In defense of control freaks

CONTROL FREAK – such a pejorative term, isn’t it?

After I wrote my last post, I had a client ask me, “I’m not a control freak, am I?”

I said, “Of course you are, but that doesn’t make you a bad person.”

People don’t control in order to dominate or to manipulate per se. They control in order to prevent bad things from happening. What I was referring to in the Control Freaks column was the stress response.  The stress response is what we feel when we need to address a threat. In any circumstance that threatens us, we respond by doing something to eliminate or control the threat. The exact nature of the threat can vary widely from person to person as well as across different situations.

In its most basic form, such as when a lion is approaching us in the wild, our anxiety makes us run away or defend ourselves. This is a simple principle in the natural world where we evolved. In our modern world, we are rarely threatened by lions. Nevertheless, our stress response still pushes us to address a nearless endless list of things that threaten us.

We all believe that the world should be a certain way, and we all wish we could make that vision happen. A parent wants his or her child to be happy, a sick person wants to get better, a scared person wants to feel safe, etc. Whenever we see something that doesn’t seem correct, we feel some anxiety. This anxiety is what pushes us to respond.

This is why we control. We do so to eliminate threat.

So how then did the notion of control take on such a pejorative sense? I think the main culprit is the rigidity that some people have as part of their nature.

If I am the type of person who sees many sides to an argument, or accepts that there are many ways of doing something, then I am rarely threatened by seeing something done in a way different from the way I would have done myself. If I am not threatened, I do not feel the stress response and I feel no need to control.

If, on the other hand, I can only see one way of doing something, then whenever I see that a task isn’t done the “proper” way, my stress response kicks in and makes me want to control.

In many circumstances, and for many people, this is a good thing. In the case of the person mentioned above, she runs several businesses and would not be successful if she were not the type of person who needed to take care of all the little details and make sure things were done right (her customers expect it). She does things well and is appreciated and loved by lots of people, (employees, customers, family members, etc.). When people have a good sense of what is truly important, their need to control is what makes things right. Those who are not very controlling may not be as successful because they let too many things go.

It becomes a bad thing when people are not paticularly competent or when they can’t distinguish between circumstances that are important and those which aren’t. For example, people who are overly controlling about the food they eat, or the way another drives, or how others are supposed to act, or the music that people must listen to at work, etc. Those are the ones that make us want to say, “aaarrrgghh!!

Tagged as Anxiety, control-freaks, Stress.

Posted in Anxiety, Stress.

Posted on 01 Apr 2009