August 23, 2021
It can be a hard Truth for most to accept at first, but it’s true regardless:
You cannot control other people.
Control is such a human instinct. We humans want to control as much as possible within our lives. This makes us feel safe and secure. It makes us feel autonomous and sovereign.
There is nothing inherently wrong with this. There are many things in your life that are definitely under your direct control. The problem comes when we try to control too much. If this goes on for long enough, everything eventually seems to fall apart. Why? Because not everything that we try to control can be controlled. And this is especially true when trying to control other people.
I think we all intuitively know on some level that we cannot control other people, but still subconsciously try sometimes, whether that be through heavily influencing them, or outright telling them what to do (and then getting mad and flustered when they don’t obey), or in some rare cases actually using physical force. In the end, none of it works because you cannot control other people.
Generally speaking, one type of people who I see most often trying to control other people—whether intentionally or not—are recently Deconverted Men.
These guys, especially if they are angry and bitter for being duped by religion for so long, will spend quite a lot of time engaging with people (usually online) who are still in the belief system that they’ve left—usually fundamentalist Christianity. They’ll throw science and history at them, criticize their faith-based statements presented as fact, and overall just hammer them any way they can.
It’s like a concentrated attack on an old shadow of who the recently Deconverted Man used to be. Because it wasn’t too long ago when he believed the same things as the people he’s now criticizing.
If you fall into this category, you might say you’re merely trying to educate and influence believers to the new information that set you free. To which I say… are you? When someone goes out of their way and spends their valuable time harshly “influencing” strangers on the internet, that seems more like an attempt at control. Influence, as I’ve said before, is best done by doing the opposite of what you’re doing.
Here’s another aspect that a lot of people miss, but is also true. You don’t have the right to control someone else. Even if you’re genuinely trying to help them and your facts, information, and beliefs will objectively 100% improve their life, you still will never have the right to force another person to adopt those beliefs and begin living according to them. And that’s a good thing because it also works in reverse: other people will never have the right to force you to live in accordance to their beliefs and standards either.
This inability to control others can sometimes be a struggle for those who’ve recently deconverted because it can feel like you’re helping as you try to drag people alongside you away from your old belief system. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t work that way. Faith deconstruction is a highly individual process and no two deconversion stories are the same.
Here’s something else to consider. Say, for a moment, that you could control someone else. You found a magic genie who granted you a wish to instantly deconvert a person of your choosing from their fundamentalist religion. They then instantly believe exactly like you. Does it mean anything? The person who you wished to deconvert didn’t make a choice. They didn’t choose or consent to change their beliefs and lifestyle. You just asked a genie to do it for them. You revised their life and brain according to your liking. Does that feel good? Does that feel real? Does that feel like the other person made any progress or developed at all?
This struggle becomes most apparent when those closest to you just aren’t making the same choices as you. Here are some examples:
- You can’t make your religious family accept your new beliefs.
- You can’t make your wife deconvert.
- You can’t make your kids stop going to church.
- You can’t make your still-believing friends understand your new point of view.
- You can’t make Christians on the internet stop believing or going to church.
Trying to do these things will make you unnecessarily unhappy. Kind of like how you feel unhappy when you try and fail at anything else in life.
Ultimately, accepting that you cannot control anyone is freeing. It means you only really have to focus on you and what you can control. Everything else you can let go of, even though it may be challenging to do so.
One of the most valuable lessons that you can learn in life is to let go of that which you cannot control. Once you’ve tuned your awareness to a point in which you can do this, it feels like a massive burden is lifted off your chest. It can be scary at first, but you eventually come to realize that all those things (and people) that you tried to control because you feared you would get hurt if you didn’t control them… don’t actually hurt you at all. Rather, they just drift out of your life like a passing breeze.
When your focus turns inward and you only concern yourself with what you yourself can control (which is you and the aspects of your own life) you are much happier and much freer. And those two things are, in my opinion, the primary goals for a recently Deconverted Man breaking free of the trap of fundamentalist religion.