I found a fascinating article in Scientific American; a study was done showing that when people feel helpless they become more superstitious:

Feelings of control are essential for our well-being — we think clearer and make better decisions when we feel we are in control. Lacking control is highly aversive, so we instinctively seek out patterns to regain control — even if those patterns are illusory.

Apparently, any event which makes us feel helpless, from getting lost to getting fired, will increase our urge to seek patterns and explanations, to regain control by “making sense” of our situation.

And we easily stretch to the point where we’re imagining or inventing “solutions” or “explanations” or “meanings” that aren’t really there.

I immediately thought of relationship dynamics. There’s nothing like a confused, angst-filled, chaotic love relationship to make us feel helpless, our hearts and lives spinning out of control.

It occurred to me that this strong urge to regain control by inventing meaning must surely play out in the ways we process painful relationships:

• We may turn our pain and loneliness into art (poems, songs, etc.).
• We may create fantasies about the relationship or imagine we are living out a fairy tale.
• We may mystify the relationship, imagine there is deep or profound meaning to the pain which makes the suffering worthwhile.
• We may theorize about the other person in ways that make us appear in-control by comparison. (It’s he who is damaged, lost, confused, etc. — not me!)
• We may over-simplify our mental image of the other person in an effort to “get a handle on them,” and thereby lose sight of their dimensions and complexities.
• We may keep tabs (spying, Googling, gossiping, etc.); staying informed makes us feel more in control of what’s going on (even if the relationship is over and “what’s going on” doesn’t matter anymore).
• We may philosophize our helplessness (“it wasn’t meant to be,” “timing is everything,” etc.).
• We may do destructive things to them  (stalking, sabotaging, destroying property, or worse!)
• We may harm ourselves (substance abuse, self-harm, self-neglect, etc.) as a way to attract attention, or as a way to feel in control of pain. (Self-inflicted pain might be preferable to pain we can’t control.)
• We may generalize too broadly (“men can’t be trusted,” “women are too needy,” etc.) as we attempt to draw lessons from our painful experience.

Can you think of other ways in which we might try to imagine our way back into control when a relationship throws us into emotional chaos?

Photo: “Roses in the Dark (Finding Magic Where You Need It),” taken at LisSurMer

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    Last reviewed: 11 Mar 2010