Imagine you have two parents. One parent goes about encouraging you to make your own decisions but works at helping you find enough information to make your own best decisions whenever possible. The second parent goes about telling you what to decide, sometimes actually speaking for you and deciding for you after critiquing your own judgment.
One parent seeks to prepare you by influencing you. The other parent seeks to protect you by controlling you.
One parent gives you the right to be wrong. If you make a mistake, that parent helps you figure out what went wrong and how to correct that mistake. The other parent makes sure you never get it wrong, never get hurt, never make a mistake, and corrects your inevitable mistakes for you just in case.
Which parent loves you best?
I probably could not be more obvious in how I would answer my own question, but I’m not sure most parents are all of either type. Rather, most parents are some of both from time to time but typically more of one type than the other. More influential or more controlling.
In my book, “Love’s Resurrection: its power to roll away fear’s heaviest stone,” I confess to having lived out two different stories in my first 70 years of life. While living my fear story, I was driven to take more control over other people, places, and things. And the more control I tried taking, the less influence I ended up giving. The high price I paid for being in control was that it cost me any influence I’d hoped to have with other people, places, and things. Hence, I learned from that mistake to live instead out of my love story and to let go of my old narrative I called “fearful control.”
In the Bible’s New Testament we read in I John 4:18 these words, “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love” (ESV).
A different John, the late John Lennon of “The Beatles” fame, once posited that the two main forces in the universe were love and fear. I do not disagree. In my own experience, love has drawn me with a soft voice requesting that I give influence with others. Fear has driven me with a loud voice requiring that I take control over others. Love has challenged me to do the sometimes difficult work of influencing others. Fear has commanded me to do the always impossible work of controlling others.
So where did my fear come from in the first place? How did that fear story ever get told and why did I believe it for so many years of my life?
The first responder in our brains to any new experience in life works at doing two things: comparing and assuming. Our brain’s limbic system is tasked with our survival in the face of trauma, starting with the new experience of birth itself and the trauma of leaving a warm dark womb for a cold light delivery room, now having to breathe on one’s own. The Amygdala within that limbic system triggers a chain reaction, producing stress hormones that cause our heart to beat faster, our lungs to then expand, and we cry ourselves into survival. Next new experience occurs and our brain already has an old survival memory to draw from. A trauma comparison can now be made and an assumption drawn. We assume that survival requires crying. Worked once, should work again. And it does. We continue surviving. How? By crying. Why? Because crying is our way of gaining control over other people, places, and things.
For awhile.
But then what happens when that assumption of control breaks down and our survival seems threatened? Cry louder? Perhaps. But it is certain that more fear is triggered as we lose control over our surroundings and in due time others feel themselves losing control as well and begin their own cycle of fearful control in response to that crying infant. We’ve all been there. If not as parent, then at least as infant.
Implication being that I’m not the only one who has lived a fear story and learned fearful control as if by default, given the reality of our brain’s limbic system and survival instinct. Fight or flight for the purpose of gaining control is the story of our entire animal world and, on the human level, is basically our war story now playing out in places like Gaza in the middle east. Fearful control meets fearful control. No different than when a crying infant meets an abusive parent.
And then there is the political party conflict within these United States. Did someone say fearful control?
Fear stories often lead to war. Hurt people often hurt people. People losing control work extra hard and long to regain control. Fearful control triggers more fearful control until in the back and forth of it all, one easily forgets what even started it all in the first place. Political fear stories now endemic in our society are having the effect of losing all needed influence with the American people. As if perfect fear was now casting out all love instead of the other way around. As if by everyone taking control, no one is able to influence any actual solutions to our problems.
No, I don’t personally believe it’s as bad as all that, but I do believe from my professional perspectives as both pastor and psychotherapist that what some call “sin” and some call “mental illness” and what Jesus of Nazareth called demonic possession is really the same thing: fear. Fear demanding control. Faith in such fear leads us to place our doubt in love. Which takes us back to the initial question about the two opposite parents: which parent loves you best?
I’ve done enough family therapy over the last four decades or so to know that control-dominant parents doubt that influence-dominant parents can really get the job done. Hard parents doubt that soft parenting will actually work. Fear doubts that love is really powerful enough to work. To fear, love seems too good to be true. To the warrior, pacifism seems powerless. To anyone living out of a fear story, control is more powerful than influence. Demanding control is bigger and better than desiring influence. And so we remain in our sin and in our mental illness with our demon (Jesus might say) of faith in fear and doubt in love. Waiting for perfect love to finally cast out our fear.
Well, maybe you’ve noticed.
Maybe you’ve had a parent who lived more on the fear side of the line and took a more controlling and protecting part in your life. And another who was more on the side of loving influence, trying to prepare you to do the work of self-protection and self-determination. If not, maybe you know someone else who had such parents. And, if so, maybe you’ve also noticed that fearful control has a way of wearing itself out from eventual failure to do the impossible. What lasts is loving influence. Same as the power of the steady tortoise to win the race against the speedy hare, love outlasts and outlives. Fearful control ultimately dies out.
Love lives. "The wage of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life....." (Romans 6:23).
Which is why I’m putting my faith in the more loving political candidates and the less fearful ones in this election. Putting my faith in loving influence and my doubt in fearful control. Promises of control are always false promises. Promises to try and influence because of love for neighbor as self are the ones worth believing in.
It’s also why I continue to believe the promise of Jesus Christ as found within the Bible. The Bible is essentially a fear story (a story of sin by a people of fearful control) leading up to a love story (a story of salvation by the uncontrolling, crucified God of loving influence) empowered to outlast and outlive that initial fear story we’ve all lived along the way.
And it’s why control vs. influence really does matter……… perhaps more than anything else in the universe.
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