At the whim of external forces
“Locus of control”. I first heard the term many years ago on a podcast while I sat in the car with my parents. It was one of those profound moments — I even remember the view as the podcast discussed the term; a mid-sized lake, red houses, mountains draped in Norway spruce. The term did not ring essential to me back then, but it made this sort of tingly sense. I somehow felt that it would become important later in my life. And indeed it did.
Locus of contrl is all about a state of mind. There are internal and external locus of control. If you have internal locus of control, you will attribute success to your own effort and abilities. If you have external locus of control, you attribute success to luck or fate. Psychological studies, the podcast explained, have shown that the most content, happy and successful people have a strong inner locus of control. They believe that if they put in the right amount of effort, they can get what they want, and if they fail, they believe they can correct it by working differently or trying harder. Those with an external locus of control, on the other hand, experience more anxiety and arbitrariness — they do not believe that it is in their power do anything about a situation.
The feeling of “powerlessness” is a complex feeling, yet I believe it is fundamental to explain good and bad functioning. By “bad functioning”, I mean feeling at loss, feeling down, feeling drained. Actually, it might be a good idea to list some indications of bad functioning:
1. You feel that people just take and take.
2. You have a hard time making decisions.
3. You procrastinate.
4. You are desperate for distractions.
5. You need and crave validation from others.
6. You dread saying no.
7. You fear being “revealed” or “exposed”.
8. You feel alienated.
These feelings belong together. Speaking from my own experience, they are all an indication that you have lost touch with yourself. When you feel unable to relate to yourself, it creates indecisiveness and lack of clarity and purpose. Feeling like a stranger to yourself, you desperately want others to see and validate you for who you are. Yet, feeling like a stranger to yourself, you fear there might be something fundamentally wrong with you, and you fear the exposure of this “wrongness”. To amend, you do not come clear about your wishes, but rather “people please”, hoping others will come to your rescue in turn. As this wish for validation is not clear to others at all, they do not fulfill your wish. You become increasingly drained and disappointed until you just feel alienated from the world.
What lies behind this spiral of bad functioning? Whenever I find myself caught in one of these spirals, I realize that one overarching feeling lies behind:
Feeling a deep sense of powerlessness.
That internal locus of control is not present in these spirals, and it creates a feeling of being at the whim of external forces. The trouble about this feeling is that external forces are sometimes in our favor, and sometimes they are not. The only thing that is certain, is that they are arbitrary. The universe is not rigged for anyone, and external forces might cushion, spoil, attack, abuse, teach or fool us. Things just happen. The good thing is that we can choose how to respond. And it can be very easy. Go outside, take a day off, call a friend, dance, go on an aimless train ride. Don’t wait for things to come to you. Other times, it might be hard to change. Quitting a job, for example, or ending a relationship. But the important thing to keep in mind, is that these are also actions that are within our grasp. We can do them, if we want to.
Simone de Beauvoir writes about immanence, and to me, this also reflects the feeling of powerlessness — though I believe it applies to all genders:
“In a way, the woman’s complete existence is a form of waiting, because it is trapped in the limbo of immanence and arbitrariness, and because her justification is always in the hands of another; she waits for men’s recognition and confirmation, she waits for love, she waits for her spouse’s or lover’s gratefulness and praise, she waits to find her reasons to live, her worth, her being.”
Feeling unable to do anything about a situation creates anxiety and inner turmoil. It fosters complaints, resentment, nervousness, underachievement, neediness and alienation. Getting out of this spiral is hard, and it has to be done over and over, but sometimes it might help to remember that in theory, you can do crazy things. You can do like Forrest Gump and start running until you do not feel like running anymore. Or do like Christopher McCandless (from “Into the Wild”), and leave home, family and education to live in close proximity with nature, in Alaska. Nothing really stops us, except perhaps pride, fear and responsibility.
Luckily, we do not actually have to be crazy, we just have to believe that we can be crazy. Inner locus of control is a state of mind. It’s about feeling powerful in your own life — not at the whim of external forces. As Eckhart Tolle wrote in the book “The Power of Now”:
“If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and you must choose now.”
Originally published at https://solveigbjrkholt.medium.com on April 24, 2021.
