5 Signs You're a Control Freak. Or Maybe Not.

                 

 

source: Pinterest

con·trol freak  

Noun

A person who feels an obsessive need to exercise control and to take command of any situation.

Urban Dictionary Definition: con trol freak Noun

Person/persons who, if not in control of many aspects in other's lives will go ballistic. This ensues telling, demanding, and finally just doing what they wanted all along. 

1   1.   YOU CANNOT RELAX DURING A WATSU SESSION.

Have a Watsu treatment recently?  Calm water or stormy ocean?  They are quite healing for the properly-matched water lover.  My dear friend and Watsu-therapist-for-a-session accused me of being a control freak after tossing me around in stormy waters in attempts to display his skills and soothe me.  Some people are mermaids equipped with fins and steel lungs, meant to lounge for hours in the sea.  Others, like me, are land-and-air creatures meant to fly, climb, ride, feel the wind in our hair, see the earth far below us.  Water does not always appeal to me unless I'm surfing on top of it.  Consider basics: it sucks for us contact lens wearers, and any mild skin rash or infection will go bonkers in tropical water.  I have never been a water baby, being more attracted to land sports while my siblings lapped away like fish as youth.  My friend was making a sweeping generalization about my character based on his Watsu experience and my Watsu stiffness, but as we know sweeping generalizations are judgments based on limited experience, one’s own perceptions and life experience. 

All non-mermaid fairies please refer to the Control Freak Characteristics at the end of this article.   For your dry wings, the Watsu-related pictures I researched for this article took place either in the Dead Sea (key = salt stability!) or in still pools.  Hmmmm.  For now we will hold off judging.  You can judge (yourself, me, others) all you want after reading what deems a person a control freak.  

2.  You are overly critical of every bodyworker and healer who touches you.  Even worse, when THEY USE THEIR OILY HANDS TO MASSAGE YOUR FACE YOU FREAK OUT.

Sound familiar?  Does to me.  This is my regular schpeel.  A bodyworker and healer myself having received hundreds of massage and energy treatments over the years, so I am quite sensitive to others’ energy and touch.  If I spend money and time to expose my energy, aura and spirit to another, I want to be damn sure they are proper healers with benevolent intentions and healing capabilities. A barrier I encounter in Asia is that these qualities are more rare than you may think.  So I roll the dice, suck up an hour and $5 for much needed relaxation.  What results is an hour of mind chatter criticizing the poor bodyworker.  This tortures me and him or her on an energetic level but is not intentional by any means.  Bodywork becomes a meditation for me when I am facing my mindchatter.  Hopefully I’ve experienced a satisfactory level of relaxation by the end of the massage but inevitably some face touching is included.  OOooh, I feel my jaw tighten as they work to loosen it.  Asia grime, oil, clogged pores, now-minor acne; none of these situations are very forgiving of a face massage unless it’s a de-clogging facial.  And it is never fun for me when someone rubs their fingers over my eyeballs. 

It was this very scenario last week which forced me to face my friend’s critical evaluation of me: am I a control freak if I cannot stand my face massaged?  What in the world is wrong with me?  Does everyone just love this?  Hmmmm I must be flawed and controlling if I don’t love EVERYTHING supposedly relaxing, and so must you.  Or maybe not.  Read on.

KPJAYI  Mysore, India, Spring 2009

      3.   You maintain a DISCIPLINED ASHTANGA YOGA PRACTICE: 6 days/ week except moon days and ladies’ holiday.

Hoot, holla, Ashtangi’s are ALL control freaks, right?  Oh, wait, I practice Ashtanga in said manner.  Huh.  The ever popular, controversial practice that is Ashtanga yoga.  Anyone practicing with that much discipline must be a control freak.  Competitive athletes, dare I say, are not all control freaks.

What IS Ashtanga, really?  Without launching into a thesis, my experience of Ashtanga is a soulful, expansive, grounding 8 limb life path.  It is a way of life that shapes a person inside-out forming a strong, centered, powerful, confident, dedicated, open, beautifully truthful individual if one allows the process to work its’ magic.  As in every part of life and any type of yoga, if you are a control freak, and if you bring a control-freak quality into the practice, it will wreak havoc in your life.  You will become controlled by the practice rather than the other way around, but hopefully if you stick with the practice long enough you will face yourself with awareness, compassion, forgiveness and acceptance in order to let go.     

Ashtangis are so many things.  Some may be control freaks but the ones I know are living a soulful, conscious path of truth.  

4.   You have particular DIET HABITS that are different from your current surrounding culture; whether you are in North Dakota, India, Thailand or NYC.

This is a big one.  Just about everyone I know has one diet request or another: vegetarian, vegan, raw, no soy, no sugar, or meat PLEASE!  We all have different bodies, cultural beliefs and influences.  Most if not all of my friends are intense yoga practitioners whose bodies and life are founded around feeding themselves food that will fuel them with nutrients and love.  Oh so important, but not so easy to capture when in foreign lands.  Sitting at a table ordering food with yogi’s is a riot and we all sound like control freaks.  But indeed we are not, we are simply sensitive beings interested in taking the best care of our soul-vehicles as possible.

Controls freaks weave in and out of these circles and are rampant.  The socialrexia world is an easy place for control freaks to hide.  But most people I know are simply doing what I have just described: treating their bodies like the sacred soul-vehicles that they are.  The line sometimes indistinguishable by an outsider it is a crucial one.  We have spent endless amounts of time, money, resources to harness and balance our energy and food is a major component to this balance.  We are each experts for what diet works best to keep us in balance.  If that requires some amount of discipline and decision-making, so be it.  It is when people with true food/ control issues use food to avoid dysfunctional.  This topic will be covered further in one of my next blogs as it is also a very personal topic for me.

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      5.   YOU ARE SELECTIVE ABOUT THE COMPANY YOU KEEP, WHO YOU SPEND TIME WITH, ENERGY YOU SHARE.

I learned this lesson at an early age by my friend, Lindsay Stark, who had Cystic Fibrosis.  She was in the hospital 80% of the year.  My freshman year of college I was hospitalized at the same time as her.  She was 18.  We talked on the phone every day about life, people, living with chronic disease, silly ineffective doctors.  By then she had cut most people out of her life: from her perspective they would pretend to care for a time, visit her in the hospital, then she pretty much wouldn’t hear from them again.  These people were her blood family.   Lindsay had a tough outer skin.  While her approach of cutting most people out of her life was understandable given 18 years of a life with CF, it made sense to me to some extent as well.  Just after I was released from the hospital and back on my college campus I received a message: Lindsay had died.  My spirit was crushed for a long time and in this moment I began questioning my purpose on this planet.  Thanks to Lindsay I also recognized the importance of keeping close those souls who hold tremendous positivity, support, passion, brother and sisterhood.  It is because of her that at crucial moments I have been able to cut ties with people whose energy is poisonous.  There is no need for anyone, autoimmune/ chronic disease or not, to punish themselves by “serving time” surrounded by people whose impact on their life is full of negativity.  I am not recommending we abandon our loved ones in times of struggle; rather the opposite.  However, we are in-tune enough to feel the soul and spirit of those around and judge who is worthy of keeping in our lives.

True Control Freak Characteristics:

-       A person terrified of failure

-       Someone who tries to manipulate the behaviors of others

-       Someone who believes they will be happier if those around them will change one or two things.  
     And so they try to change those things.

-       Unconnected with their true self, control freaks try to manage other’s impressions of them by altering
     their behavior and personalities depending on context

-       Someone who is NOT OK with the unknown or changes

-       Someone who insists on speaking for others, explaining others’ thoughts

It is OK if you are a control freak.  The first steps towards change are awareness and acceptance.  Add in a dose of lovingkindness and compassion and you are well on your way to inner peace.  Om.

source: Pinterest Devin Carr