Control and Trust in Parenting
Parenting is the only job I know of where doing it well means becoming less necessary every year. Every other role rewards indispensability. This one requires you to deliberately engineer…
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Teaching Your Nervous System That It’s Safe to Let Go
You cannot talk a nervous system into safety. I wish somebody had told me that earlier in my career. I spent a while handing people very good information and watching…
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Choosing Presence Over Perfection
A perfectionist is never in the room. She’s four hours ahead of it, running the check. Is this going to turn out? I have to make sure everyone is happy….
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Peace Comes When You Stop Carrying What Isn’t Yours
I wrote a post last month about sorting out what’s yours and what isn’t. This one’s about what happens after the sorting. That’s the part nobody tells you and it’s…
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Rest as an Act of Resistance Against Control
Control cannot survive rest. That’s the whole reason stopping feels so dangerous. Every other tool in this series works around the edges of the grip. Rest goes straight at it,…
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When You Relapse Into Old Control Habits
You did beautifully for about three weeks. Then, you let things go. You didn’t check. Maybe you handed something back and kept your hands still. You noticed a difference in…
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How Faith Changes the Way We Hold Control
Surrender is one of those words that has been used to do a lot of harm. I’d like to take it back. It has been said to women in dangerous…
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Trusting Yourself Instead of Controlling Outcomes
I asked a woman what she was afraid would happen if the thing she was managing went wrong. She gave me the practical answer first. Then I asked again, and…
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Learning to Sit With Discomfort
Almost everything we’ve talked about in this series is an escape hatch. Checking gets you out of not knowing. Managing gets you out of watching somebody struggle. Perfecting gets you…
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Replacing Control With Boundaries
There is a difference between what a “control” is and what a “boundary” is. A control is a rule you make for somebody else. A boundary is a rule you…
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Small Acts of Letting Go That Build Trust
Nobody lets go of everything in one afternoon. That’s the mistake I watch people make after a good sermon or a hard conversation. They decide to surrender it all, they…
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Releasing the Fantasy That Control Keeps You Safe
I drove past a field once that had a gate in it. Chained, padlocked, hinges good. And no fence. Not on either side. Just a locked gate standing in the…
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Control in Relationships: When Helping Turns Into Managing
Helping is good. I want to start there, because this post is going to make some of you uncomfortable and I don’t want it misread as an argument for indifference….
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Letting Go of the Need for Certainty
We had a storm come through here a while back. When I was younger, I checked the radar eleven times in about two hours. The storm did what the storm…
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You Can Control Your Response, Not the Trigger
Let’s start with what’s not negotiable, because most advice in this area skips it and loses people immediately. You don’t get to choose your triggers. A certain tone of voice,…
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When Someone Else’s Choices Disrupt Your Life
Somebody made a decision and now you’re living in it. He left. She relapsed. Your business partner did something reckless. Maybe your parents sold the place. Your kid dropped out….
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You Can’t Control Other People, Even When You Love Them
You can’t control other people. Even when you love them. Especially when you love them, actually, because love is the thing that makes us think we should be able to….
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What You Can Control (And What You Can’t)
There’s a version of this list on every therapy office wall in America. I have mixed feelings about it, because the tidy version leaves out everything that makes it hard….
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God Is Not Asking You to Carry the World
I want to be careful in this one, because I’m about to disagree with some sermons. There’s a version of Christian womanhood floating around that treats exhaustion as evidence of…
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Why Letting Go Feels Unsafe
People describe this to me in almost physical terms. I asked a woman once what would happen if she stopped checking her husband’s location, and she put her hand flat…