Life & Therapy

I am not a great bowler; in fact, I’m pretty terrible, so I am well acquainted with the gutter ball.  I often throw the ball, and it veers to one side, flirts with and then hooks up with the gutter.  I notice that during the veering stage, I mentally and physically try to reverse the fate of the ball.  I might do a little lopsided jig in the opposite direction of where the ball is headed, trying to convince it to magically change directions, while in my head I might be saying something like “No, no, no, no, no!!!!”  or “Go THIS way!”  Sadly, the ball never listens to me.

When we don’t want things to go a certain way, we may fight the truth for a while, as if we can game the system.  We don’t like to admit when we are not in control of a situation.  We have no control over the ball once it leaves our hands, but we still may try to influence its path with our magical thinking, dancing and mental commands.  We may feel that if we even open up to the possibility of things going where we don’t want them to, we are somehow committing to that reality.  So, we fight the things we don’t want, we close ourselves off from that which we are afraid of, and we imagine that we are in control of everything.  

We invite pain into our lives when we try to control that which is out of our hands.  By not allowing the possibility of disappointment into our imaginations, we are less prepared to deal with disappointment when it comes our way.  Ironically, by trying to control outcomes that are beyond our control, we wind up feeling even more out of control when the outcome isn’t to our liking.  We may not have a say in how some things turn out- such as whether our bid for a promotion is accepted, or whether a medical diagnosis is one that we want, or whether our flight arrives on time.  We do have a say in how we respond to the outcome of any given situation.  If we focus less on trying to influence things that are beyond us, then we have more energy to respond to whatever comes our way in life.