We have several habits that can hold us back in our healing, many of which are ingrained in us from years of conditioning, habitual practice and subconscious programming. One of these harmful mental and emotional habits is our need for control. We try to control situations, events, outcomes, and relationships. Our need for control extends to our thoughts and feelings, and instead of allowing ourselves to experience them naturally, we try to control them by pushing them away, suppressing them, stuffing them down deep within us, and locking them away. We try to banish them from our memories and our lives. We deny them. We try to forget them altogether. We have a very hard time relinquishing control over the things that are out of our hands. Even when we feel powerless in our addictions and feel totally overwhelmed and overtaken by them, we still try to control things as much as possible. We try to stop ourselves from feeling our pain. We avoid thinking about it. We try to control the people around us. We try to control how our relationships operate within our lives.
Then when we’re in recovery and working towards healing, we try to control how things go, from the rate at which we’re making progress, to the deadlines and timelines we’ve created and imposed on ourselves – from how fast we’re able to make difficult changes, to how we go about rebuilding and repairing the relationships in our lives. When we don’t feel we’re progressing quickly enough, or when we disappoint ourselves by relapsing or otherwise letting ourselves and other people down, we feel down on ourselves, judgmental, self-critical and unforgiving. We become so consumed with trying to control our emotions, our thoughts, and our lives that we’ve forgotten to be good to ourselves during the healing process. We aren’t giving ourselves the support and encouragement we need. We’re chipping away at our motivation and enthusiasm for our recovery because we’re beating ourselves up when we don’t meet our own expectations. We’re detracting from our self-esteem and feelings of self-worth. Our need for control makes us so hard on ourselves that we don’t give ourselves the patience and understanding we need to keep getting back on track when we falter, to keep trying when we want to give up.
Our tendency to need to control things often comes from fear – fears of uncertainty, of failure, of disappointment. We learn in recovery that in order to be at peace within ourselves and to experience the calm and tranquility we need in order to heal, we have to let go of our need for control. We have to surrender to the flow of life, to our inner journey, and to the guidance of our intuition and higher power. We have to actively practice having faith in ourselves and our ability to heal ourselves. We have to practice letting go, of resistance, of expectations, of our fear.
At The Guest House Ocala, you will be treated with dignity, respect, and compassion. Call 855-483-7800 today for more information on our treatment programs.