By Steve Hauptman

If you love an addict, or live with one, or depend on one in some way, you are probably in, as the old saying goes, nine kinds of pain.

And I’m guessing that, whether or not you realize it, the very worst of these pains comes from being confused about the difference between power and control. No, they’re not the same. In some ways, they are opposites.

One difference: power is possible, but control is usually an illusion.

Another: seeking power can set you free, while seeking control can make you crazy.

Control, as I define it, means the ability to dictate reality. To get life itself — people, places and things — to meet your expectations. Power, on the other hand, means being able to get your needs met. To take care of yourself. To not just survive, but to heal, and grow, and be happy.

Here’s an example of the difference:

Imagine your rich uncle dies and leaves you in control of his multinational corporation. So you wake up one morning the CEO of Big Bux, Inc. You go to your new job. You sit behind a huge desk. Four secretaries line up to do your bidding. You have tons of control. You can hire and fire people, buy things and sell things, build plants or close them, approve product lines and advertising campaigns, manage investments, bribe congressmen, you name it.

How do you feel? If you’re anything like me, you feel crippled by anxiety. Bewildered and overwhelmed by your new responsibilities. Disoriented. Panicked. Anything but in control.

You have lots of control but little power. You’re unable to take care of yourself.

Now imagine the Big Bux board of directors realizes you’re in over your head and fires you.  “Here’s a severance package,” they say. “Go home and take a nap.” How do you feel now? I’d feel great. Sure, I no longer control the corporation, but my life is my own again. Giving up control has empowered me to take care of myself.

There are two other interesting differences between control and power.

Control looks outward, mainly at other people, places and things. Power looks inward, to your own feelings and needs. So control-seeking pulls you away from yourself, away from self-awareness and self-care.

Control operates paradoxically. The more control you need, the less in control you feel. Which means if you depend on getting control to feel safe and happy, you don’t feel safe or happy most of the time. Chasing control is a lot like chasing a train you can never catch. Power, though — rooted in healthy, intelligent self-care — is a real possibility.

Addicted to control
“Ideas we have, and don’t know we have, have us,” the psychologist James Hillman once wrote.  Control is just such an idea.

Can you be addicted to control? I think we all are. I think it’s unavoidable. Who doesn’t hunger to be able to dictate reality? Who doesn’t seek control constantly?

We do it in a gazillion ways, ranging from huge (starting wars) to tiny (changing channels), from mindful (driving a car) to unconscious (forming expectations), from creative (curing disease) to destructive (cutting down rain forests), and from innocuous (scratching an itch) to dangerous (beating a child).

However you explain this urge, it’s both an elemental part of human nature and the one that most clearly separates us from other animals, which pretty much have to take reality as it comes. So familiar we barely notice it, most of the controlling we do is habitual, automatic and unconscious. In fact, should we meet someone who is not automatically con-trolling (think: Dalai Lama) that person would probably strike us as, well, inhuman.

As a therapist I work with control addicts all the time. And I see their addiction as the root cause of most (maybe all) their emotional problems: anxiety, depression, substance abuse, bad relationship, bad parenting.

Control addicts act much like people who are addicted to substances. That’s because their behavior is driven by the same motive. The goal of any addiction is to manage feelings — i.e., to make uncomfortable feelings go away. Think about it. Whenever we seek control it’s because we’re convinced we’ll feel better with it than without it. We think dictating reality will allow us to avoid some sort of discomfort: pain, anxiety, boredom, anger, confusion, embarrassment, fear.

So control addicts use controlling behavior in essentially the same way that substance abusers use alcohol, drugs or food.  And like other addictions, theirs takes over their lives, and leaves them compulsive, narcissistic, self-defeating, largely unconscious, and damned hard to love or live with.

Try giving up control
But what makes controlling an addiction as opposed to, say, just a bad habit? Several things, but here’s the most obvious: Addictions are famously difficult to give up.

Try giving up control for a day, and see how you feel. Try giving up control for ten minutes.

We tend to over control two things: our own feelings, and other people. Over controlling feelings makes us anxious, depressed and addicted. Over controlling other people ruins our relationships.

The antidote to over controlling relationships is being able to be yourself with another person, and to allow them to do the same with you. We call this intimacy, and it’s hard emotional work. It’s hard because it combines both detachment (letting go of control) and responsibility (noticing and expressing feelings), and demands we rise above our fear of both. But it also offers us our only chance to feel truly connected to and accepted by another human being.

Let’s be clear here. Recovery from control addiction isn’t easy. The people I know who commit to it — who decide to give up controlling and replace it with personal power — do so mainly because they’ve come to realize that being addicted is even harder.

Want to become more powerful?
Here are seven ways to do it:

1. Detach. Let go of what you can’t control anyway. That may be a situation, or a person, or that person’s behavior. If it’s a person you love, you can detach with love, as they say in Al-Anon. Detaching doesn’t mean you stop caring. It just means you acknowledge your limitations. And when you do that, an enormous relief often follows.

2. Refocus. Start by shifting your focus from outside — people, places and things — to inside — your own needs, thoughts and feelings. Happiness is an inside job, and most of the answers you need are there.

3. Take care of yourself. Stop over controlling yourself, and learn to listen to your body instead. Hungry? Eat. Tired? Sit. Rest. Maybe take a nap. (Naps are great.) Lonely? Seek out safe people. Angry? Scream (into a pillow, maybe, so you don’t scare the neighbors). Sad? Let yourself cry. It’s how the body naturally relieves tension, and it helps.

4. Educate yourself. You’re not crazy; your pain means something. Your job is to find out what it’s trying to tell you.  After his first Al-Anon meeting one of my clients told me, “It was like a light coming on in a dark room, and suddenly I could see all the furniture I’ve been tripping over.” Hey, why live in the dark if you don’t have to?

5. Get support. No one gets through life alone. Even if you could, why would you want to? Seriously consider checking out a self-help program, like A.A., Al-Anon or Nar-Anon or CODA. You’re probably scared of that first meeting. That’s okay; everyone is. Go anyway. It won’t kill you, and you can’t know beforehand what you’ll hear. A good meeting can save your life and your sanity.

6. Listen to feelings. This is a big one. Living with an addict usually requires hiding your feelings, sometimes even from yourself. But feelings are essential. You need to get them back again. Hang out with people who are trying to reclaim their feelings, and who can keep you company while you’re trying to reclaim yours.

7. Have faith. Develop your spiritual life. No, you don’t need to join a church. You don’t even need to believe in God. You do need to believe in something bigger than you, something you trust even when you don’t understand it. Call it Na-ture. Call it The Force. A.A. and Al-Anon call it Higher Power, but you can call it what you like.

I used to reject the idea of God, but I always believed in psychology. Then I heard Scott Peck suggest that it’s not unreasonable to replace the word God with the word unconscious. That permanently reframed the idea of God for me. I realized there was some intelligence inside I could listen for, and which would guide me if I let it. I might doubt the existence of God, but who can doubt the existence of that voice? The part that Knows Better? So that gave me something to trust. Hey, we all need some invisible support.

Steve Hauptman, LCSW, is a therapist practicing in Mount Sinai, New York. A Gestaltist and leader of interactive therapy groups, he is coauthor — with his “inner monkey,” Bert — of the blog “Monkeytraps: A blog about control” (http://monkeytraps.com). He is also writing a book titled “The Illusion of Control.” Steve can be reached at fritzfreud@aol.com.