Self-Mastery, Control, and Coping Mechanisms

Coping mechanisms; we all have them. We all have ways of functioning in the world and most of them were learned when we were in pain. It doesn't matter whether we learned them in childhood or adulthood, we tend to hold onto the coping mechanisms even after the circumstances have changed.

The problem with this is that the old strategies create a level of dysfunction in our current lives. They aren't necessary. They aren't the best way to handle the scenario in the present and they tend to create more pain instead of fixing the problem.

This is coming up for me right now and it's an interesting perspective to have. Like everybody else, I had a lot of behaviors and coping mechanisms that I no longer needed. It took me a long time to work through those behaviors and shift them. But now what I'm finding is that some of the strategies I've picked up in the last couple of years are also not needed because I've moved past them too.

I'm being given the opportunity to continue to adjust my responses and behaviors as needed instead of waiting 20 years to shift them like I did with the first set of coping mechanisms I let go of.

How do you recognize this?

It's all part of being self-aware and for me, it's about asking the right questions. I was given temporary strategies so that I could understand what was happening at the time. The key is that they were meant to be temporary. There was a longer term strategy that I needed to get to, but I had healing to do first.

When I was given the temporary strategy, I took it as something that I would carry with me permanently, but that wasn't true. How many of the strategies that you're currently using in your life are meant to be temporary? How many were actually permanent strategies? How many are old and just bad habits that you hold onto?

This awareness is fascinating to me. I admit, I'm kind of geeking out a bit about it. It's important to recognize that I'm not scared of these realizations and I'm happy to shift strategies on a dime if I need to. None of this stressful. It doesn't cause pain. I don't get caught up in it. I simply take it on, get what I need, and keep going.  I had to gain control over my emotional responses, understand the wild thinking, and not be afraid of it before I could do any of this.

Self-awareness like this is really hard when you're scared of the awareness, which most people are. They are scared of what's in the shadows. They are scared to find out that they aren't good enough or don't deserve or can't have. They are scared of failure. Honestly, they end up being scared of the stories they've created in their minds more than they are scared of what's actually there.

The other thing I don't do is beat myself up. The old strategy doesn't work anymore, but I'm not making up stories about how much I sucked before. There is no hammer. The strategy has just served its purpose. It doesn't mean the strategy is bad or that there was anything wrong with it. It's just that there is a new, better way forward that I get to use now. If it changes again in 6 months, that's fine too. The constant beating up of ourselves keeps us stuck. You won't allow yourself to change if you're going to move to self-punishment immediately by deciding that what you were doing before was somehow wrong.

When you let yourself off the hook, you just simply accept that the strategy is done and you move to the next thing, you free yourself to shift with your life. You unhook yourself from the need to keep everything the same because you're afraid of what comes next. So, what did I learn?

I got distracted by life and the problems that were being presented to me. I've gotten pretty good at keeping emotional and mental control over myself, but I still allow my focus to swing too far. My focus was the thing that was out of balance. That was what I needed to shift. So here's the simple process I got out of this experience.

1. Is the problem mine? If no, then move to step 2.
2. Gain clarity by having conversations or listening to intuition and offer any advice or suggestions I have.
3. Walk away and shift my focus back to my own life and work.
4. If the problem comes back to me again, repeat steps 2 and 3.
5. Rinse and repeat as necessary.

The first hurdle here is recognizing it's not yours. We have a tendency to want to pick everything up and we don't have to. If you only tended to the problems that were truly yours, your life would be infinitely different than it is now and you would feel better too.

To understand that's it not yours, there is one story you have to get rid of. Do you know what it is? If you want things done right, you have to do them yourself. That story has victimization written all over it. You're making yourself responsible for everybody else's stuff because you've decided that you're the only one that can handle it. It's a lie that keeps you trapped.

You don't trust people to handle their own lives and you worry that their crappy choices might affect you. So you've decided to take control in ways that are harmful to you and the people around you.

What if I told you that the only thing you need to do is trust that your life will be okay? Why will your life be okay? Because you can handle whatever happens in it.

Your life is okay because you know how to manage it not because you have control over everything and everyone in it. Your work is to manage you; your thoughts, your feelings, your problems, and your sense of balance within your own life. You don't get balance by taking control of the entire world. You get balance by taking control of you.

The second big hurdle that shows up in being able to do this smoothly, is your own emotional and mental response when problems are shown to you. What you do with this stuff within yourself determines your response or reaction.

I had to get control over my mental and emotional states before I could do this. When problems were shown to me I would descend into fear and try to take control. That meant that I was out of balance constantly. It meant that I was never able to relax or be calm, my focus was all over the place, and I had absolutely no peace in my life. It caused more drama and more problems because I didn't have boundaries in place. I had to shift my emotional and mental responses to my life to be able to understand that it wasn't mine and then to be able to let it go.

If your mind goes down the rabbit hole, if you descend into fear or worry like I used to do, you will have trouble just giving advice and walking away. It will be very difficult for you because your mind will tell you that you need to do more or that it's your job to solve it. Your mind might even suggest that the other person can't do it on their own. All those things are lies that you need to let go of.

Those are stories and you victimize yourself with them. They even cause you to create stories of blame, shame, and guilt too when people don't do what you think they should do. If it's not yours, then it's not yours and you don't get to control it. You don't like that because it doesn't allow you to keep control.

The way to balance your life and yourself is not to have control over everybody and everything around you. You don't feel better through gaining control. You will never have enough control to be comfortable if you try to do this. There will always be somebody not following instructions. There will always be something that doesn't go as expected. This strategy will not work. Honestly, it will probably make you quite miserable and very grumpy.

The only control you have is over yourself. Recognizing that things aren't yours and letting them go allows you to maintain your boundaries and maintain control over yourself. It helps you with the process of self-mastery because you're no longer trying to master other people.

The way you trust this is only by trusting yourself. I can hear the argument from here. "But, what if they make crappy choices that affect me?" You can manage your life so that means that you can handle other people's crappy choices.

"But I shouldn't have to! If they just listen then I won't have to deal with it!"

Why do you victimize yourself like this?

There are so many stories here that come from wanting control over our experience so that we don't have to deal with crap. But the thing is, it doesn't work like this. The idea that we shouldn't have to is what makes us want to control everything. When life becomes about avoiding all of the experiences we don't think we should have to have, we live in fear of the great "what if?".

The mind ventures into the unknown and it doesn't like it there. That's why we want control. The mind uses the victimized story about what you should and shouldn't experience to get you to try to control everything. This is a giant trap! The experience will be what it is. Your job is not to control it. Your job is to understand why it's there, learn from it, and let it go. Your job is to understand that you can manage what happens in your life, regardless of whether you created that experience for yourself or somebody else created it for you.

The fun of being human is that we bounce off of each other. We create experiences for each other, intentionally and unintentionally. The idea that we need to try to control this by creating rules for other people to follow is what causes many of the problems that we see in the world today. If we simply learned to manage ourselves and left others alone life would be much simpler and easier to handle.

Stop victimizing yourself based on the choices that other people make. You are not a victim of their choices just because you didn't have control over their choices. That's a perception and it's not true. It keeps you powerless and stuck. Separate yourself from the choices of others. Anything that rolls into your experience you will have the ability to handle, so don't worry about what they are doing. You're fine. Just trust that.

This is a hard boundary to reconcile because the extremes of the human experience teach us to be afraid of other people's choices. People are living from pain and they make choices to project that pain onto others in traumatic and extreme ways. The need for control is causing the system to fail. It's creating deep divides in society and the world as a whole. While I understand that we will end up going through this to learn about it, my job is to simply point it out. Those that are able to shift the experience within their own lives (at the individual level) will do so and the rest will get to learn through lived experience. That's how life works. The purpose of pointing it out is not necessarily to shift it collectively or take some control over it, but to simply offer the recognition of it.

If I'm honest about my role in the world, it is to point this kind of stuff out. The idea of self-mastery offers balance in a world that seems bent on chaos.  Learning to manage that at the individual level makes life easier. I'm not here to show people how to avoid experiences. I'm here to show people how to manage the experience once its there. I do that by sharing my own experience and the clarity I get from it while offering to help you do it for yourself when you're ready.

The lessons I shared in this blog, are things that have taken me a long time to uncover. I had a lot of work to do to heal a lot of fear and worry before I could get to here. The journey continues obviously, I'm still in my human form, but my goal remains the same - I want to teach you how to begin to go down the path of self-mastery in your own life. That's why I will continue to share these kinds of things with you.

Love to all.

Della