"I'm not even annoyed at my job anymore; I'm just over it. I spent $700 on this sweater. You like it?"

"With my dad, it's like everything I do is wrong. It makes me so angry – I'm going to stop talking to him for a while."

"I was really into that relationship and now, I don't know, I guess I'm not anymore."

Feeling out of control is not, in general, the feeling we feel when we feel out of control. Instead, out-of-control gets translated into a host of other feelings, such as boredom or dislike or anger. Because we identify ourselves as being [bored/angry/whatev], we make behavior decisions based on those feelings. And the function of these feelings is to justify an action we're about to take in order to (secretly) regain control (not, of course, that we're aware that we're involved in any kind of power issue at all).

Unfortunately, being reactive is patently not the same thing as being in control. A key marker that you feel out of control is when you find yourself really invested in trying to take control, and not necessarily of the situation you're in. So it goes like this:

SUBCONSIOUS: "Taking control in this type of situation had horrible consequences in the past; I'm afraid to enact power."

CONSEQUENCE: You don't get what you want; more importantly, you don't even try, meaning you don't get to [assert yourself/protect yourself/etc.].

TRANSLATION TO CONSCIOUS: "I feel [enraged/disinterested/depressed/etc.]."

CONSEQUENCE: You take control of a situation where you can do so without triggering your subconscious fear. So, instead of quitting your job (because self-assertion had negative consequences for you in the past), you plan an expensive spa retreat weekend.

And to use the above examples:

"I feel out of control at work" translates to "annoyed" and manifests as "I'm going to control my closet."

"I feel out of control with my father" translates to "angry" and manifests as "I'm going to control the communication."

"I feel out of control in my relationship" translates to "detached" and manifests as "I'm going to control my feelings."

When you find yourself taking control of a situation, it's because you are totally out of control. And "out of control" is not the space you want to be in when making big behavior decisions.

So, if we don't feel out of control, how do we know when we're out of control? And what does "control" even mean anyway – control over what? And how do we get control back? And do we even want it?

ORIGINS OF CONTROL

Our sense of authority comes from how authority was enacted by us and on us in our families. What did you do when mom yelled? When your sibling was treated better than you? Were you a follower at home? Pushy? What succeeded in getting you what you wanted - did sulking work? Being a suck-up at school? Lying? What didn't work?

With power and control we generally translate our childhood sense of power and control – unexamined - into our current jobs, relationships, etc. Here are the four basic ways we enact power – and we often use them in combination:

ENLISTING OTHERS

Were you the sibling who always tattled to mom? If this technique worked, then you never really learned to trust in your inner sense of power, and your experience of control is that you enlist others to enforce your authority for you. You probably still do this. At work, you go to your boss with complaints about other people. In your personal life, when you get into a fight, you get backup – spouse, partner, friend, sibling, etc. – to marshal your arguments, as if the more people who agree with you, the more right you are. You get other people to back you up because you believe, at a certain level, that it's somehow not meaningful if you're the only one who thinks something is true. Here are some of your core supporting arguments:

"EVERYONE does it this way."

"Wanting that is totally NORMAL."

"Well, that's the way WE do it."

CRUSHING OTHERS

Was one of your parents a GREAT SANTINI-type who ruled the house? Were your feelings and desires subsumed by some outside parental force? Did the family get dragged along on one parent's desire, e.g. did you have to do things like visit historic battlefields then get in trouble if you complained, i.e. expressed yourself? If so, then you learned that asserting your authority had terrible negative consequences. Having been thwarted for so long, you are probably now doing to others exactly what was done to you – crush them first, shout louder than them, ensure that you are always totally in control, consequences be damned. Do you dismiss every issue that isn't your issue, like if it's not important to you, it's not important at all – and not just unimportant but almost contemptuous? Are you coercive? Do you have lots of unspoken rules about what you will and won't discuss?

Your core arguments rely on force of personality and not giving much back to people emotionally into order to keep them on their toes. When someone disagrees with you, you squash them; if squashing doesn't work, you cut them out. You might be very passive-aggressive about this. Is your past littered with broken relationships? Ex-friends? People you no longer speak to? Do you use logic to cut people down? When you're in an argument, do you focus on the precise words the other person uses in order to catch them in a logic trap and use one small mistake to dismiss them and everything they're saying? Crushers often try to sound reasonable, as if they're acting out of logic and not emotion. For crushers, the more upset the other person becomes, the calmer they get; getting through emotionally makes them feel in control.

DOING NOTHING

Do things happen to you at work and you complain a lot and do nothing? If so, you may believe you have no authority. Your experience growing up was that you weren't allowed to enact your power. If your family was very hierarchical, then perhaps you learned that power can't be enacted upward, only downward (and even that was only allowed if you didn't get caught). You cede your power to some kind of generalized rule-following – like at work – and get very upset when people break the rules because it's not fair that they do it but somehow you don't. So you complain about it at home and probably take it out in your personal life or by spending a lot of time being unhappy and beating yourself up. You do a lot for others and keep doing it no matter how little you get back or how unsatisfying it all is.

Your core arguments probably come off like a lot of whining. You may notice that your friends, who used to give you advice about your problems, now just kind of nod and agree because you've never taken their advice. For example, you complain about your job; when a friend suggests you look for a new one, you say something ala, "Yeah, I should do that" then go back to complaining. You are probably wracked with a lot of guilt over, well, everything. You're two-faced in all likelihood, presenting a sweet, fake face to the world and a real, mean one to people close to you. Passive-aggressive defines you, like making cutting remarks in a sweet tone then acting all upset when someone "took it wrong."

DOING SOMETHING

Are you someone who always has to respond? Are you constantly righting wrongs, real or perceived? If so, you probably spent much of your childhood feeling your authority was thwarted. Maybe your parents never listened to you; maybe they always seemed to side with another sibling; maybe when you reacted to unfairness, you got yelled at. If so, you are probably spending a lot of your time trying to even out relationships and make everything "fair." You may write letters to congresspeople or speak up at staff meeting about inequities or have very tit-for-tat interpersonal relationships. You cannot just sit with the unfairness; it MUST be righted.

You are a constant complaint engine. You send your steak back. You contact family members to tell them exactly how you feel about what you believe they've done to you. For you, there's no such thing as a mistake – it's a personal slight; there's no such thing as an oversight because every single human action, to your mind, is totally deliberate. If someone forgets your birthday, it's not mere forgetfulness; rather, it's personal, it's a pattern, it's unacceptable, and you're going to tell them about it.

CONTROL OF WHAT?

A central problem with any of these four responses is you've confused taking action with taking control. Action looks like control because you're taking power over… something. Whether you're sitting there sulking about it or screaming in someone's face about it, you're still doing something. But there's a disconnect here because taking action is a behavior you perform in place of actually taking control because truly standing in your power… scares the crap out of you. Example:

CURRENT SITUATION: You really hate one of the people who works under you in your division at work. You can't put your finger on why, but you can't stand him and want him out – he rubs you the wrong way for some reason. Unfortunately, he's pretty good at his job, has done nothing to set you off, and your mutual boss really likes him.

TAKING ACTION: You decide you're going to comb through every inch of his expense accounts looking for a discrepancy so you can maybe justify firing him.

PAST SITUATION: Growing up, you felt like no one really listened to you, and, when they did, that you were somehow wrong in some way. Maybe you jumbled your words or said silly things because you had so little confidence that your legitimate thoughts would be meaningful and valued. Gathering evidence to fire someone mimics that past behavior – instead of examining what's happening inside you and why you're upset about this person, you're turning to external cues to tell you how to behave. And maybe the fact that your mutual boss likes this guy raises some issues and insecurities for you – like competition for parental love, or maybe, like in childhood, you feel the two of you are being compared and that you're coming up short.

TAKING CONTROL: You decide to do nothing about this person because, if you have to go searching for a case against him, then you don't really have one. If it's doable, you let one of your co-workers manage this person instead of you; if that can't happen, you look for another way to manage your wound, like by trying to confine the relationship to email so you're not as easily set off by him for example. You decide that the part of you that dislikes him is responding to a past wound; you choose, instead, to listen to your adult voice that says he's doing a good job.

Given the current situation, why would you ever comb through this employee's expenses looking for a reason to fire him? Rather, the action you're taking is in response to your feeling out control in the past. Taking control is acknowledging your past but behaving based on the present.

TAKING BACK CONTROL

Taking control means taking SELF-control, not control over some external situation or person. And this is the essence of power and control. It never has anything to do with anyone else. For the most part, we don't get freaky about things we KNOW we can't control – like the weather; you might be bummed if your party gets rained out and you have to move it indoors, but not enraged. Also, we don't get wildly upset about things we KNOW we can control even if they don't turn out the way we'd like; while we may kick ourselves a bit for blowing off the gym, we don't become violently frustrated. (BTW, if you are getting extremely upset over things entirely out of your control or totally in your control, you should go talk to someone because it may speak to a larger issue, like depression for example.)

Control is really about one thing: a reality check. Internally, it's about getting a sense of yourself and your own power issues. But self-awareness isn't the whole answer. Externally, it's about knowing when to stop. Stopping often looks like starting, since stopping one course of action – getting high every night and watching TV instead of dating, nagging your partner the second he or she comes in the door – means starting another – e.g. dating, smiling and shutting up, etc.

Stopping is not "giving up" or "giving in" or "losing"; stopping is an acknowledgment of your own power; it's a statement to yourself that you have done right by you, that you have reached for what you wanted in the best way you currently know how, AND THAT YOU DON'T JUDGE YOURSELF TO BE A FAILURE FOR NOT GETTING THE OUTCOME YOU WANTED. When you keep pounding away at something – or keep avoiding pounding away if you're the do-nothing type – you're telling yourself that the problem with the situation is you. This is why the reality check is so crucial; if you've really done everything you can to get what you want, give yourself a break, stop, and come up with plan B.

We get upset about things we THINK we can control; we get upset when we have SOME control over an outcome but don't have a great sense of how much. This is where we overassert our control – by doing something, by doing nothing – and where we feel we need to exert power – by enlisting others or crushing others. Thinking we can do something to control an outcome – like making someone love you more or getting someone to apologize for something they did and really mean it and make it all right or any of a host of other outcomes we want and believe we can get if we just manipulate the situation correctly – is what drives those strong emotions and misplaced behaviors. They define being "out of control." Taking control, paradoxically, is about relinquishing control. By letting go of behaviors predicated on your past, you are living in your present, which is the essence of standing in your power and control.