For Their Own Good (And Mine): The Hidden Urge to Control

I’ve been scheming to control people a lot lately.

Of course, it’s for their own good.

Of course, it’s because I know better than they do.

Friends who are going through things with their families, parents of patients who are in the throes of critical illness, and even my amazing partner. (Luckily, the drive to control my spouse is much quieter than it used to be…I’m not going to ask him if he agrees with that, though.)

I kind of knew I was trying to control people, but it wasn’t until I realized how much energy I was expending on the effort and just how spectacularly it wasn’t working. And that it would never work. I was exhausting myself in the exercise, all without the person of my focus having a “better” situation one way or another.

We often try to manipulate people because we want to help them.

It’s part of a physician’s implicit job description to manipulate people. Ever taken a course on motivational interviewing? Ever hear the ethically supportable concept of coercion? If you’re a parent, manipulating your children probably feels like a legit life-and-death situation. (I was constantly manipulated by my mother, and I turned out great, thank you very much.)

But every once in a while, the lesser moments we all have because we’re human, we tell ourselves we’re manipulating others for their own good, when in reality, we’re doing it for our own good. Even if it’s 51% for my benefit and 49% for theirs, it feels gross when I figure out I’m doing it.

Here’s what’s happening and why it doesn’t work.

If you’re new to this material, here’s a quick primer on the Thought Model.

Everything in life falls into one of five categories: Circumstance, Thought, Feeling, Actions, or Results

Circumstances are neutral facts. For example, it’s currently 67℉ in Nashville.

Thoughts are the 60,000 neural connections that give emotional valence to our circumstances. Honestly, there’s research to back up that number, and most thoughts are unconscious (otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to function). If I’m a person who loves my weather super hot, my thought about Nashville’s current temperature may be, “This sucks, and my whole day is ruined.” Importantly, thoughts are not facts. While I may dislike the neutral circumstance of it being 67℉ outside, someone who hates heat may think it’s a completely gorgeous day. And we’re both right, it just depends on our individual proclivities.

Feelings are the neurohormonal cascades that flow through our bodies once a thought occurs. In our example, as I think about the garbage day ahead that I’m expecting, my dopamine and serotonin levels drop, while my cortisol rises, and I experience sensations in my body that I recognize as “annoyed.”

Actions are the things we do (or don’t do) out of our feelings. Out of my feeling of annoyance, I ruminate, throw myself a pity party, and am generally a grump to everybody I interact with.

Results are what we get with the culmination of our actions. In this example, my result is that I completely ruin my own day by wallowing in my annoyance, telling myself the story of why I’m annoyed over and over again, priming my brain to find ever more data that my day is just completely awful.

Say I’m running the following Thought Model:

Circumstance: Patient’s family in the unit making a decision for their child

Thought: “They’re hurting themselves by delaying this decision.”

Feeling: Compassion

Action: With every update, I reiterate how their child’s clinical situation is not improving. I remind them that they told me what their child would want in this situation, and this is not it. I commiserate with my colleagues and the bedside nurses, RTs, child life specialists, clergy and physical and occupational therapists about just how awful this is. I worry about the emotional strain on the unit. I worry about the emotional strain in the patient’s family. I worry about the resources being used caring for the patient and their family. I try to anticipate every angle of the patient’s situation they will broach next, play scripts in my mind about how I’ll respond to every single one and slide into victim mentality about how hard it is for me caring for the patient and their family.

Result: I make the patient’s care about me, not them and their family, and I try to manipulate them into making a decision they are obviously not ready to make (or accept the outcome of when we try to make the decision for them).

But how could it go so sideways? “Compassion” is a good emotion, right? Like so many things, it depends. It depends on the actions you take in response to the emotion you’re feeling. The way I’m functioning above, out of a feeling of compassion, I’m trying to manipulate somebody into doing something so that I can feel better about the situation I’m in with them.

Playing this scenario out another step, whenever we’re interacting with others, we’re running their own Thought Model. For the example above, the patient’s parents’ Thought Model may look something like this:

Circumstance: Dr. Turnbull said, “You’ve told us that in this situation, your child would want…”

Thought: “I’m an awful parent for them being in this situation in the first place.”

Feeling: Anguish, guilt, shame (any litany of awful emotions, now that I actually put myself in their situation as opposed to superficially doing so…)

Action: Withdraw from conversations about my child’s path forward

Result: Remain in the current situation, even though it’s awful, because that’s more comfortable than venturing into the unknown situations that could occur if I make decisions for my child

The actions I take in my Thought Model become the circumstances in the other person’s Thought Model. And no matter how thoughtful I am, how experienced a communicator I am, or how much I truly believe my heart’s in the right place, I cannot control the neurons that lead to another person’s thoughts, or the neurohormonal cascades that lead to their emotions. Which means I can’t control their actions. Or the results they get.

So what do we do with this knowledge?

Is the answer to push harder? Maybe. Run that through a model and see what results you’ll get. If the results seem “best,” then push harder. Is the best answer to become complacent? Maybe. Run that through a model and see what results you’ll get. (I will say that whenever I get complacent, I slide further into victim mentality, and those results are never good.) I observed my lovely colleague doing what I currently think is best: she dropped the rope.

Y’know when you were young and played tug o’ war and the sides were perfectly matched? No matter how hard you pulled, they pulled equally as hard? No ground was gained, no matter how hard you tried, your hands getting rope burns and your little kid muscles straining? At some point, somebody on one of the sides got the bright idea to drop the rope. As kids, the point of dropping the rope is to have a laugh at your opponents going flying backwards as soon as their pulling is met with no resistance. As adults, the point of dropping the rope is to relieve the burning and straining you’re feeling while showing mercy for the other person. You might have to take up the rope again in the future, but at that moment, there’s relief. There’s an acknowledgement that when we try to control others, we just exhaust ourselves and risk the other person shutting down completely.

The day my colleague took over for me, she said, “Today’s my day to listen. I’m just going to listen. However long it takes, I’m going to listen to what they have to say about all of this.” She realized trying to “make” them take action was not working and was just frustrating everybody involved. So she took a different tack. She dropped the rope, setting the stage for her to have a different Thought Model than I did, which probably helped the patient’s family develop a different Thought Model for themselves than they’d been able to have with me. She decided to stop trying to manipulate them.

So, the next time you feel you’re in a struggle where you’re just not getting anywhere, decide if you’re trying to control someone who, simply because of how neurons and physiology work, cannot be controlled. Decide if your reasons for trying to control them are really for their own good, or actually for 51% of your own good. Or maybe even 100% of your own good and none of theirs. (Don’t clutch your pearls and beat yourself up if you realize this. You’re human. Humans are going to “human,” and none of us has evolved past it yet.) Consider the Thought Model they seem to be running while you’re running yours; you’ll probably find there’s a way forward that doesn’t involve you pulling against something immovable.