September 23, 2007

• Control Issues

  I have control issues.  I have had them all my life, a string of ever changing and sometimes contradictory issues.  As a child, unconsciously Virgoan to the max, I noticed every little flaw and malfunction in my world and in those who inhabit it.  I was quick to express my judgments and suggest what could be done to fix things.  Even now I notice, but I try, usually, not to dwell on the glitches and gaps.  I know it isn’t my job to fix everything.

  Through encounters with my own fallibility and with disapproval and rejection from those who resented my efforts to fix their flaws, by my teens I had begun to stifle much of my overt criticism.  I swung to the opposite extreme (most of the planets not in Virgo in my chart, are in Libra instead).  In general, those I saw as too flawed to tolerate, I rejected.  I focused my attention and affection on those I judged to be superior and, paradoxically, afraid to trust my own judgment in personal matters, I depended overmuch on them to guide me.

  That, of course, left me vulnerable to a series of codependent relationships in which the relationship was more important than either partner.   That is true codependency at its most basic, but the word has been coopted and its meaning misunderstood or distorted so that in popular speech codependency is often thought to have something to do with addiction.  In codependent pairs, one, or both, or neither partner might be an addict.  When staying together outweighs considerations of either partner’s contentment, mental health or general wellbeing, that’s codependency.

  When it became evident to me that nobody else is as qualified as I am to make my own choices, I started learning how to do it for myself.  I had to establish personal boundaries.  That wasn’t easy.  For a while, I thought that “my way or the highway,” was the way to prevent others from controlling me.  I got out of a few relationships when I realized that I was being manipulated and controlled.  It took lots of time and growth before I understood that I could be myself in the face of manipulative and controlling behavior from a significant other.

  I find it amusing that I now feel I can truly be myself as I share my life space with an old guy with narcissistic personality disorder who tends to cite ancestry, parental programming and other mitigating circumstances when I point out his power games and control maneuvers; and a young guy born with the Sun in Leo during the Chinese Year of the Cock, who makes little effort to control himself, leading to conflicts between us whenever his unbridled impulsive self-interest triggers my instinct for self-preservation.  Maybe I malign them too severely in my effort to make a point, or maybe not.  The point is that I withstand the onslaught of their (largely unconscious) attempts to control me and my life, without often resorting to any reciprocal effort at controlling anything beyond myself.

  That’s enough effort, right there.  I am not easy to control.  I have lapses during which my impulses lead me to irrational behavior, such as bringing home a bucket of frog eggs and taking on the responsibility for a herd of tadpoles.  Irrationality is not always an error, but I am seriously questioning the wisdom of becoming maternally attached to such a fragile and essentially wild population. 

  I have learned that, profound and useful as they are, reason has its limitations and the serenity prayer doesn’t cover every eventuality.  Serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference, all great things in themselves to possess, fail to address those eventualities when I can change things but it would not be in my best interests to do so. 

  Additionally, a totally rational life would not only be rather dull, it would be totally out of sync with the reality in which I live.  There is some satisfaction to be derived from the knowledge that even at my advanced age, I can learn from my mistakes, because I am certainly still capable of making them.

  To stray back in the general direction of my theme of self-control, as I said, it’s a big enough job for me, more than I can currently handle to perfection.  Spirit over mind and mind over matter is a helpful rule of thumb, but it doesn’t address the difficulty of drawing distinctions between those artificial and arbitrary conceptual levels, nor does it provide any how-to information. 

  That triune meme:  body-mind-spirit, also fails to cover all the bases without a lot of stretching of one part of it or another.  A couple of decades ago, some of us started referring to “body-heart-mind-soul-spirit.”  For several reasons, the pentad rang truer than the old triad, but it never caught on and eventually it fell short.  There’s more to being than that.  There’s more to it than words can express, and the old words we have to express it get in the way of telling it like it really is.

  I am what I am and I’m working and Working at discovering and using every available tool and all my power to be the me I Will me to be.  Some days I am more successful than on other days.  Today, at least, I am still breathing without having to put a lot of conscious effort into it.  I haven’t blacked out or fallen on my face even once, and every trip to the outhouse has gone without incident:  no wet pants from moving too slowly and no asthma attacks from trying to move too fast.  That’s success, for me, for today.
   

  • 7:55 pm
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