Change Your Life: Living Skillfully

I have a Thing about control.

photo credit: Jesse757

Not about controlling other people. (In fact, I kind of have a Thing about not controlling other people, because I hate other people trying to control me.) And not even so much about being in control of what’s happening around me, because I figured out early on that that wasn’t realistic.

My Thing is about being in control of myself.

This is why I’ve never got really drunk, for example, and in fact why I hardly ever drink at all.

I realise I’m unusual in this – at least, in how much I’m like this. But what it does is it gives me a lot of empathy for people who feel out of control, and a powerful motivation to learn techniques for getting back in control.

Which is why I do what I do. I work with people, typically stressed, busy people, who feel that their thoughts, emotions and behaviours aren’t completely under their control and who are increasingly unhappy about that. And I help them to regain that sense of control, so that they can decide on the direction of their lives and turn their attention to living their best life without being held back.

In my case, the out-of-controlness in my life has mainly been my emotions. (For other people it’s more thoughts or behaviour, but it’s all linked together somewhere down in there.) In particular, I went through an experience of several years in which I felt very out of control of my emotions.

I did my master’s degree in one year, which the university I attended let you do in that particular field, and I was involved in a lot of other things that year as well. In retrospect, I was doing too much – and it wore me down and made me emotionally vulnerable.

I fell in love, and it wasn’t reciprocated, but I had so much fear around saying anything that I didn’t find that out for a long time, and then I kept hoping, and had so much fear around saying anything that I didn’t find out again for a long time that the answer was still no, and in the meantime I’d started training for something that I wasn’t suited for or any good at, and living with too many other people, and members of my close family, in another country, were ill, and I was extremely short of money and then I got ill (from the stress), and there were times I wanted to hurl plates at my housemates I was so angry, and there were times I wanted to kill myself I was so depressed, and I started to have panic attacks whenever I was in a crowd, and the upshot was that I couldn’t work full-time for several years and carried the hurt and bitterness for many more years.

So I learned a lot about stress.

And I learned a lot, over the years that followed, about personal development and about how people work, because I wanted to understand myself and I wanted to make sure that I didn’t go down that path again.

And finally I discovered hypnotherapy. And once I figured out that it wasn’t about someone else controlling you, but about you having more control over yourself, I realised that this was what I’d been looking for.

Around the same time I started learning to meditate, which is another path to self-control. In the form I practice it, it’s about letting go of superficial thoughts (which include emotions) and allowing your true self to arise.

One day it was my turn to lead our little meditation group, and nobody else happened to turn up. So I was sitting by myself in an empty building, and fear came to visit, because I also have a Thing about being alone which is deeper and more buried than the control thing.

So I let fear go, and fear came, and I let fear go, and after about 20 minutes the timer went off and that was OK. Nothing terrible had happened because fear had come.

And the following weekend I went to a hypnotherapy conference and was more confident and gregarious than I’d ever been in my life.

photo credit: Jeremy Burgin

So my point, and I do have one, is this: If you’re feeling out of control I can completely relate to that. I mean, if I tell you I can control my skin temperature and stop my shaving cuts from bleeding and alter my heartbeat (all of which is true), it sounds like I have some kind of superpower and that I’m totally on top of things. But the reason I can do that stuff (which is a lot easier than it sounds, and also a lot less useful) is that I wanted to learn how to be in control of more important things, like fear and anger and sadness. And stress.

But enough about me. What’s your stress story? I realise you might not want to tell it publicly, so I’ve put a form below that posts, anonymously, to a place that only I will see. I look at all the responses, and I keep them in mind in everything I do, because I want to help other people feel in control of their stress too.

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