There was once a Twitter meme that was "single sentences that change your life completely immediately upon reading them."
For me it's this sentence that appeared somewhere in a Dialectical Behavior Therapy worksheet or handout. I found PDFs of these handouts and searched and searched and couldn't find it.
But I remember this sentence so clearly because it really did change my life completely upon reading it. It was in a list of items with check boxes next to them. They were all things to try when you feel distressed in some particular way. I don't remember. What I remember just seeing
🔲 Have you considered that you fundamentally cannot control other people?
And I remember just staring at it dumb founded and thinking about it. I remember having a cascading series of epiphanies about all the ways that without knowing it I had been seeing my life and actions through a lens by which somehow all of the decisions made by other people were an effect of the decisions that I made and thinking that if I only made the right decisions I could control other people and get what I wanted from them and if I didn't get what I wanted it was because I had failed to do and say the right things that would have made them feel and do the things that I was hoping for. As if I was living in a visual novel and just needed to choose the right branching paths that result in the ending I wanted.
And then I considered that I fundamentally cannot control other people. No matter what I do or say, other people will always be separate entities whose lives do not revolve around me. They will feel however they're going to feel and I can't make them feel a specific way by doing all the right things. And no matter what I do, they will always have the free agency and autonomy to decide to do something unexpected or undesirable and nothing I could do would change their mind or prevent them from doing it.
Their actions, feelings, and decisions are outside of my control. I fundamentally cannot control other people. It's just simply not possible to do at a fundamental level. I can try and try and try. I could be a master of manipulation and social steering. Yet still, other people would always be uncontrolled variables. Every single person in the entire world no matter how important they were to me could still, at any time, decide to leave me. And then they could leave. And there's nothing I could ever possibly do to prevent that. That's something they can always decide to do. Whether I like that or not doesn't change if they decide to do it. I fundamentally cannot control other people. I cannot prevent them from leaving me. I cannot make them love me or care about me. Their actions, feelings, and decisions are not determined by mine. They are not NPCs.
And in realizing all of that, I also had the second epiphany that the fact that this is a revelation meant that I had been trying to control other people. I had been manipulative! I had been trying to steer situations to result in the outcomes I wanted. I had been trying to do things to prevent people from leaving me. I had been trying to do things to make people love me. I had been viewing other people as NPCs in a visual novel whose affection bars I could max out if I only made the right dialogue choices. I had never thought that this was what I had been doing before. I was never intentionally scheming or trying to manipulate people. I never was trying to lie or cheat. But my entire thought process for making decisions was built in a fundamentally manipulative way because I was thinking that my decisions and actions were what determined other people's feelings, decisions, and actions. I wasn't conceiving of other people's decisions as something that could happen independently of mine. The only reason someone would ever leave me would be because I had failed to choose the right dialogue options that would have prevented that. That might not sound like horrible narcissistic manipulation but it's still actually a manipulation and control oriented way of thinking.
I sat there, and blinked. And I read the sentence again. And I checked off the box with my pencil.
✅ Have you considered that you fundamentally cannot control other people?