Control Issues A Drive for Predictability. Understanding life skills are key to walking out healthy sonship.
It is the orphan spirit that displays the fruit of broken life skills and hurtful behaviors. Sonship initially connects the heart to the Father’s love. It can’t stop there. A mark of sonship is proactivity to manage well the Fathers business entrusted to him.
Commonly, the control principle is motivated not so much by a drive to power as by a drive for predictability and safety. Beneath the power-oriented, manipulative behavior we usually see a frightened person. Spontaneity and surprise are threats within this system. Control in this case is characterized by manipulation rather than domination.
Given the fundamental unpredictability and insecurity of life, when the system is organized around controlling what cannot be controlled, many failures, stresses, and distortions of human experience are the side effects. Family members become overspecialized in their control-maintaining styles:
- One may be controlling by sickness
- another by being overly helpful
- by constant subject changes, another by cuteness and seduction
- by superior competence or super achievement
- by intellectualizing all experience
In this process people aren’t truly accountable for their behavior, no matter how “good” it may seem. The indirectness of these controlling techniques in effect puts them out of the reach of accountability. Who can take someone to task for being sick? How can you challenge someone who is only trying to be helpful?
Facing Shame, Fossum & Mason