Beyond My Control
Jan. 8th, 2005 09:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lederhosenAnybody who's seen 'Dangerous Liaisons' (and I trust that's most of you) will remember those words, repeated over and over, by a man dealing (badly) with an internal conflict. He's torn between two choices, either of which would cost him more than he can face, and so the only way he can escape the weight of that decision is to convince himself that he has no choice - that he is merely the instrument of someone else's will. I suppose this is the same thing as Milgram's 'agentic state'.
In my own life, I've seen quite a few friends use this same defence mechanism. Not so theatrically, admittedly, and often the words are never actually spoken, but they don't have to be; they're what you tell yourself, so you can be comfortable with what's happening. You did the best you can, and the bad stuff... that's beyond your control.
So where do you *give* that control? Sometimes it's forces of nature, or even internal things that you can convince yourself aren't really 'you': that was the drink speaking, not me. But very often it's another person. Herein lies the problem: the people most likely to take control are the ones most likely to misuse it.
Sometimes you *have* to give others a certain degree of control over you, and that's not all bad - consideration for others means sometimes doing what they want instead of what you want. I'm going to use "control" and "power" more or less interchangeably here, both as the flip-side of "consideration", and in a broad sense: if I wipe my shoes at my door because I respect you, that represents a small degree of control you have over me. But to be healthy, this control has to flow both ways. If you are beholden to somebody else, they must be beholden to you.
To pick a not-entirely-hypothetical example: if your partner can influence you on how you may relate to your friends, then you cannot plead "beyond my control" when your partner does things that hurt those friends. Doing that makes you into a sort of one-way valve, allowing power to flow in only one direction: through you, your partner extracts consideration from your friends, but sends none back.
Unfortunately, this leaves those friends with a dilemma of their own. By accepting such a situation, by letting your partner assert control over you without making that a two-way street, you make yourself a package deal. If people want to accept your friendship - and the two-way flow of power that involves - they also have to accept a one-way relationship with your partner. That one-way relationship may seem a very small thing to the intermediary - perhaps you interact with your friends every day, and only very occasionally does your partner make a very minor demand of them through you.
But it's *not* in human nature to be comfortable with one-way relationships. Even a very minor one, barely noticeable to anybody else, leaves a very bad taste in the mouth of the person at the wrong end of it. Even if they decide it's worth it for the sake of your friendship, it taints that friendship; and you may be unpleasantly surprised to discover that it's a cost they're not willing to pay.
At this point, pleading "beyond my control" isn't going to help matters, because it only serves to underline the problem. By accepting a one-way relationship on your own behalf, you have also accepted it on your friends' behalf; and unlike you, they're probably not reaping any of the benefits that makes the one-way relationship worthwhile for you.
In my own life, I've seen quite a few friends use this same defence mechanism. Not so theatrically, admittedly, and often the words are never actually spoken, but they don't have to be; they're what you tell yourself, so you can be comfortable with what's happening. You did the best you can, and the bad stuff... that's beyond your control.
So where do you *give* that control? Sometimes it's forces of nature, or even internal things that you can convince yourself aren't really 'you': that was the drink speaking, not me. But very often it's another person. Herein lies the problem: the people most likely to take control are the ones most likely to misuse it.
Sometimes you *have* to give others a certain degree of control over you, and that's not all bad - consideration for others means sometimes doing what they want instead of what you want. I'm going to use "control" and "power" more or less interchangeably here, both as the flip-side of "consideration", and in a broad sense: if I wipe my shoes at my door because I respect you, that represents a small degree of control you have over me. But to be healthy, this control has to flow both ways. If you are beholden to somebody else, they must be beholden to you.
To pick a not-entirely-hypothetical example: if your partner can influence you on how you may relate to your friends, then you cannot plead "beyond my control" when your partner does things that hurt those friends. Doing that makes you into a sort of one-way valve, allowing power to flow in only one direction: through you, your partner extracts consideration from your friends, but sends none back.
Unfortunately, this leaves those friends with a dilemma of their own. By accepting such a situation, by letting your partner assert control over you without making that a two-way street, you make yourself a package deal. If people want to accept your friendship - and the two-way flow of power that involves - they also have to accept a one-way relationship with your partner. That one-way relationship may seem a very small thing to the intermediary - perhaps you interact with your friends every day, and only very occasionally does your partner make a very minor demand of them through you.
But it's *not* in human nature to be comfortable with one-way relationships. Even a very minor one, barely noticeable to anybody else, leaves a very bad taste in the mouth of the person at the wrong end of it. Even if they decide it's worth it for the sake of your friendship, it taints that friendship; and you may be unpleasantly surprised to discover that it's a cost they're not willing to pay.
At this point, pleading "beyond my control" isn't going to help matters, because it only serves to underline the problem. By accepting a one-way relationship on your own behalf, you have also accepted it on your friends' behalf; and unlike you, they're probably not reaping any of the benefits that makes the one-way relationship worthwhile for you.
