Want Control? Then Take Your Responsibility

Photo by Louis Reed on Unsplash

What I write about below is personal psychology 101. 

Most people in life want control over their life.

Indeed, that’s a huge understatement. We all want more control over life and our lives than we can seize.

But this want of control, when needing control becomes an idol, creates situations where, most often, we surrender control.

Here’s how that works. 

When we interact with life and with others in a way that demands control, that very action forces others in a direction they would prefer not to go. That creates conflict. Conflict creates the blame game. The moment we begin blaming someone else is the same moment we refuse to take our own responsibility for our contribution to the conflict. In refusing our responsibility we surrender the only control we have; the only control we ever have, that is, the control we have over our own responses — over ourselves. If we think we can control or have control over others we’re deluded.

Controlling others requires you to surrender
the only control you’ll ever have.

The ‘internal locus of control’ (psychology term) suggests we have control over a great many things, for instance, how we respond to others and what choices we decide to initiate. By taking responsibility we take our control. By owning your contribution to conflict, and not taking theirs, you’re able to apologise for what you did wrong. Having an internal locus of control gives us maximum control over our own lives.

The ‘external locus of control’, however, sees issues of conflict as the other person’s problem. It’s the blame game — the game that gets us nowhere. By refusing to take our responsibility we lose whatever control we could have in attempting to control the other person. Having an external locus of control gives you minimal control over your own life, and it damages your relationships, because others are confused as to why you refuse to own what you did wrong.

Taken further, the person who cannot own what they did wrong becomes an unsafe person, and these very people can make it their mission, and have the temerity, to suggest it’s others who don’t take their responsibility, that, in their view, ‘others are unsafe’. Can you see how this kind of person will never have the only control they could have, because they refuse to take their responsibility?

The sanest way to live life, and the only way to relate with others, is by taking responsibility for our lives, for our actions, words, mistakes, errors, faults, and successes.