Transcript of Edge Note: What if the thing destroying your peace is control?

Welcome to Notes from the Edge, where we have the conversations we should have been having all along. We talk about the things that we're not talking about. I'm your host, Lisa Lacey, writer, trauma educator, executive advisor, and author of the upcoming memoir Notes from a Certified Madwoman. Welcome to The Edge.

Hey, hey, my friends. Welcome to another episode of Notes from The Edge. I am your host, Lisa Lacey, and this is the place we have the conversations we should have been having all along. And one of those conversations is that stuff doesn't always work out and we have hard days. And today was one of those days where it seemed like nothing was flowing the way that it needed to go, and I don't think we hear about that enough.

And I want to talk directly to anybody who struggles with their mental health, not theoretically, not as somebody standing on the other side of it with a clipboard and a list of coping skills, but as somebody who has struggled with Mine for most of my life. I was a very young girl when things started going sideways for me. I had a suicide attempt at 15. I had already experienced trauma, and my family was told that I needed clinical therapeutic support. That support would not come for another 25 years, and I wasn't properly diagnosed with bipolar 1, borderline personality disorder, and CPTSD until I was 40.

25 years is a long time to live inside a brain, you don't understand that's happening, what's happening. And when you've been unwell for most of your life, there is something particularly cruel about it. You don't necessarily know you're unwell. You think this is just your life. You think everybody feels everything this intensely.

You think everybody's mind can just turn against them. You think everybody experiences periods where the world feels unbearable. And relationships are supposed to feel like chaos and war, and surviving is the same thing as living. You don't know what stability feels like because you don't have anything to compare it to, and I certainly didn't know what it felt like to actually like myself. Today I've had more clinical and therapeutic support than I can probably list in one sitting.

Name them, an acronym, I've done it. I take my medication, I know my diagnosis, I understand my trauma.

I understand my nervous system regulation, my patterns, and guess what? Life can still knock the absolute shit out of me because treatment does not make you immune to being human. Medication does not make you immune to disappointment, and therapy does not make you not fear things. Recovery does not mean you stop getting wounded. Healing does not mean that every outcome suddenly goes your way, and this is the part I've been wrestling with today.

Outcomes, things I cannot control. I am very good at action. Give me a problem, I can solve it. I will solve the hell out of it. Give me a crisis and I'm strangely calm.

Give me something to build, fix, research, fight, or protect, and I know exactly what to do. But uncertainty? Give me something I care deeply about and then tell me I have to wait? Tell me somebody else gets to make the decision? Tell me I did everything I could and now I have absolutely no control over what happens next?

That is where my body starts looking for a weapon, because control is not always about being controlling. Sometimes control is a trauma response. It is what happens when your brain learned very early that terrible things happen when you are powerless. Sometimes hypervigilance looks like responsibility. Anxiety disguises itself as preparation.

Obsessing over every possible outcome feels like problem solving, and we call it being proactive when what we're actually doing is desperately trying to outrun uncertainty. And here's the shitty part: you can do everything right and still not get the outcome you want. You can love somebody and they can still leave. You can apologize and they can still refuse to forgive you. You can get sober and some people will still remember you as a drunk.

You can change your entire life and somebody will still tell the story of who you used to be and define you by your worst moments. And you can build something extraordinary and watch someone misunderstand All of it. You can work harder than everyone around you and still lose the opportunity. You can take care of your body and still get sick. You can protect your children and still not be able to protect them from everything.

You can tell the truth and not be believed, and you can be a good person and still experience terrible things as a human. And that is terrifying. And I think a lot of mental health advice gets insulting right here. Just let it go. Choose peace.

Don't worry about things you can't control. Well, thank you. I'll alert my central nervous system immediately. Because if letting go were simply an intellectual decision, none of us would be struggling with it. The real work is not convincing yourself that you don't care.

The work is learning that you can care deeply And still survive the not knowing. Those are very different things. And I don't want to become detached from outcomes because I don't care. I want to become less controlled by outcomes because, uh, I trust myself. And that might be the biggest difference between the woman I was and the woman that I want to stay.

For most of my life, safety meant trying to predict what everybody else was going to do. What mood are they in? Who's leaving? Who's abandoning me? Who's angry?

Did I say something wrong? Replaying the conversation. What happens next? How do I stop it? How do I fix it?

How do I make sure the bad thing's not going to happen to me again and again and again? And that is exhausting. And eventually you realize that trying to control everyone else's behavior does not create safety. It creates Surveillance. You become the security camera of your own life, always scanning, calculating, waiting for impact.

And sometimes nothing is even happening. Your body just remembers what happened the last time. So what can we actually control? Not the cliché version. I don't want all that nonsense.

Not your attitude, because some mornings my attitude is shit. And frankly, sometimes that is an appropriate response to what is happening. What I can control is what I do next, not what I feel all the time, not the first thought that comes into my head, not whether my body gets activated, not whether somebody disappoints me, but what happens after that first wave hits. I can decide whether I send the text immediately. I can control whether I make a permanent decision during a temporary emotional state.

I can control whether I feed the thought or question it. I can isolate completely or tell somebody, hey, I've been having a really hard time. Whether I sleep before I decide on something, whether I eat something, take my medication, go outside, get off the internet, stop checking the numbers, uh, stop reading the message, stop replaying the conversation, stop trying to solve something that cannot be Solved tonight. I can control whether I ask myself one very important question: is there an action available to me right now? If the answer is yes, I take the action.

Make the call, set the boundary, go to the appointment, send the application, tell the truth, ask for help, document the problem, do the next right thing. And if the answer is no, then the work becomes tolerating the space between action and outcome. And that is the part nobody puts on a motivational poster. Sometimes healing looks like doing absolutely nothing because there is nothing left to do. Sometimes strength is refusing to interfere with an outcome you've already done everything you can to influence.

And sometimes regulation means saying, I have done what I can do today. I do not know what happens next. I am safe in this moment. Not tomorrow, not forever, this moment. That's one of the tools I use now.

I shrink time. When my brain starts catastrophizing 6 months from now, I ask, what is actually happening in the next 10 minutes? Usually the answer is much less terrifying. I'm sitting in my house talking to you. My feet are on the floor.

Nobody is yelling or attacking me. The email has been sent, the decision has not been made. There is nothing I need to solve in the next 10 minutes. That is reality. My brain may be somewhere else entirely, but reality is usually much smaller than the catastrophe my brain is making up.

Another thing I do is try to separate facts From prediction. Fact: something happened. Prediction: this will ruin everything. Fact: somebody hasn't responded. Prediction: they hate me, they're leaving me, I'm abandoned.

Fact: I lost an opportunity. Prediction: I'll never get another one. Fact: I'm struggling today. Prediction: I'm going backwards, I'm going to lose my mind. And they're not the same thing.

Mental illness can make predictions feel like facts. Trauma can make fear feel prophetic, and it isn't. And when I absolutely cannot get out of my head, go to my body. Cold water, feet on the ground, long exhale, a walk, music, nature, touch something real. Name 5 things in the room.

Not because these things magically fix your life— they freaking don't. They remind your body that your thoughts are happening inside a present moment. And the present moment is often very survivable. I spent a very long time believing stability meant I would eventually become a person who never struggled. I don't believe that anymore.

Stability is knowing what to do when I struggle, and that is different. And frankly, it is much more hopeful because I don't need life to stop being unpredictable. I don't need everybody to behave a certain way or have a certain outcome to, to come my way. I don't even need my brain to cooperate every single day. I need to know that when life gets dark, I have learned how to find myself in it.

And if you're struggling today, maybe that's enough for you too. You don't have to solve your entire life today or tonight. Find the next thing that's actually yours. Do that and let go. Put down everything that isn't.

And if you have to pick it back up tomorrow, you can. But for today, for tonight, your only job might be to just stay here and breathe. And sometimes staying is the bravest thing we can do.

Just stay. Rest as needed. One more try.

Maybe tomorrow.

What are you performing in order to survive or just get by?

And what might setting that role, mask, or performance down do to make your ride just a little bit easier?

I am your host, Lisa Lacey. When you find the answer to that, I'll see you at the edge.