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. They overlapped, 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, which is luck with a very long tail.

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.

E.g. 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." The same event gets an entirely different nervous system response, because one version has words attached to it and the other one doesn't.

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 is always a false sense, but a sense nonetheless, and apparently that's enough for most of us most of the time.

E.g. 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.

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. Rather than controlling much, most of us are 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.

E.g. 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. That's a fact about us rather than about the element.

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 entire 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 (tolerate it, rather than narrate your way around it with an illusory sense of control dressed up as insight), 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 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 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 protects you from nothing and leaves you 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.

This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute clinical advice. Nothing here creates a therapist–client relationship.

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Well wishes.

(Autistic Fruitcake)

P.S. 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's the essay rather than a caveat at the end of it.