The Illusion of Control

Chris’s com­ment about his own lead­er­ship edge offers a cru­cial lis­ten­ing point. You must have done a bit of work with your­self, Chris, to be help­ing peo­ple with ‘con­trol.’ I say this in all seri­ous­ness and with great respect because con­trol, in my book (and per­haps because of some of my own issues), is a tough topic.

It is so easy to see, or believe we see, oth­ers’ needs for con­trol and so much hard­er to see our own. One way I like to think about this comes from the psy­chol­o­gy of Carl Jung and his con­cept of the Shad­ow arche­type. The Shad­ow rep­re­sents those parts of a more ‘nat­ur­al self’ that have been pushed out of aware­ness dur­ing our upbring­ing. For most of us that includes both bright and dark aspects, includ­ing on the dark side those neg­a­tive, dan­ger­ous, or anti-social traits that had to be “giv­en up” in order to retain the love our pri­ma­ry care-givers. It is a part of us that is by def­i­n­i­tion uncon­scious although still present and active. The need to con­trol oth­ers through a vari­ety of means, from uncon­scious intim­i­da­tion and emo­tion­al black­mail to uncon­scious “care­tak­ing” can cer­tain­ly be part of this Shad­ow. But if you believe you can think your way through this, be advised: the Shad­ow does not give up its secrets to self-knowl­edge so easily.

A friend who was doing some rela­tion­ship coun­selling with his wife said pri­vate­ly to his ther­a­pist one day, “You know, I think I final­ly see my wife’s Shad­ow.” The ther­a­pist, pret­ty savvy, replied, “That’s good. Because when you are sure you see her Shad­ow, at that moment you are prob­a­bly stand­ing in your own.”

I think Chris’s method sounds great for get­ting clos­er to our innate reac­tions and shad­owy “help­ful” or “respon­si­ble” acts of lead­er­ship so that we can deal more direct­ly with the mean­ings of these pat­terns at their most embed­ded, cel­lu­lar lev­el. Then the ques­tions are: Can I hold the inter­nal ten­sions long enough to gain some insight? Can I allow a dif­fer­ent kind of response to be revealed? Can I allow some­one else to help and influ­ence me with my under­stand­ings and respons­es? Or must I do it all by myself? These are also con­trol issues.

How dear­ly we hold onto old iden­ti­ties because we think they form a sta­ble place to be! This is an illu­sion I sense we are all born to lose.

And at the cen­ter, anoth­er ques­tion aris­es which is, if I’m not in con­trol, then what and where am I, real­ly? It is in this place, after the dis­com­fort and inter­nal fires burn away, that I believe some­thing else can come in. Exter­nal­ly, in our rela­tion­ships and sense of com­mu­ni­ty, this is a place where authen­tic con­tact can be born. And in our inner worlds as well, this may be the birth­place of a deep­er love and the begin­nings of a path toward a new kind of light.