psychology
April 19, 2024

Keep the mess

There is a beautiful sentence by Elke Heidenreich that means: "You do not live to leave a tidy flat."

Cornelia Borchers *, 51, often has to think about this sentence when she feels this inner turmoil again, which irritates her so much, but simply can not be controlled. And she drives her into the room of her 15-year-old daughter, Leonie, as soon as she leaves the apartment to "turn a garbage dump into a habitable room", as Cornelia Borchers calls it. She knows exactly how pointless and, above all, ungrateful it is to throw crumpled textiles into the laundry quilt every single day, dispose of disgusted half-decayed leftovers - especially since it takes two seconds for her daughter to come back home when she comes home. "I know it's pointless," she admits, "but disorder is for me the admission of weakness and neglect, it's like a loss of control, a feeling I just can not stand." So she clears up further. Because their need for order is greater than their frustration at not being able to control that need more confidently.

The 39-year-old branch manager Birgit Förster, on the other hand, finds the SMS avalanche, which she advises her husband on every business trip, completely normal. I just want to know what's going on, where's the problem? ", Says Birgit Förster, ignoring that her husband only responds very sporadically. Send another SMS instead.

Control may be better than confidence, but the word does not sound nice. "Ticket inspection", the conductor calls, and woe, you do not have a valid ticket. Then there is a juicy ticket. If you control, you slow down the fun, make life difficult for yourself and others.

"Kontrollettis" was despised in the living communities of the 1970s as the lewd inhabitants, who fussy-minded that everyone would really clean the toilet when it was his turn.

* all names changed by the editor

But control is first and foremost the need for security and order, we control when we are afraid that something important in life will slip away from us. The partner goes alien, the children go astray, the health or the workplace is lost to us. And although these fears are not always unjustified in an increasingly globalized and uncertain world, too much control slowly but surely crusts our lives. And sometimes it has to do with too much time, because working mothers or wives have more important things to do than to be behind their family or to spy on. "I have an 80-hour job and I can not afford to constantly control my family," laughs the 48-year-old Annette Thielemann, "so if my schwerstens pubertierende daughter is not available in the evening, then I just trust her Guardian Angel, that worked very well so far. "

Our experience has taught us how unpredictable life can be.

Control is rigidity and can make life ever smaller and more boring. For fear of illness we do not travel any more, for fear of disappointment we do not love anymore, for fear of the risk we live with mask and handbrake on. "Control is often an avoidance," says the Hamburg psychologist Oskar Holzberg, "I avoid confronting myself with my fear of loss .. Risk avoidance becomes a life-avoidance."

That's one side of the medal. The other is healthy caution, what psychologists call "self-care." We know what can go wrong, so let's take care. After all, we have experience. If a lot of mistakes have been made in the past, many have overlooked warning signals, trapped us in traps, we just do not want to be miscalculated again or deceived or hope for something that does not arrive.

Perfection arises because we become uncertain

Because the older we get, the more we know what is good for us and how the situations should be in which we feel well. Is not it our right to try, at least, to adapt to circumstances, not vice versa?

Of course, I learn from past mishaps and pack a sweater too much rather than too little because I froze in Mallorca last summer because it has been raining all the time. And anyone who once lay in bed in the tropics with a high fever can be vaccinated beforehand and will not leave without his medication kit.

Our horizon is no longer boundless, we no longer feel immortal. This makes us more careful than before and often more timid. Because our life experience has taught us how chaotic and totally unpredictable life can be.

There is no ultimate security, certainly not in love.

Therefore, we pay in various old-age provisions, so that we do not impoverish later, because it is not one of the few benefits of getting older, from experience to have become wise, at least a bit? Not to go outside with wet hair, because we catch cold? Would you prefer to be at the airport an hour early because we did not manage to fly anymore? The money for a new car but rather put into a pension fund, so we later our children are not on the bag? Would you rather stay with the man who does not make us happy, so that we are not alone in old age?

Of course, then there is the risk that we will not leave the house at some point, so we do not get on the road under the wheels.

44-year-old Bettina Schütte describes herself as a "crazy control freak" in terms of her health. Foresight was her favorite pastime. "Behind every jibe I feared a whole body cancer." In March of this year, her internist praised her values as a young girl. Three months later, her gynecologist diagnosed cervical cancer with her. "Luckily at a very early stage," says Bettina Schütte, "perhaps it was a sign of fate that I should not always think of myself."

Good experiences, bad experiences - that's life, but how we behave, that's all our choice. I can let the fear of cancer determine my life, or I can think "Inschallah, God willing" and just go on living. "Healthy is who has not been sufficiently examined," mocks the doctor and bestselling author Manfred Lütz, "sometimes you're afraid because behind this fear is a very different, before that life is insecure and unpredictable, but the mistake is that we believe we can create more security through more control. "

Control is actually fear

But there is no ultimate security, just a deceptive one. Especially not in love, because control does not eliminate the danger of fraud. The man whose cell phone I tap on suspicious SMS is therefore not faithful, only refined, savvy. And his love for me will certainly not increase my control.

In every attempt at control in a partnership, Holzberg believes that fear is "and I have to control it, I have to choose, do I want the truth, do I bear the truth, and does this increase my fear?" So do not build a diffused control network, but in doubt, hire a detective, he says.

We are tired of unpleasant surprises. Safety and reliability are often more important to us than excitement and unpredictability. "We need to be aware that control is only ever possible to a certain extent and in a manageable area," says Bernd Sprenger in his book "The Illusion of Perfect Control," a true insight, but one that does not always live.

Seeing life as a party.

For the more we lose control of much, the more vulnerable we feel, the more radical is our desire to control at least the small remainder. We would like to know today what tomorrow will be like. Because the counterforce to control, the controlless, the car of experiments, this "consciously go into uncertainty", as Holzberg calls it, often seems too dangerous.

There is still much that eludes our influence. Marion Mueller-Mey, 52, is no longer driving a car since she had caused an accident, "although he went out lightly". Recently she was hit by a drunken cyclist on the way home. "Somehow that freed me," she says, "now I'm driving again, I just can not drive my whole life."

"The willingness to trust does not mean to seek even more security, but, conversely, is to endure insecurity," said sociologist Nikolas Luhmann, "instead of weighing all information rationally, we should follow more intuition."

We still want to capture everything. Children, friendships, health, the workplace. We start collecting, saving, sorting. It is the fear of transience, because what we throw away, give away or give away, does not come back, can not be brought back - the world is changing before our eyes - that is wonderful, but also painful. Nothing should happen, which must not happen. But children move to the other end of the world, men do not call, or they leave us, jobs are rationalized, everything is in flux, nothing is for eternity.

"It's about the tricky art," says Bernd Sprenger, "to connect things with each other instead of opposing them: control and trust, logical thinking and intuition, planning and action, we need both poles to live well. "

So - control is good, but a bit of chaos in life does not hurt either. Let's just try to see life as a party where we can control the menu, lighting and guest list, but not the mood. If we do that, it's gone.

Cornelia Borchers has taken the first step. When her daughter left, she did not enter her room. "It was hard at first," she says, "but then total liberation."