CONTROL: THE PERVAISIVE POISON OF RELATIONSHIPS
By Bill Cottringer


I have a subtle but powerful image in my head that I think is very common. It is an image of a chain link perimeter fence around the amount of arbitrary freedom and happiness I have a right to. I am never quite sure how wide my circle should be, but whenever the perimeter fence gets breached all hell breaks lose and even when it gets threatened the defenses go up.

Here is something to consider: Our country was founded on our rebellion against being over-controlled by another government and religion. Now I would never think I had one-hundredth the sense that our Forefathers had in drawing up the important documents that give us all inalienable rights, but I do think they made one grave mistake. This was in not defining things like the “pursuit of freedom and happiness” a little more precisely so as to know better when we have these things or don’t. One thing is for sure though, when we don’t think we do, we are capable of just about anything. Another person’s unhappiness can decrease our own happiness and another country’s ideologies can offend ours to the point of going to war.

The central issue in living, and especially in personal relationships, is when the perceived locus of control is being challenged and we over-react by making a judgment of the challenge’s unfairness and the challenger’s motives, and then over-anticipate further erosion of our fence line. By then, fear of all the unknowns dominates the landscape hiding all solutions. Oh my gosh, if I let her tell me what to eat, next she will be controlling what I wear and then how I think. He is telling me where I should want to live or where I should go to church and that is totally unfair. This foreign government doesn’t have a right to oppress people and if we don’t intervene now what else worse will come of not taking action? That company doesn’t have a right to do drug research on poor helpless animals and I have a right to make that wrong right anyway I can.

This perception, if not dealt with assertively, thoughtfully, and creatively, has the potential to start divorces, catatonic withdrawal, violent arguments, business disasters, and even wars between countries. The difficulty is that we have learned by mistake that the only two possible reactions are either passivity or aggression, usually in their extremes. In the past, male partners chose the aggressive response while females opted for passivity, but that is all getting mixed up nowadays, which makes it even more difficult to unravel.

I believe the over-reaction is not always proportionate to the issues involved, but a natural result of more subtle, sub-conscious controlling we allow to accumulate without doing anything positive about it. Consider how every day the government, money, employers, parents, children, traffic, the weather, advertising, churches, marriages, and our bodies, feelings and thoughts constantly cut holes in our fence. Sometimes it gets to the point that there are more holes than fence! Our brains have a built in survival mode and always know when enough is enough, but the trouble is that when things get out of balance we want to get back to where things should be instantly and it never works that way. Hence an incapacitating vicious circle of control—frustration from being controlled and more frustration from not being able to control that.

It seems to me that we are all trying to figure out what is right and wrong in this life by using our freedom to find happiness. The trouble begins when we are in a relationship and have differences in opinion about what happiness we each want alone and together and how we can best use our freedom to get it. When we are in sync on both the goal and process to achieve it, things are great; but when we are out of sync things can go south quicker than a New York second.

A conflict about control is the most important time to put feelings aside—especially about who is right and who is wrong—and look for rational compromises and creative solutions that restore responsible equality of freedom. It becomes a matter of reaching a workable balance between selfish individual wants and unselfish relationship needs. And like it or not we are being controlled by freedom and equality forces—freedom is the exciting anecdote to the potential mediocrity of equality and mandated equality serves as the checks and balances for exploitation of irresponsible freedom. Much is the same for the similar divergent problem of justice vs. mercy. Mercy is just a way to rectify injustice and justice is just the repair of undeserved mercy.

An important realization is that life itself imposes inevitable control—the oak leaves fall to the grown towards winter, the river flows where it goes, seasons pass and people will never get everything they think they want to be happy. Our main difference is in being self-conscious—we are the only beings who can experience true happiness, but only because we know the difference from unhappiness. You can’t have a rainbow without the sun and rain and that is a controlled reality like it or not.

It seems to me that when we enter into a relationship with another person, we voluntarily give up part of our fenced areas in trusting and hoping that together we can more than make up our “losses” in expanding our joint area. This is the real happiness we are looking for in a relationship and exercising responsible freedom, thoughtfully, creatively and assertively is the only way to get there. It comes down to giving up something to get a more accurate perception of the present and doing something different to create a better future, moment by moment. That is pursuing happiness with responsible, assertive freedom to restore balance between personalized selfish individual wants and the greater good of unselfish relationship needs.

I am moved to remember some valuable advice given by a high school friend who saw the real purpose of relationships—to have fun adjusting your fence lines.


William Cottringer, Ph.D. is President of Puget Sound Security, Business Success Coach, Sport Psychologist, Writer and Photographer from Issaquah, WA. He is author of Passwords To The Prosperity Zone, You Can Have Your Cheese & Eat It Too, and The Bow-Wow Secrets. Bill can be reached for comments and questions at (425) 454-5011 or bcottrigner.pssp.net