have to have control; the truth is that this desperation for control can destroy our lives and the lives of those we love.

This desire to be in control is not always expressed consciously in the consulting room; it may be communicated unconsciously, for example, by a patient arriving late, so that I as a therapist am the one who gets the experience of waiting, and they don’t have to endure the feeling that they have no control over when the session begins. Or they may only speak of their experience in the language of diagnoses—not by exploring with me, in the voice of a patient, how they really feel, but by declaring, in the voice of a psychiatrist, that they have, say, OCD or ADHD, or an eating disorder, as if that were the end of it. Closing the door on their experience rather than opening it and inviting me in.

All this has a high price. If a patient is late, he loses precious minutes of the session. If he hides in a diagnosis and closes the door on me, he denies himself the care that a part of him also wants.

These costs are always greater in other areas of the patient’s life, because that is the nature of a relentless quest for control: it makes it so hard to let anyone else in. We can end up isolated and crushingly lonely, in absolute dominion over our empty realm of one. And we can trap others—our partners, colleagues, children—in our frantic quest to be master of everything.

Why are we like this? I think we need to go back to the beginning and the trauma of being born so incredibly uncontrollable. Babies live in a world where things happen to them; bodily functions and hunger that feel shocking and painful and monstrous, diaper changes and baths and clothing that seem to come out of nowhere. No wonder they cry so much and so hard.

Loving parents will try to ease this terrifying sense of loss of control by responding to their baby’s distress as best they can, cuddling and feeding when they cry for milk. But all parents are sometimes overwhelmed by the primal and all-consuming needs of a brand-new being. It’s not just babies who need to develop the ability to tolerate the sense of loss of control.

As a therapist, I find this a useful way to think about the many different constellations of symptoms that patients bring with them—not just the alphabet soup of diagnoses listed above, but also people who become controlling partners, or who find themselves repeatedly in relationships with controlling partners, and other difficulties as well. Perhaps all of these ways of relating to ourselves and others are connected by the trauma of being born without control, and the desperate, dangerous desire to have it; the belief that we should have it.

The ability to tolerate not being in complete control is essential to building a better life, not just for babies and parents, but for all of us. It may feel like being in control or not being in control are the only options, but that is not the case. There is an alternative. I have felt it in the presence of my psychoanalyst, who offers me a space of freedom of feeling and thought, where emotions do not have to be controlled, but can be understood, made meaningful.

Psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion described this state as “contained.” He theorized that a loving parent, by holding their baby in their arms and in their thoughts, by trying, and sometimes failing, to make sense of what the baby is experiencing and to symbolize it, to put it into words, can become the container for their baby’s overwhelming feelings. It is this instinctive gift, from the parent who can give it, that ultimately allows the baby to find itself contained. Not in control or out of control, but contained.

When we give in to the compulsion to be in control at all times, we lose the most valuable parts of ourselves: the parts that need freedom to come alive. Our hunger – for food, sex, life and love. Our imagination and creativity, whether artistic, entrepreneurial, culinary or playful. Our emotions, which reveal who we are and where we want to go, and with whom we want to go there.

This vomiting illness has made me so unstable, I think, because it has taken away the illusion that I sometimes hide in, that I am now an adult, in control of my life, of my mind, in control of what happens to me. The truth is much more disturbing, unpredictable and liberating.

Moya Sarner is an NHS psychotherapist and the author of When I Grow Up – Conversations with Adults in Search of Adulthood