habits and other weaknesses. The reason twelve-step programs urge people to accept the uncontrollable nature of addictions is not because they’re never controllable but because, given human weakness, they’re never fully controllable. There’s always something that can, at least temporarily, overwhelm human control and cause us to do things we’ll regret, and believing otherwise only makes us more foolishly vulnerable to that possibility and more self-critical when it occurs. Life sucks, our control sucks, but it’s not personal. There are limits to what you can do to change yourself, and recognizing these limits is essential to managing bad behaviors, bad pieces of your personality, even bad taste in shoes.
Indeed, the more you study dysfunctional behaviors, the more convinced you become that most of us have weird brains, and those who appear not to just haven’t exposed their own brains to the kinds of stress, relatives, or Japanese animation that will reveal their mental dysfunction. The prevalence of unique, genetically associated dysfunctions is certainly consistent with Darwin’s theory that individual differences, even dysfunctional ones, improve genetic diversity for the species and enhance its chances of surviving unforeseeable future threats. If genetic diversity is a good thing for the species, however, it’s often a disaster for the individual, who gets to carry all kinds of odd instincts and impulses in his DNA that cause trouble and are hard to bear.
Neuroscience seems to show that many emotional and behavioral problems we thought were caused by bad parents or trauma are also caused by wiring that isn’t reversible. This explains why self-improvement is hard and sometimes impossible, even when we’re strong-willed and well guided. In other words, we’re often fucked.
On the other hand, while there’s much pain in incurable dysfunction, the joys of self-improvement are overrated. Strength and confidence may give you a wonderful feeling and a license to walk around in a cape and tights, but big fuckin’ deal. Real confidence comes from knowing you’ve used what limited strength you have to do what’s important. If your strength isn’t great, and as a result you have to strain harder, you deserve even more credit, assuming you’ve got the values to do something worthwhile.
If you accept that self-improvement has its limits, then you can begin to discover the nature of these limits, which you need to know if you’re going to manage them well. So the goal of pushing your potential isn’t just to improve your performance but to improve it as much as you reasonably can, given your resources, while discovering what your limits are. That way, you’ll know how much help you need and how much to compromise when you can’t do everything yourself.
Addiction isn’t the only self-destructive behavior that seems like it should be controllable but isn’t. Eating disorders, hair picking, hoarding, and procrastination are similar in that they seem like bad habits that should improve with steady effort and strong willpower, but are actually very hard to change. It’s no one’s fault, not even your mother’s. The only conclusion to draw is that many people have less control over their basic behavior than they deserve, and that it’s often hard to know how much responsibility they should bear for their actions.
Of course, just because you can’t always make yourself stronger or even correct your weaknesses, you still have to try. If your goal is to be a good, decent person who carries out his responsibilities, you’re never off the hook. The fact that you’re flawed and have limits to how much you can improve or even control yourself means that you just have to work harder to get as close as you can to where you want to go. You should never hold yourself accountable for results you don’t control, but always for the strength of trying.
Many requests for help spring from an expectation for self-improvement and a denial of the fact that it hasn’t yet happened in spite of many failed previous efforts to get help. This chapter—and really, life—is about how to realistically assess your ability to get better, cope with the pain of accepting what you already know, and turn your knowledge of your limits into a useful plan of action. No matter what shape your life is in, what step of the ladder you’re on, or what drives you to buy this book.
Taking Back the Reins of Your Life (After a Stampede)
Since humans control very little besides their DVR queues and their opinions about Miley Cyrus, it’s not surprising that we often feel like our lives are slipping into chaos. Sometimes it’s because you’re actually losing control, sometimes because someone close to you is spinning out, and sometimes because whatever you don’t control feels far more important and overwhelming than what you do. In any case, the goals you wish for when you’re feeling out of control, as listed and described in the following three examples, are rarely realistic and will often make your helplessness worse.
The trouble is, of course, “out of control” usually means just that, and no amount of sweating, seeking, and therapizing is going to change the fact that life reserves the right to throw more shit at you than you can possibly handle. Accepting the way life sometimes becomes—or at least feels—uncontrollable, however, need never stop you from managing damage or speeding up recovery.
Feeling helpless doesn’t mean that everything is going to turn out badly or that you’re doing a poor job with your life. If you can ignore the terrible meltdown feeling and take credit for how you’re handling the problem, rather than getting carried away or feeling too responsible, you’ll have much to be proud of and many more options to consider.
Here’s what you can’t really control but feel you should:
• Income (or lack thereof)
• Relationship status (or lack thereof)
• How other people feel about you, without magic or the power of hypnosis
• Your offspring, after they’ve exited your body
• Your ability to refuse the gravitational pull of a “party-sized” bag of pretzel M&M’s/any and all booze/your phone after all that eating and/or drinking when your deadbeat ex is still a text away
Among the wishes people express are:
• To regain control they thought they once had
• To figure out how to get close family members to control themselves
• To stop feeling helpless all the time
Here are three examples:
I’ve always been hardworking and good at doing sales, and I married someone whose love I thought I could count on, so I really don’t understand why my life seems to be coming apart. After getting laid off from my old job when the company was sold, I had to take a lower-paying job with a new boss who hates me. Meanwhile, my wife decided her feelings for me were gone and that she couldn’t stay married to someone she doesn’t love, even though I thought we had built a really nice life together. Now every day feels like a death march and I can’t stop crying. I’m the biggest loser I know, and the pain won’t go away. My goal is to regain control of my life.
My son has always been a nice kid, but he’s always been too good at finding trouble, and even now that he’s twenty-five, he just can’t seem to get his life together. We tried hard to get him extra help when he was in school, but he never did homework and quit college after a year. We think he drinks too much, but he won’t admit it, and the girl he hangs out with has no job, too many rings in her face, and an ex-boyfriend in jail. My husband and I dread the day when she announces she’s pregnant with our grandchild. My goal is to finally find out what’s the matter with our son so we can empower him to get control of his life.
I’m
