It Will All Work Out: The Freedom of Letting Go

by Kevin Hart

The punishment of every disordered mind is its own disorder. —Saint Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

I still gave in to immediate gratification rather than focusing on lasting happiness.

it’s that very lack of togetherness that becomes your sentence to pain and suffering.

To be asleep in your day-to-day means to be living it without awareness.

And living this way has its consequences.

I’m talking about the darkest times when you hit that bottom. When everything is going wrong. When it seems like God woke up and came down to earth just to slap you across the face in front of everyone. Then left, and decided to come back one more time to slap you again for good measure.

As long as you’re not in that last category, your bottom can be your blessing. Because when you have to sit with the consequences of your actions, and you really don’t want to live with them, you almost have no choice but to gain a new perspective and become a different person.

And I don’t just mean that God was always by my side, which I do believe. I mean that I thought I was the one making all my decisions. I thought I was in control.

These monsters are compulsive. Insatiable. They want more of everything. You want a good meal—they want an all-you-can-eat buffet that never ends. You want love; they want undying devotion every second of the day and night. They make everything about “Me, me, me.”

People might think of them affectionately as the little quirks of your personality.

It’s like when you fall in love with someone ’cause the sex is amazing, and you’re so blinded by pleasure that you can’t see what a bad person they are for you in the long run.

As these monsters take over, you start to lose yourself and who you are. Your common sense—your ability to process true reality versus self-delusion—lessens.

They control you through fantasy.

They make you see what they want you to see, and think about what they want you to think about. So you’ll keep feeding them, instead of your family, your health, and the things that really make you happy.

Once they’ve got you, they never want to let go. Because if they can’t control you, they can’t exist. And how they keep control is by keeping you asleep. By keeping you blind to what they’re doing. They’re playing flutes and rubbing menthol lotion on your chest at night. Making sure you feel cozy and carefree ab...

these monsters cannot eat when you’re living right. Why? Because they have no food. Their food is your attention. Their food is your trust. T...

THE CONTROL MONSTER

Control. I just wanted control. When I had it, I felt like I could breathe. Like everything was going to be okay. And when I didn’t have it, I was filled with anxiety, feeling like every little thing could go wrong.

But no matter what form your Control Monster ends up taking, they all serve the exact same purpose: to manage anxiety, and make sure you’re safe and successful.

Some people’s control happens right out in the open, in plain sight.

Whereas other people’s control can happen more beneath the surface. This style is less obvious and harder to spot, since it’s mostly operating inside someone’s mind.

Control is having power over a situation, yourself, or others, and being able to influence what goes down.

When you can’t release control, you’re uptight and tense. You might never ask for help or you refuse it when it comes, because you don’t want someone else coming in and messing things up.

It’s condescending, because what you’re saying when you do this is, “I don’t trust you to drive. You’re not going to go the right way, you’re too slow, you’ll probably crash the car.”

You see this playing out in the student who always tries to do a whole group project by themselves. Or the parent who never lets a child out of their sight and monitors their every move. Or the boss who says, “It’s my way or the highway.” And tells everybody how to do their job, or does it for them, instead of letting them bring their own creative solutions to the table.

In the sneaky version of this monster, one of its key methods of control is avoidance. If certain situations or people make you feel anxious, you’ll steer clear of them. And for a lot of people, one of the biggest causes of anxiety we avoid is conflict.

If somebody else starts pushing and arguing for their way, even though you might disagree, you get quiet or let yourself get pushed over, so they can have it their way. That’s because a piece of you is afraid of facing some intensity and having somebody get mad at you. So you end up controlling what everyone thinks of you by not being authentic.

To keep you from getting into a bad situation, your monster could put you into overdrive, where the first instinct is to take action and get your hands on everything. Or it could use the complete opposite strategy.

Let’s take failure as an example.

It has you fighting your way through and doing everything yourself, because it doesn’t believe other people can do a good job or look after your best interests.

If you don’t believe that you could succeed or handle any outcome short of success, you might pursue another, safer road. Or just not pursue one at all. That way, you and your Control Monster still get to minimize the risk of failing.

It’s genius. ’Cause you can’t fail if you never try in the first place.

Any form of control is really just protection. And you get protective because you’re afraid. And you’re afraid because you don’t trust. Let me say it again: Any form of control, at the end of the day, is really just protection. And you get protective because you’re afraid of something bad happening. And the reason you’re afraid of something bad happening again is because you don’t trust yourself or others to handle a situation.

“Again” is the key word, people. Because in the past, when somebody else was supposed to be in control, a situation likely turned out bad for you.

Usually the moment some element of your early life got out of control—that’s the moment th...

That’s its number one priority: to support you in that particular environment where you weren’t safe, whether physically or emotionally.

you either charge into a situation and take on everything yourself, or you run away from it. Well, what does that sound like? Basically, those are different types of survival responses. In the face of scary situations, your brain wants to choose either fight or flight. And way back when, the Control Monster chose whichever option felt the smartest at the time.

Note that when we are very young and can’t flee physically, we flee in our minds, and that’s called the “freeze response.” So if your monster controls more on the inside, and makes you run away or shut down, that can happen when you had a parent who could explode and get real mad without warning. Or maybe they were dominant, inflexible, or narcissistic, and they always got heated or wanted to get their way and be right. This parent was out of control with control.

And when you’re real small, fighting back in these situations usuall...

You kept them and any situation from getting out of hand by shutting up and going with the flow.

You were strategically using certain behaviors in hopes that they would affect how another person treated you or how they behaved around you. For all the right reasons, you were trying to make sure the world around you stayed safe and cool at all times.

And what started as an attempt to control one or two specific individuals can then become the way you manage everyone your whole life.

Because that’s how your monster learned to deal with anxiety.

I took a chance and placed my trust in their hands. I hoped they would show up for me to help score a win, and they fumbled. And when they fumbled, I was disappointed. I was hurt. That reinforced my decision to do everything by myself.

But here’s what starts to happen when you make that decision: you start prejudging others.