Freedom from Control Games

There has been a theme for me this year, it started back in January and has led to the deepest and most profound transformations in my life since the early years of Journeywork in the mid-90s. At the start of this year, while in India on our last In The Presence tour, I put out a fierce prayer that all remaining fixation here was stripped away. I prayed that the concept of ‘I’ of ‘me’ and ‘mine’  - the ego - be finished off completely.

Man, if I’d known what would ensue I don’t think I would have had the courage to put out that prayer! It’s been the most tumultuous roller coaster ride, often feeling like life was throwing the book at me.  I’ll spare you the dramas here and simply report that it has been truly and shockingly liberating.

Shortly afterwards, I started noticing the ways in which I was subtly and not-so-subtly still playing control games. I began paying closer attention and soon realized that my patterns were showing up regularly and pervasively. I recognized that the core of the pattern seemed to be a complete and ugly resistance to being controlled, and when I explored deeper memories from early life through to my teens started flooding – times when I had felt dominated and arbitrarily controlled by my parents – and I recollected my deep and strong fear of submitting or ‘giving in to’ control. It had seemed that if I surrendered to anyone’s control, if I let go in the face of it, that ‘I’ would cease to exist… my light would be snuffed out. And that possibility was terrifying.

I quickly began to realize that this fear of being controlled and had subsequently affected so much of my behaviour, that it was hard to look anywhere and not find some reaction to the fear. It had seemed as if my only choice was to resist and deny the control, to somehow fake the appearance of being ‘independent’ or ‘self determined’. And increasingly through the years my whole being became passive-resistant and passive-aggressive. It was as if a mini force-field emanated from my body, silently putting out a, ‘Back off and leave me alone, because I’m going to do things my way’ energy. As a person who loved human contact, intimacy and ‘merging’ it was a painful way to live, and must have been hugely stressful and frustrating to those who cared about me. And I began to see through the lie of the games, got it that they were pathetically ineffective at making me feel in control or safe.

This realization made me inquire a little more broadly. I wondered, “If being controlled snuffs your light out, threatens your existence, then what is the reality? Have you actually been controlled in any ways?” The answer stunned me!

When I admitted the truth, there was never a time that I had not felt completely and utterly controlled – by parents, grandparents, teachers, schedules, rules, demands, requests, emotions, needs, my own body… by life itself. Underneath my façade of independence, I had always felt hopelessly controlled – literally out of control. It had weighed me down, drained me of energy, flattened and depressed me.

The stark paradox stopped me in my tracks. My underlying belief had always been, “I will die if I submit to control”, but the real truth was that I had felt overwhelmingly controlled by every life circumstance I could remember, for as long as I could remember.

Within a couple of days I approached Joanne our PA (and a Journey Practitioner), sat her down and said, “Jo, I need help here. I’ve got something to face. I need a Journey process!” She got me to relax, open emotionally and verbally empty out all the ways in which I had felt controlled in life. I scanned back through the years, and the ways just poured out of me… from waking in the morning to last thing at night there seemed to be not a single time when I did not feel impotent to the control that was pervasively exerted over me. It was relentless, complete, total.  I then told the truth about how my resistance games had been futile, completely ineffective, and again I emptied out all the ways in which this was true. The emptying out – with its inevitable opening into the feeling of complete surrender to being controlled – racked me emotionally, shocked me to my core.

The Journey process that followed was simple, an effortless extension of the elicitation. But the result was extraordinary! The lie of fixation, the illusion of the egoic 'I' became totally clear: if avoiding control is absolutely necessary to sustain ‘me’ the ‘I’, and ‘I’ am helpless to avoid being totally controlled, then ‘I’ do not, cannot, exist. The answer to my prayer had come in the most unexpected of ways, and I felt completely free.

We all play control games, yet it can be really simple to free ourselves from the grip of control’s dramas and fears. We can simply choose to just stop, open and face the real truth. It’s not rocket science, it’s just sharp in the moment of truth telling.

When I went home, saw my wife, Brandon, and explained what had happened her eyes welled up. “I feel like I’ve got a new husband”, she told me. “I’ve always felt that you had some resistance to my love, like you were subtly pushing it away. And that energy is just not there any more. For the first time you feel really open to me”.

That was enough for me. To know that the love of my life felt that for years I had been pushing away her love made me absolutely determined to seek out any remnants of the old control games, and I’ve been keenly inquiring ever since.

  

Since getting real and facing the truth my life has opened and freed up in ways I could not have imagined. It has been fuller, richer, more vibrant, easier. It seems like there’s much less of ‘me’ and much more of Life being experienced. And for the first time in my life I feel neutral to control issues. It’s as if I’ve seen through the lie of the notion of control, and it has debunked both my strategies and my fears in that area. I see the control game playing that takes place around me in life, and remain unmoved, untouched by it. I might even be a nicer guy to live with these days, who knows?

I am currently teaching a simple version of the work in the Visionary Leadership Programme, and we have developed a more refined and thorough version of the elicitation and process I went through – it’s called ‘Impossible Binds’ – and we have re-designed our Advanced No Ego retreat to include this exciting new work.