The Inner Locus of Control
In your life, you are not in a rudderless boat, there are things you can control even when everything seems to go horribly wrong.
Lately I have been thinking a lot about control. As in: what is within my power to control and what is not? Then I read a Free Press article by psychologist Johnathon Haidt about rising depression and anxiety of teenaged girls. I have followed Haidt’s writing for some time now, so I was not unfamiliar with the topics, but I paused on something that really struck me: the inner locus of control. Haidt writes,
…this is a malleable personality trait referring to the fact that some people have an internal locus of control—they feel as if they have the power to choose a course of action and make it happen, while other people have an external locus of control—they have little sense of agency and they believe that strong forces or agents outside of themselves will determine what happens to them.
There is strong correlation between depression and anxiety, and an external locus of control, Haidt wrote. I would add that having the viewpoint that other agents or forces control what happens to you and that you have no control or influence, is the abandonment of personal responsibility and autonomy. It’s infantile, and at the risk of sounding harsh – weak. It’s giving up before you even put up a fight. Haidt calls it catastrophizing, and it is. It’s a constant wail: woe is me! It is the victim’s mantra.
It was news to me that this locus of control is the heart of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT ((but of course that makes sense)) which has helped countless people heal and put their lives and psyches back together. CBT helps you identify your ruminations and black and white thinking; it helps you know when you’re distorting reality and using emotional reasoning. These things are symptoms and causes of depression, according to Haidt. But what’s amazing is that you do not have to dwell in this place in your mind, you do not always have to be the helpless victim at the hands of seemingly titanic forces. There’s something you can do, there is something you can take control of to help you out of the void – and it’s OK if you need CBT to find your way out.
An excellent example of someone possessing an inner locus of control came up in the form of Amanda Knox this week, she wrote about it in an essay. Knox was an American exchange student in Italy who was convicted falsely, despite overwhelming evidence pointing to someone else, of organizing the rape and murder of her English roommate. She spent four years in jail before having her sentence overturned. She writes about how she began to face reality, and it was a difficult thing to recognize; she called it her epiphany. She states,
…I was sitting with my epiphany. And it was this: I was not, as I had assumed for the past two years, waiting to get my life back. I was not a lost tourist waiting to go home. I was a prisoner, and prison was my home.
I’d thought I was in limbo, awkwardly positioned between my life (the life that I should have been living), and someone else’s life (the life of a murderer); I wasn’t. I never had been. The conviction, the sentence, the prison—this was my life. There was no other life I should have been living. There was only my life, this life, unfolding before me.
Knox bravely confronts this truth of her situation, a reality that was terrifying, unjust, and horrible. But instead of giving up her selfhood and autonomy, she decides to make of her life what she can. She goes on to say,
But—and this was the critical thing, the thing I hadn’t been able to see until that moment—no matter how small, cruel, sad, and unfair this life was, it was my life. Mine to make meaning out of, mine to live to the best of my ability. There was no more waiting. There was only now.
To be sure, Knox ruminates over and regrets the life she would not live. She imagines returning home, in her 40s, barren and without love. She flirts with suicide and ending it all. Then she does something truly remarkable, truly brave. She does what Viktor Frankl did in a concentration camp during WWII, she seeks out meaning and asks herself, “How do I make this life worth living?” Not the one she fantasizes about and wishes for, but the actual life she is living now. The one in which she is in her 20s, has been falsely convicted of a crime she did not commit, and is imprisoned in a foreign country. She writes,
That was a big question, one I couldn’t answer in its grandest sense. But there was a smaller version of that question: how can I make my life worth living today? I could answer that. That was entirely in my power. So I did that. Doing sit-ups, walking laps, writing a letter, reading a book—these things were enough to make a day worth living. I didn’t know if they were enough to make a life worth living, but I remained open to the possibility.
And while my new emotional default setting remained firmly stuck on sad—I woke up sad, spent the entire day sad, and went to sleep sad—it wasn’t a desperate, grasping sadness. It was a sadness brimming with energy beneath the surface, because I was alive with myself and my sanity, and the freeing feeling of seeing reality clearly, however sad that reality was. I was slowly and deliberately walking a tightrope across a bottomless foggy abyss, with no clue where I was going and nothing to hold onto but my strong, instinctual, inner sense of balance.
Knox says it right there plainly: her inner sense of balance. When all was lost, and her life was thrown upside down, and much of the world thought her guilty of her friend’s murder, she turned inward to what she could control, and it got her through. She did not deny her situation, she sat with it and looked for the small pieces of her existence that were beacons. In simple things, she found meaning despite the sadness. If you cannot make meaning out of life, try to make meaning out of a single act in your day. That is a much smaller task and after this becomes habit, before you know it, meaning might become life.
Far less horrific and traumatizing than what Knox faced, I had a big epiphany when I was 20 years old in college. It was so jarring that I remember it to this day. As a little girl I had always wanted to be an adult. Now, right this minute. I didn’t want to wait. I wanted to grow up and be done with childhood. That’s because I thought adults had it all figured out and knew how to handle everything. Despite growing up raised by a single mother and experiencing multiple divorces on both sides (mother and father married and divorced several times throughout my younger years), I still somehow thought everyone knew what they were doing. I attribute this to the fact that my mother is extremely strong willed. She’s an iron woman who always made it through everything, there was nothing she could not handle or deal with. I thought it was because she knew the way, like having memorized a map long ago.
It was not until my professor of anthropology, a man I greatly admired and looked up to (something very rare for me), revealed himself in a very vulnerable moment. I had stopped by during his office hours to discuss a topic from class but instead, he started talking about his recent separation from his wife. She had been having an emotional affair with someone online and he had found out. He was devastated, and he looked it; he looked like a wounded, lost little boy. He was reeling from it all. He looked straight at me and said, “I don’t know what to do. What do I do?”
My jaw almost dropped to the floor. What do you mean, you don’t know what to do? I thought. Then it hit me like a ton of bricks: adults have no idea what they’re doing, and I will never get to a point in my adulthood where I have it “all figured out.” That was a child’s fantasy, as whimsical and unreal as Never Never Land. It’s remarkable that that fantasy had lasted until I was 20, to be honest; I attribute it to my natural optimism. But now, it was gone, and I had to deal with the fact that life would not be smooth sailing because I knew how to navigate the waters, it would be blind sailing in the storm and a lot of praying for land and favorable winds, but no control over either.
So, what could I control? Only myself. Only how I reacted to the thing’s life threw at me. Afterall, hadn’t I been doing that all along?
Since adulthood was not some magical destination in which all my problems would be solved, all questions answered, all knowledge known, I would make sense of it as I went and find answers in what seemed right. Contrary to what you might believe, this revelation did not embitter me. I never looked at adults the same again, especially as I became one, and I became ever more aware of people’s vulnerabilities. I could see more clearly now, but I was not powerless. I could control something, I had influence over much and the source of that was within me. That knowledge, that lesson, had been before my eyes my entire life and lived out every day by my mother.
I used to hate when she said to me, “That which does not kill you, only makes you stronger.” Or she’d shorten it, and only say the first half. Now well into my 30s it makes me smile because, she was right. Mothers usually are.