What can you control in your life? Your health? What others think of you? How happy your lover is? The weather? Your finances? Your future? Your appearance? Your mood? Other people’s moods?

Can you control these things completely, or just influence them to some extent? Some folk feel that they should have 100% control, others that they have none at all.

When we feel powerless, we feel we can't control important elements of our lives.

We all need power, not necessarily over others but over our own lives, at least to some extent. But what happens when we don't feel we have control? What can go wrong within people, and in whole nations, when a sense of control has gone?

In this series on the Dark Side of Your Emotional Needs, I explore how meeting needs in damaging ways is at the heart of much human suffering, emotional disturbance and tyranny.

Catch up with the rest of this series so far here:
▶︎   • The Dark Side of Your Emotional Needs  

I'm pleased to say that my series on The Dark Side of Your Emotional Needs is now available as a book! Get it on Amazon here (search for 'Mark Tyrrell' on your Amazon store if you are based outside the UK):
▶︎https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dark-Side-Hu...

All references can be found here:
▶︎https://www.unk.com/blog/the-dark-sid...

00:00 Introduction: The Dark Side of Your Emotional Needs
00:27 What can you control in your life?
01:54 We all need some sense of control
02:49 We are hardwired to self-determine
03:32 A healthy dose of control
04:20 It's good for you to know you could exert control
05:31 The dark side of the need for control
06:22 Learned helplessness: learning not to control
07:19 The need for rebellion
08:45 'It's who you are!'
10:26 When the 'need' morphs into a 'greed' for control
12:24 Perilous perfectionism
14:07 When the need for control is not met healthily
15:20 When the 'you can do anything' idea becomes disempowering
16:53 Five simple steps to tyranny
18:16 How a scammer abuses the need for control
19:25 Watch out for the power play of life

Subscribe to my self-help channel for more videos like this @uncommon-knowledge

Practitioners: sign up for my weekly Clear Thinking newsletter here:
▶︎https://www.unk.com/blog/free-therapy...

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++About Mark Tyrrell++

Psychology is my passion. I've been a psychotherapist trainer since 1998, specializing in brief, solution focused approaches. I now teach practitioners all over the world via our online courses.

More about me here:
▶︎https://www.unk.com/blog/about-mark-t...

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