By Katia Del Rivero

A few days ago, I was talking with a young man whom I’ve learned to appreciate in the little time I’ve known him. To me, he is super-efficient, completely focused on work, and “controlling” everything is OK, excellent as a matter of fact. From my perspective, he’s got a huge heart, although it seems to me that at times, he doesn’t know it.
So, we were talking about the modeling of a bank that rented the first floor of the building he is in charge of, and he was telling me about all of this security systems: electronic backup, communication, and armor that they are making in order to prepare the corresponding branch. The quote he used to close his description was: “They leave nothing behind, not a single detail. They have everything, absolutely everything under control.” And I, in this impudence of mine, answered: “And yet, they’ve got no control at all.”
I felt such an endearment about his reaction, a worried look, and a little bit of abandonment, coming with: “Katia, whenever you or someone else says this, it hurts me to the core. How is it that I’ve done everything I could, everything, everything I should and was capable of doing for ensuring a result, I realized an excellent plan, and it’s not in my hands the certainty that it will happen in a certain way. It’s really challenging for me, it invites me to a frustration state.”
To this frustration state, that this good man describes, in the Blumenstein Theory® we call it “helplessness state”. It’s this feeling where I feel powerless facing what’s in front of me, and I can develop endless emotional states, from freezing to frustration, fear, and anger.
What Causes Abandonment
What causes this state? From my perspective, the great lie we’ve told ourselves as humans, to survive in an uncertain world: that we can control the world, and the people that live in it. And when we realize this is not true, usually we are not prepared for it, we don’t know how to generate alternatives, and we go into helplessness.
If you are “talking clearly”, you will make others do what you want. If you make an “infallible plan” you will be prepared. If “you do what’s right”, everything will turn out ok in the end. And in this way we are told the greatest lie in life, “you can make things happen”. Even if you speak clearly, you will not make others do as you say. Maybe, and just maybe you’ll increase your probabilities of being listened by others, and help them feel invited to build with you, and from that place he chooses for himself, what he believes you expect him to do. If you make an infallible plan. Oops!!! I laughed. There is no infallible plan. There will always be a possibility you can’t control and that could happen. When we talk about “infallible plans” we are really talking about plans where, in the best of cases, we’ve considered most of the contingencies with the highest risk of happening, and/or those that could cause a great impact, even though the possibilities are minimal. But it’s enough, and there’s no need to ask to those who survived the Thailand tsunami in 2004, or to those who lived last night heavy rains in Mexico City to confirm that “uncontrollable” happens.
Options to Help with Helplessness
If you do “what’s right”. What is right? For who? For what? Is it always right? How do we know something is right? “Everything will be OK.” What’s OK? According to who? We live in a world full of reality constructions that we take as “real, true, universal” and sell lies, or said in another way, or reality constructions as universal. Nothing more distanced from the truth, at least from a social systems perspective. If you haven’t stopped reading and have reached this point, it’s because maybe despite questioning some of the “truths” you believed, despite probably feeling some fear or helplessnes, you would like to know the options:
● The first one is admitting that we live in a world where control nothing, nor people, nor the nature we live in.
● The second one, is asking ourselves if this is true, what options do I have?
Michael Blumenstein offered a third alternative: sufficiency.
Living Uncertainty with Enoughness
What is enoughness? The certainty that I’ve got everything that is necessary to face life’s uncertainty of life and to live a good life.
In other words, learning to “sail confidently in the sea of uncertainty” knowing that we are pretty good sailors, that we can’t control the sea, but that we can react to the sea, and we have what it takes to do so.
How do we know this? How can we affirm this with so much certainty? Because this is what you’ve done up to now. What tells us this? You are alive, you are breathing, and to this point you’ve survived to everything life has put in front of you. Ergo, you’ve been enough for your own life.
The myth that we’ve built is that we can control life. What life seems to remember us, is that the challenge is not controlling it, is living it, and living it from our enoughness.
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