When we love and care about someone, it is natural to want to help them—in fact, that is a part of love. We tell them they matter to us, offer kind words, give gifts, show up, listen, make dinner, sit beside them when things are hard. Love takes many forms, and much of what makes life worthwhile comes from these ordinary acts of caring.
We also want to protect the people we love from suffering, to help them avoid the bad relationship, terrible decisions, and mistakes we can see coming. We want to guide them through difficult choices so they can avoid bad outcomes, and help when they get into a jam. When someone matters to us, we want good things for them.
We Cannot Control Others
But in wanting good things for someone, we sometimes forget that we cannot control other people. We know that everyone has their own mind, their own desires, their own fears, and makes their own choices. And yet we forget.
Or perhaps more accurately, when someone we love makes a choice that frightens us, our urge to protect them makes us act as though this isn't true. We try to persuade, explain, or warn. We make the argument one more time, send articles, and offer solutions. We try a different approach, and then another. We become more forceful when being gentle does not work. We may even begin to believe that if we could just find the right words, the right consequence, or the right way of presenting the problem, we could get the other person to make the decision we think they should make.
Sometimes this looks like helping—sometimes it is helping. But underneath it is also often an attempt to control something we cannot control. This is easy to see in parenting. When our children are young, we have an enormous amount of responsibility for what happens to them. We decide what they eat, where they go, when they go to bed, whether they wear a helmet, who they spend time with. We protect them because they cannot yet protect themselves.
But even a toddler makes it clear that responsibility is not the same as control. We can tell a two-year-old what to do, explain why, offer rewards, set limits, and insist. And still, sometimes, the answer is no. We can influence their behavior, but we cannot reach inside another person's mind and change it.
As our children grow, our ability to direct their choices diminishes, but the desire to protect them remains. We see a decision that seems certain to cause pain and want to step in. We might know we cannot simply make them choose differently, and yet we try. We probably never had as much control as we imagined. We had responsibility, influence, and opportunities to guide them. We could create conditions that made some choices more likely than others. But our children are separate people, with minds and wills of their own.
Parenting makes this especially visible, but the same has always been true of everyone we love. We see a partner drinking too much, a friend staying in a relationship that seems to be hurting them, a sibling avoiding a problem that needs to be addressed. We see someone making the same mistake again, refusing help, and we want to do something.
This desire comes from love, but there is another layer to it: it is painful to watch someone we love suffer. Their decisions frighten us. We worry about their health, their relationships, their future. Sometimes we fear something much worse: that their choices will eventually cause us to lose them.
The higher the stakes…
The higher the stakes, the stronger our desire to step in and try to control things. We do not want to look directly at the possibility of bad things happening to people we love. We may tell ourselves that we are trying to help, and we are. But part of us is also trying to make the possibility of bad things happening go away, to push away the uncertainty inherent in life. If they would just stop drinking, leave the relationship, go to treatment, listen to us, make the decision we know they need to make, then everything would be okay—except that we do not actually have the power to make any of those things happen.
And sometimes the stakes really are high. The danger we see is real. Our warnings may be justified, our persistence may matter, and our efforts may help someone avoid a terrible outcome. But even when we are right about the danger, we cannot guarantee what happens next. That is the part we struggle to accept. We want to believe that if we care enough, try hard enough, and find the right approach, we can keep the people we love safe. It is seductive lie.
No one else can live our life for us, and the reverse is true, too: we cannot live someone else's life for them. We cannot control whether someone we love drinks tonight, leaves a harmful relationship, goes to treatment, takes our advice, or makes the decision we believe is best.
We can influence people and support them. We can make things easier or harder. We can tell the truth. We can offer our experience. We can love fiercely. But this leaves us with a much smaller, and more realistic, sphere of control: our own actions.
Happens in my day job too
I see this in my work as a doctor. I explain the risks, offer treatment, make recommendations, encourage change, and intervene where I can. But I cannot make someone take medication, stop using a substance, leave an unhealthy situation, or follow through on the plan—regardless of how confident I am that it will help. And sometimes, despite everything I do, the outcome I fear happens anyway. Medicine makes this limit of control impossible to ignore.
This does not mean that everything that happens to us is our own fault. Our lives are shaped by genes, biology, other people, our families, our communities, trauma, luck, money, opportunity, and circumstances we did not choose. These things matter enormously. Saying that we have control over ourselves is not the same as saying that we have complete control over our lives. It means that, amid all the forces acting on us, our own actions are still the part we can most directly choose.
We can decide whether we speak honestly or remain silent, whether we listen or lecture, whether we offer help or withhold it. We can decide whether we keep making the same argument or let the other person know that we are there when they are ready. We can set boundaries. We can choose how we respond to fear—with anger, manipulation, withdrawal, or compassion.
This sounds simple, because it is. But it is not easy, and because it is not easy, we often need to be reminded of it. When someone we love is making a choice that scares us, we do not want to accept that we cannot control the outcome. We want to fix it, to save them, to believe that our love can protect them from the consequences of their choices. Sometimes we confuse our inability to control someone with a failure to love them enough.
The Courage to Love
But part of loving another person is seeing clearly that they are not ours to control. We can still care, help, speak honestly, and set boundaries. We can do what we believe is right, even when it is difficult. We can keep showing up. But we have to do these things without pretending that we control the destination.
This is part of what makes love so frightening. We open our hearts to another person without knowing how their story will unfold. They may make choices that hurt them. They may suffer in ways we cannot prevent. We may lose them, despite everything we do to keep them safe. The more we love someone, the more there is to lose. And that reality is scary.
And yet we continue to love. We show up, we care, we try to help. Not because we know how the story will end, but because the person matters to us now. We cannot make love safe by controlling what happens to the people we love. We can only choose to love them without that guarantee.
Love,
Doc
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