Psychologist Ellen Lange defines the illusion of control as: an expectancy of personal success that is inappropriately higher than the objective probability warrants.
The illusion of control is largely the result of familiarity. The mere exposure effect is when people mistake familiarity for comfort and a solution. So how does this tie into drug addiction, alcoholism, mental disorders, and families? Think about someone with a gambling addiction. The whole addiction is based on the illusion of control. The gambling addict has a tough go at turning things around because of this. Gambling is one of the few addictions where the person is actually in control of what they bet on, how much they bet, and, unlike other addictions, can actually get ahead temporarily with one pull of a lever or a strong hand of poker. What they can not control is that the house always wins, and even when they get ahead once in a while, they are still way behind. The focus is not on the totality of the losses, it is on the one finite win; sound familiar?
Families of loved ones with alcoholism, drug addiction, and mental health disorders are in a similar position mentally to a gambling addict, and this is why it is at least equally as difficult to help a family as it is to help an individual patient with a substance use or mental disorder. The family is like a gambling addict that thinks they are getting ahead, at times gets ahead, and only focuses on these small blips of success while being blinded to the previous destruction and setbacks. The gambling addict does not think they have a gambling problem; they think they have a financial problem. Like the family, their perception is maladaptive.
A family has cancelled an intervention or not moved forward because the loved one who needs help found a job, changed a routine, or merely promised to think about or actually go to treatment through a therapist, psychiatrist, or an outpatient clinic. The family knows there is a problem and thinks it is anything but what it is. Families also believe that the solution is entirely different than what it is. Families and the intended patient often focus on addressing symptoms or losses rather than on the behavioral causes of those symptoms or losses. Maladaptive thoughts largely explain why both sides remain on a hamster wheel.
Families often feel they have to be the ones to fix the problem, or feel they are the reason there is a problem, and are afraid to fix it or confront it. Whatever the problem, families and the intended patient take on an illusion of control. Both the family and the intended patient are trying to control an uncontrollable situation. Like the gambling addict, even when they think they are controlling every aspect of their bets, they can not control the odds. Mathematically, you will never get ahead in gambling, and clinically, families and their loved ones will not get better without professional help and guidance.
The illusion of control the family has, and like a gambling addict, is the belief that one incident can bring things back to normalcy. Families often believe they are one job, one arrest, one new significant other, one health membership, one speech from dad or an aunt or uncle in recovery, one moment of clarity, one more incident or thing away, etc., from turning things around and making the situation flush and whole again. The intended patient thinks the same way. They often feel they are one more day, one more drink, one more this, that, or the other, and they will stop, away from being ok. These dysfunctional beliefs are all an illusion of control and a psychological justification to continue because you tell yourself, you believe, you have a solution.
“The family and the intended patient always underestimate what they are up against and always overestimate their ability to fix the problems themselves. It is almost a textbook definition of the illusion of control; the expectancy is higher than the probability.”
Why Humans Default to Control When Things Feel Unsafe
The answer is simple: the control comes from familiarity, which provides comfort, as does routine, and sends the illusion of a solution. People do not like change or being moved off their square. People resist change, even when it is good, because it is unfamiliar and they see it as uncomfortable before they see its benefits. When someone or something attempts to pull people out of their routine, the human brain resists and pulls them back to familiar territory as an act of control.
“It is just like during the COVID-19 pandemic, when everyone ran out and bought toilet paper, even though it was not needed to help with symptoms of the virus. People did that to create an illusion of control in a flooded, maladaptive state.”
Families do the same thing when addiction and mental health tear through the home. Why would anyone with a sane or lucid mind allow things to be this way? Why would a family fight and question the professionals and believe themselves or their loved one with an addiction or mental disorder? The reason is that it is familiar, and doing an intervention would require an unknown change and relinquishing the control they think they have, which is nothing short of an illusion, an illusion of comfort, familiarity, and solution. Many families, instead of an intervention, suggest having them committed somewhere. Why? Control, control, control. It is not to say that a coercive intervention protocol is unwarranted at times; it does, however, need to meet specific criteria before being used. It should never be used as a first line of defense when it’s about you trying to control things and avoid facing your loved ones because of your secrets and family history.
Families find more comfort in staying in a situation they’re familiar with than in having someone come in and show them how a healthy change could improve it. Families do not want to hear where they’ve gone wrong, how they’ve compromised the outcome, or why it’s become this bad. Families and the intended patient find it difficult to surrender to something they can’t see and over which they have no control.
How Codependency and Enabling Grow Out of the Illusion of Control
Enabling benefits the enabler more than it does the intended patient. It actually does not benefit the person with a substance use or mental disorder at all. Enabling can be an instinct. It’s how most people would react to a loved one in need. Over time, enabling provides the enabler with comfort and benefit, and enabling becomes a comforting coping mechanism. Once the enabling becomes the normal, familiar routine, it takes on the illusion of control. The enabler believes they are helping and controlling the situation through the familiar act. The benefits of enabling include feeling needed, having a sense of purpose, believing you’re helping, and, for some, actually believing you are keeping your loved one alive in doing so. The benefits to the intended patient are… well, none.
The routine becomes so powerful, and the reward so strong, that the enabler cannot stop even after realizing it is not helping.
“Re-read that last sentence. It sounds exactly like someone using substances to find relief. Even after realizing it is not helping and making things worse, both the enabler and the intended patient find it almost impossible to stop.”
The need for familiarity and the illusion of comfort and solution it brings is almost parallel to the elusive feelings the addict or alcoholic gets from their substance use. By the time things are bad enough to seek intervention, the family resists change and often chooses to hold on to familiar behavioral patterns because they provide an illusion of comfort and control. It is like explaining to a person with an addiction or an alcoholic how destructive drugs and alcohol are after they are mentally and physically dependent.
Codependency brings the same familiar illusion as enabling. Codependency, like enabling, benefits the codependent more than it does the other person. The illusion of control that comes with codependency is that I feel better, they feel better, they feel worse, I feel worse. The question is not what the intended patient gets from the codependency; the question is what the codependent enabler gets from their behaviors.
“What benefit is so great that you are knowingly willing to sacrifice your adult child, spouse, or other loved one to serve your own maladaptive needs? You could ask the intended patient the same question. What benefit is so great that you are willing to go to this depth in life to achieve the delusional benefits that substance use and acting out mental disorder behavior bring?”
As stated earlier in this article, the enabler and codependent are like the gambling addict, thinking they are in control of all aspects of the bets and do not realize they are not in control of the odds or the outcomes, and never will be. However, much of the changes the codependent enabler makes has a profound impact on the behaviors and actions of the intended patient.
Al-Anon likes to tell its members that they cannot cure it, they did not cause it, and they cannot control it. The three C’s are true, with an asterisk on the control part. You may not be able to control the intended patient directly, despite your best efforts of codependent enabling, and you can make significant changes that will hold them accountable for their actions. The more comfort you provide and the more you try to exercise the illusion of control that includes codependent enabling, the more you disable your loved one’s willingness to want help or see the need to do something different. Furthermore, it is not about whether they want help or need it; it is about when they have to do something different. If the benefits of a behavior outweigh its consequences, the behavior does not change. Interventions work because of this textbook evidence-based fact. Waiting for them to want help while a codependent enabler provides comfort for their own benefit prevents the intended patient from having to seek help. The codependent enabler has full control over this change for themselves, and this change has a significant impact on the illusion of control your loved one has over you, and greatly increases their need to want help and help them realize they have to get help.
For both the loved one with a substance use or mental disorder and the family, there is one undisputable clinical equation needed to change behavior. The consequences must outweigh the benefits of the behavior, and enabling prevents this from being proved.
Consequences > Benefits
Dysfunctional Family Roles as Control Strategies
The family member with the substance use or mental disorder is not the only one with a dysfunctional illusion of control. The rest of the family adopts maladaptive behaviors to comfort themselves and balance out the dysfunction. Each family role is a coping mechanism to attract the primary enabler’s attention. How a family member dismantles works like this:
- The substance user creates chaos and drama, and the primary enabler reacts and puts the majority of their focus on the one “in trouble.”
- Hero takes on perfectionist characteristics and becomes an overachiever to attract attention from the enabler/intended patient relationship.
- Martyr becomes a victim of circumstances and worries more about what will happen to them if the person gets better or goes to treatment than if they do not.
- The Scapegoat acts out, seeking similar attention from the enabler by mimicking the intended patient’s behaviors.
- The Lost Child isolates. Not to be alone but to be found
- The Scapegoat puts on an illusion of family normalcy to present to the outside world
Not all of these roles are visible and will eventually form if they have not already. These roles are not diagnoses or labels; they are coping mechanisms acted out through an illusion of control to absorb the impact of what is happening to your family. As time passes, these roles become commonplace, and trying to change them is met with resistance. From a clinical perspective, the family system will fight, make excuses, and justify the maladaptive role behavior to keep the system from returning to health. It does this because of the illusion of control effect, and the mind wants to remain familiar even though the return to health would be an improvement.
Just like the substance user, change is not welcomed, because it is unfamiliar and control is lost. During this time, any change is perceived as a threat, even if it will bring bluer, sunnier skies.
“This clinical and psychological certainty, not a sales pitch, is why families think what we are saying is a sales pitch. They believe this because, as we try to provide a solution, the families’ brains feel we are trying to take away their familiarity, control, comfort, and sense of solution, and they see it as a pitch. The reality is, they are the ones selling us while fighting to hold on to their dysfunctional, lowered bar, homeostasis.”
Why Families Fear Closure More Than Chaos
Closure means change and adjustment. Closure means there is no more diversion. Closure means turning your attention inward and reflecting on your mistakes. Closure is about looking in the mirror. Closure means no more illusion of control or familiar territory. Closure means we could not fix this, and someone else can. Because of these things, chaos is more comfortable than closure, and it is familiar.
“There is no easy way out; the illusion of control allows the family to believe there is. Families must realize that, to help their loved one, they must set aside their maladaptive comfort and become uncomfortable as well. Your loved one should never be used as a psychological pawn to find maladaptive fulfillment within themselves, which is what the family is doing now, whether they believe it or not. If the fear of change is greater than the fear of staying the same, you will have a long, painful road to recovery.”
Most people, not all, gossip. They do so as a diversion. People immerse themselves in social media, looking at everyone else’s lives. When someone’s life appears better than others’, they talk negatively about them and downplay the situation to feel better about themselves. When someone is unwell, sadly, many people use that as a barometer and an illusion that they are doing better than that. This is how many unwell humans think. Agree with it or not, it is true. The loved one with substance use and mental disorders is a diversion from yourself. There is a benefit to the way things currently are, or you would not allow it to continue. You can argue all you want and complain about how much that last comment offended you, and it is true; if it were not true, then you would not be offended and certainly would not be allowing yourself and your loved one to live this way.
Closure takes away your psychological mental tennis match that you think you are in control of and will eventually win. If there is no closure, then all the maladaptive coping mechanisms you rely on and that have become your new normal can continue. In other words, you seek familiarity over the discomfort of change.
We are not here to offend you, guilt you, or shame you. As we will say over and over, you are not wrong, it is not your fault; it is what it is. Your family did not ask for this, and this is where you are and how you are acting and behaving. Many people in this situation would prefer not to hear the truth.
Why Letting Go of Control Is Harder for Families Than for the Loved One
I am not sure any professional has seen, witnessed, or experienced the depth of dysfunction or unwellness from a broken family system than an interventionist. At no other time will any professional see this dysfunction together and in full bloom. Speaking to the family members individually provides little insight into the unwellness compared to speaking with the family together. The family is by far and wide much more difficult than the person using substances. We have had professionals at the highest level work here and witness what we witness. Even they were taken aback, stating they never experienced this level of dysfunction with a family at any point in their careers. Personally, my education never prepared me for what I was to face with families. Sure, we learned the concepts, the roles, the theories, the behaviors, but never an explanation of what was to take place in the real world when a family is overwhelmed and overpowered by a loved one with addiction and mental disorders. Hopefully, you take away from the last sentence of this paragraph that this is not your family’s fault. We also hope that what you take away from this is that the intervention is not to be performed by someone who is not a professional interventionist. What you are going through is common and, in all likelihood, unavoidable. We have a solution, and you do not have to fight it.
On a numbers level, families are much more difficult. Just add up the number of people involved in your family who are involved in the decision or the intervention, and that is how many times harder a family is than the person with a substance use or mental disorder is to help. You have multiple personalities in a family, all affected differently, who have taken on maladaptive behaviors, roles, beliefs, and ideas. Families can be difficult to help because they do not realize how unwell they are, and are not using alcohol and drugs, or are not affected by mental disorders. On occasion, some family members may have problems, and, for the most part, are not nearly as bad off as the intended patient.
It is interesting how frequently we hear a family tell us their loved one is in denial, and the family is almost always in far greater denial than the intended patient; they don’t even know how or why they are doing what they are doing. Families often fight to let go of their illusion of control, unaware of what they are fighting about or why in the first place.
The Cost of Believing You Control the Outcome
The cost of the illusion of control can be far greater than financial loss. The illusion of control will eventually cost you your relationships, your family, your sanity, and your loved ones due to substance use or a mental disorder. The intended patient becomes almost sacrificial at this point. The family tries so hard to fix the addiction, mental health, and behavioral destruction with their loved one as they stay stuck in familiarity, unknowingly seeing what needs to change in the first place. Families fight the process so hard that it becomes overwhelmingly stressful and unhealthy. To a trained addiction and mental health intervention professional, it is commonplace. To an outsider, a family’s actions would make almost no sense.
At no time would a family react or take similar actions regarding any other medical condition. Very rarely would a family suggest their actions or strategies to an outsider facing the same struggles. The illusion of control is so powerful that it paralyzes people from making effective decisions.
“The illusion of control is not even control at all; it is maintenance. If you think about it, what the family is controlling is an attempt not to make the situation worse or better; they are controlling it to remain familiar. When it is familiar, it disguises itself as comfort and a solution.”
What Families Actually Have Control Over (And What They Don’t)
One of the most frequent taglines on our website states that an intervention is not about how to control the substance user; it’s about how to let go of believing you can. That is a nice way of saying to let go of your illusion of control over other family members and the intended patient.
People have control over themselves, not others. That said, much of what we do can influence others’ actions. An enabler controls whether they enable. Stopping or continuing enabling can and will greatly affect the outcomes for the person on the receiving end of the enabling. Whoever said you can lead a horse to water and can’t make it drink really did not think that all the way through. You can lead a horse to water, and you can make it drink. You just need patience and boundaries. You may not be able to control the horse, and if you build a fence high enough and strong enough and leave one large trough of water, the horse will drink at some point. Whether it wants to or not, it eventually has to; there is a difference.
You can change the environment that you have allowed that comforts the loved one with mental disorders or an alcohol or drug addiction. Your loved one with the addiction or disorders has manipulated you into what you think, feel, and believe. They, in fact, are controlling you. So, how do you fix this? Take back control of yourself and stop letting others lead you down a path that works for them and not for your family.
Here are the things you can control:
- Yourself
Here are the things you can’t control:
- Others
- The Past
- The Future
Here is what you can influence your loved one with alcoholism, drug addiction, and mental disorders to do when you know this and make healthy changes:
- Take accountability
- Allow the consequences to become greater than the benefits
- See and feel the bottom
- Move through the clinical stages of change (contemplation, preparation, action, and maintenance/growth)
- Realize how much they miss, need, and love their family despite what they say otherwise
- See that they have to get help and not just want help (having to get help and wanting help are two different things)
- Make healthy changes
- Seek treatment
- End the belief of betrayal
You’re probably waiting for your loved one to “Want Help”. Your loved one already wants help; that is one of the primary reasons they use drugs or alcohol and act out mental disorder behaviors, they do not like the way they feel. Healthy changes from a family can and will influence your loved one and move them towards a better way of living. They are not going to want help if they do not have to get help because the family is standing in the way, trying to control the situation in an unhealthy and ineffective way.
Why Family Surrender Must Come Before Loved Ones Change
In almost all cases, the intended patient is hurting those who love them the most. People who hurt others do so because they are hurting themselves. Sadly, the majority of those with a substance use or mental disorder take little to no accountability for their behaviors and consequences and blame the fallout on just about every other person, place, or thing. The primary blame is almost always directed toward the family. When we bring this up, many families retaliate and say, “Not our loved one, they never said that. Not everyone with a substance use or mental disorder will outwardly blame the family, although a majority of them do. For those who think your loved one is different, trust us, they’re there, they just have not said. The ones who do not verbalize it are just better manipulators and feel that, in saying that, they would lose the support they need to keep you providing them comfort to continue their addiction and their behaviors.
When a family surrenders first, they get a reboot, a do-over. The situation you are facing did not happen overnight, and it will not be repaired overnight.
“It is not the family’s fault that addiction and mental disorders happened, and it can be fixed.”
By doing an intervention, a family resets and changes everything they have done up to this point that is harming themselves and their loved one. The bigger message of an intervention is that we are all in this together, we all need help and healing, and we support you and each other in the healing process. It sends the message that you understand they are uncomfortable, and you are uncomfortable too. How can a family expect their loved one just to make an about-face, change everything, and enter treatment when the family can’t do that? What message are you sending to them? Think about that, by allowing things to continue or making attempts that fail utterly, what are you saying to them and yourselves? You are saying that we condone your behavior and ours. You are not betraying them by helping them; you are betraying them by not.
The family, with a professional, is the only one that can help, not because it is your fault, but because you have allowed them to believe that it is. Your loved one wants help, and they are using alcohol, drugs, mental disorder behavior, or destructive behavior as a solution. Why, because in most cases, they do not have to be. In other words, the consequences of their actions are not greater than the benefits of their choices. You may think it should be, and it isn’t, but why?
Because they are acting out to be saved, to be seen, to be heard, think about how much pain they are in that they are doing this to themselves. Have you ever thought for one second as to what benefit the alcohol, drugs, or behaviors are providing them that exceeds what they are doing to themselves and their lives? That is what they are up against, and you can’t possibly understand that or fix that for them. You need professional help, and without it, they will continue to self-medicate and self-destruct as you search for answers on what to do. As they do that, they are hurting you because they are hurting too, and they feel it is either your fault because you caused it, or it is your fault that you are not fixing it. Either way, it is not your fault, and the family can and must take the first step. We are called Family First Intervention for a reason. We help the family first, and then together we help your loved one in need.
Letting Go of the Illusion of Control Is the Starting Point for Real Help
One of the family’s biggest fears is harming the relationship between the family and the intended patient. As families explain how tumultuous things are between them and their loved one, they still try to convince themselves that they are worried about making things worse. The belief is anxiety and fear. To compensate, you enable, provide comfort, keep things familiar, and avoid confrontation. All of these strategies are an illusion of control. You are trying to control the situation this way and think that in doing so, you will not make it worse. It is getting worse, slowly. If families fell off the cliff from no problem at all to where they are today in one day, the immediate response would not be to do what they are doing now or what we state in this article. What is happening is addiction and mental health insidiously eating away at your family. You’re not controlling anything. Now, while you think you’re slowing things down for the better, what you’re slowing down is your loved one from asking for help or wanting help at all.
It is always interesting to work with a family of five or more people who live in fear and are paralyzed by one person who has no real power over anyone, not even themselves. How is a family losing to one person with no power other than manipulation? The answer is simple: the family allowed it to happen over time, and because it happened slowly, you immediately started adapting by slowly maladapting. The answer or solution is not to peel back slowly; it is to change swiftly. As we said earlier, if the change had been big enough from the beginning, you would not have let things get this bad. It is the same in reverse. You must shift swiftly and effectively, but why?. The answer is
“For a person with addiction, alcoholism, process addictions, and mental disorder, the definition of hitting bottom, taking accountability, and making a change is when things get worse faster than they can lower their standards, adjust, or find a new way to manipulate their way out of it.”
