Complete Control Over Anything Is Illusory

Our version of humanoid is around 285,000 years old, give or take. For most of that span, we were not alone. As recently as 40,000 years or so ago, multiple species of humans were alive on this planet at the same time: Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo floresiensis tucked away on their island, us, overlapping, sometimes interbreeding and sometimes not making it. We are the one branch that happened to still be standing when the dust settled, and we've spent the entire time since acting like that was inevitable instead of what it was: luck with a very long tail.

It's worth sitting with that for a second before moving on, because the rest of this essay is really just that same fact playing out on a smaller scale, over and over, inside individual nervous systems instead of across geologic time. We are a species that survived by accident and immediately started telling itself a story about destiny. Far from a character flaw unique to any one culture or era, it might be the most consistent thing we've ever done.

With the development of language, via the evolution of our particular humanoid neo-cortex, I've noticed a propensity for the feeling of safety (rather than safety itself) sought specifically in language.

If a person can hold a concept with language, they feel more comfortable about that topic. A solar eclipse used to mean the end of the world. Now it means "put on the glasses, it's at 2:14pm, it'll be over in four minutes." It is the same event with an entirely different nervous system response, because one version has words attached to it and the other one doesn't.

The event itself never changed. The moon still crosses in front of the sun exactly the same way it did when it meant the gods were angry. What changed is that we built enough language scaffolding around it to defang it (without controlling it; we still can't do a single thing to speed it up or stop it) by naming it precisely enough that the not-knowing stopped being the dominant feature of the experience.

If I'm unable to understand what's occurring, using language, I might do some odd things behaviorally in response. A mental break could occur. More likely, I'll do something smaller and sneakier: I'll manufacture a sense of control out of whatever material is available. It's always a false sense, but a sense nonetheless, and apparently that's enough for most of us most of the time.

Give someone a diagnosis before you've given them a single day of treatment, and watch how much calmer they get in the room. The diagnosis hasn't changed anything about their actual condition. It's changed nothing biologically in the twelve seconds since you said the word. What it did was hand them language, and language reads as safety to a nervous system built the way ours is built, even when the thing the language is describing is still exactly as unsolved as it was before you named it.

I watch this happen constantly, and I want to be clear that I think it's a trick the nervous system plays on all of us, clinician included, rather than one being played on the client. I've felt my own shoulders drop reading a diagnostic label about myself, in the exact same twelve-second window, before a single thing about my actual biology had shifted. Naming a thing differs from solving it, though it feels enough like solving it that most of us stop pushing further once the name arrives, which is sometimes useful and sometimes exactly the thing that keeps the real work from starting.

With us (humans, collectively, but I'll cop to my own clinical population specifically too) it tends to be religious views doing this labor. Holding the universe in nice, neat boxes. Such a nice sentiment. I mean that with less sarcasm than it probably reads with. It is a nice sentiment, though not a true one.

Safety is illusory. Safety, as I'd define it clinically, is being comfortable with where you are in space and time (context) and believing, reasonably or not, that you can control your own hierarchy of needs. Believing you can control it is doing a lot of the work in that sentence. Most of us are not controlling much. We're managing the feeling of control, which is a different project entirely, and a much more exhausting one, because it has to be maintained constantly instead of just being true once.

A researcher discovers a new element. They name it. They spend a career finding out everything there is to know about it, and with each new discovery, a new word emerges, invented every time by us, for us. Over time, they quickly forget that the language used to define the element is our own creation rather than the actual thing itself. The thing itself existed before we had a word for it and will continue existing exactly as it is regardless of whether our species is still around to keep naming it. The element does not know its own periodic symbol. We needed it to, which is a fact about us rather than about the element.

I think about this every time a client arrives with a label they've carried for years (a diagnosis or a story about what kind of person they are), treating the label as though it were load-bearing, as though removing it would cause the actual structure underneath to collapse. It wouldn't, because the label was only the name we gave the structure so we could stop staring directly at the unnamed thing.

Thank Buddha, or whatever you want to believe in, we don't have real control. We just like to think we do. The thinking is the whole trick. It's a very convincing trick, and I don't say that dismissively: it's convincing enough that entire theologies and diagnostic manuals have been built on top of it, because the alternative, which is sitting directly in the truth of how little any of us are steering, is hard to tolerate for more than a few minutes at a time without some kind of scaffolding.

If you can learn to tolerate discomfort well, to sit with it rather than narrate your way around it with an illusory sense of control dressed up as insight, well, that's the golden ticket. How you get there will be somewhat unique to you, based on your ancestry, your nervous system, your attachment history, and a myriad of other factors you had no real choice in whatsoever. Genetics are a cruel bitch sometimes. So is the family you were handed, and the century you were born into, and the body you're running all of this through. None of that was a choice. Almost none of the raw material was.

Embrace comfort states as much as your discomfort states, and feel all of it. Be a hedonist even for discomfort: taste it all, the whole plate, including the parts that don't go down easy. Grief, boredom, rage, the specific ache of being misunderstood by someone you love: these are the texture of being a sapiens with a nervous system and a short amount of time rather than malfunctions.

Numbing yourself to half the menu doesn't protect you from anything; it means you're only half-alive while you're doing it. Violence always precedes peace, in a non-republican sorta way. Every real integration I've ever watched a client go through required them to stop running from the ugly part first rather than skip to the resolution. There's no version of this work where you get to keep the boredom and the grief locked in a separate room from the joy. They share plumbing. Numb one, and you've numbed the whole house, whether you meant to or not.

Even the mere writing of this is paradoxical. My attempt to hold perceived chaos, and what I believe to be truths of the universe, is based on my own limited view of everything, filtered through one nervous system and one very short life, pretending to speak in generalities. I have not even the smallest amount of ultimate influence over anything, including whether any of this lands the way I mean it to. And fucking dig that. That is the essay rather than a caveat at the end of it.

Well wishes, 🙏 Love C. Dialogos, LMFT, Buddhist Chaplain