How to Help Your Clients Feel More in Control

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“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”

– from the Serenity Prayer

Other than trying to tell God what to do and thereby trying to exert too much control, I think these lines from the Serenity Prayer tell us something important. I guess it was more of a plea than a directive!

Apparently during the Covid pandemic, Americans bought many more guns than usual. Clearly they couldn’t shoot the virus, and presumably they didn’t believe they could.

Maybe some really believed society was breaking down, and with it law and order. But I suspect at least part of why this happened was due to the central human need for a sense of doing something.

To feel like you’re doing something is, at least, something! Same with toilet paper. We weren’t going to stand arm in arm fighting that plague armed only with rolls and sheets of the bathroom… but at least it was doing something.

Feeling helpless leads to feeling hopeless, and feeling hopeless makes us depressed and afraid.

But of course, feeling unable to influence or control events or ourselves isn’t necessarily the same as genuinely not having agency or influence over our own life. I’ve written about learned helplessness here.

How much control someone feels they have can be characterized as their ‘locus of control’, which means the extent to which they believe they, as opposed to external factors, control outcomes in their life.

You can download a free locus of control worksheet to use with your clients here.

So first off, it’s important to get a sense of just how much control your client feels they have or should have. People who overemphasize how much of their own and other people’s lives they should be controlling tend to feel guilty a lot of the time and steal too much of the ‘blame pie‘.

Control: More or less

When people feel reasonably able to control, or at least positively influence, events, they avoid both unrealistic opposite extremes of feeling either that they have to control everything and everyone, as with the control freak, or, at the other extreme, that they can control nothing, as with very low self-esteem.

When the need for control becomes a greed for control or when we are desperate to feel some autonomy in life, humanity can be taken down all kinds of dark and dangerous paths.

Feeling in control, particularly feeling in control of ourselves when externally things are out of control, is central to good mental health.

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Research from the University of Cambridge shows that individuals who feel a sense of control over their lives and have a clear sense of purpose and meaning tend to be less prone to anxiety disorders, even during very challenging periods.¹ A sense of control has also been shown to have positive effects on physical, behavioural, and psychosocial health.²

Your clients, like everyone else, have the fundamental need for a sense of control and autonomy. So how might we help them develop that quickly in order to strengthen their mental health?

One: Distinguish between what can and can’t be controlled

Clients often suffer not just because of what’s happening, but because they are trying, unsuccessfully, to control the uncontrollable.

They may try to:

Control other people’s reactions
Eliminate all uncertainty
Prevent uncomfortable emotions
Rewrite the past.

This is a losing game. One of the most powerful interventions we can make for our clients is to help them separate:

What is within their control
What is influenceable
What must be accepted.

You might ask: “Of all the things troubling you right now, which parts are actually within your power to change, even slightly?”

Even this question can be therapeutic. It reduces overwhelm and redirects effort towards areas where it can actually make a difference.

A simple exercise

You might give your client a simple locus of control exercise: to draw three circles, entitled ‘Control’, ‘Influence’, and ‘Accept’; then divide their current concerns among them.

Clients often discover they’ve been investing 80% of their emotional energy into the concerns in the ‘Accept’ circle, believing they belonged in the ‘Control’ circle.

Conversely, they may realize that things they assumed were completely beyond their influence are in fact able to be influenced to some extent.

We can remind our clients that for things they have to accept, they can still influence and have some control over the way they respond to those parts of life.

Next, we need to get specific.

Two: Focus on the next action, not the whole life

When life feels out of control, clients tend to think in vast, unmanageable terms:

“I need to fix my career.”
“I have to sort out/save my relationship.”
“I need to become super confident.”

These are not actionable goals, they’re abstractions. Or, as therapists might say, ‘nominalizations.’ A nominalization is a word that is non-specific but sounds meaningful (politicians use them all the time!).

The more abstracted the client has made the problem (or challenge/goal), the less control they feel.

“I just want to be happy!” is an abstraction because ‘happy’ is a nominalization. It means different things to different people and needs unpacking.

Having some big, vague goal actually takes away a sense of control. The ‘field’ of desired action is too big, too generalized. Your job is to shrink the field by getting specific.

Instead of “How do I fix my (whole) life?”, shift to “What is the very next useful action I could take?”

This might be:

Sending one email
Going for a 10-minute walk
Saying one honest sentence to someone they find it hard to be authentic with
Writing down three options for what they might do at the weekend.

Small actions restore agency because they are doable. And doing, even something tiny, interrupts helplessness.

You can reinforce this by highlighting progress explicitly: “Notice what you just did there: You identified an action and followed through. You took control.”

Control is not a grand feeling. It’s built from small, repeated experiences of “I can act” or “I can speak”.

Three: Reframe emotional experience as something that can be influenced

Many clients feel controlled by their emotions:

“My anxiety won’t let me…”
“I can’t help how I feel.”
“It just takes over.”

While emotions can be intense and automatic, the belief that they are completely uncontrollable deepens helplessness.

When our feelings run riot and we feel we have no influence on when or how we emote, our sense of control shrivels. It can be a real epiphany for clients when we help show them they can, to a greater extent than they imagined, influence their own feelings.

We don’t want to invalidate their experience, but we can expand it.

A useful shift is from “I must control my emotions” to “I can influence my emotional state.”

You might explore:

How sleep, movement, and environment affect mood
How attention (what we focus on) changes emotional intensity
How breathing or pacing can reduce physiological arousal.

Ask exception questions, such as “Have there been times, even briefly, when the feeling lifted or changed?”

This gently introduces variability, and where there is variability, there is influence.

Another powerful technique is helping clients externalize the emotion:

“What does your anxiety want you to believe right now?”
“If that feeling had a voice, what would it be saying?”
“Can we think of ways you can begin to stand up to that anger when it tries to make you do what you don’t want to do?”

This creates space between the client and the emotion, space in which choice and agency can emerge.

Four: Strengthen decision-making muscles (even in low-stakes situations)

A reduced sense of control often shows up as indecision. Clients may:

Overthink choices
Seek constant reassurance
Avoid decisions altogether.

The habit of indecision steals a sense. of control. from us. So help your client reclaim a sense that they have options.

One of my very first clients couldn’t decide whether to leave his (largely, it seemed, happy) marriage. In the end, he wanted me to make the decision for him.

This kind of stuckness is common when one or all parts of life seem out of control. If we feel whatever we decide will be wrong then, of course, making decisions will be scary.

But decision-making is like a muscle, it strengthens with use. And importantly, it doesn’t need to start with big decisions.

Encourage clients to practise making small, low-stakes decisions quickly:

What to eat
What to wear
What task to do first.

You might set a rule: “For the next week, make small decisions within 30 seconds – no overthinking.”

This does two things:

It builds tolerance for uncertainty.
It reinforces the experience of choosing and moving forward.

Then, in session, reflect: “What was it like to decide and just go with it?”

Clients often report a surprising sense of relief. And over time, this generalizes to larger areas of life. The message becomes: “I may not get every decision right – but I can decide.”

And that is deeply empowering.

But ultimately we want our client to update their self-image as not some object in the world that is just acted upon, left entirely to the whims of chance, fate, and other people, but as an active entity in its own right.

Five: Help them rewrite their story of passivity

Many clients carry an implicit narrative:

“Things happen to me.”
“I always end up stuck.”
“I’m just not that kind of person.”

These are not just thoughts; they are identity-level conclusions. And identity shapes behaviour.

Part of restoring control involves gently challenging and updating these narratives.

You might ask:

“Can you think of a time you handled something better than expected?”
“Where in your life do you already show agency?”
“What would someone who knows you well say about your strengths?”

Even small examples matter.

Then help them link past agency to present possibility:

“So there are times when you have taken control of a situation. What made that possible then?”

If you’re skilled in therapeutic hypnosis, you can amplify this by having them revisit and relive the feelings of having more autonomy, and linking those feelings to the present and future.

When you do this, you’re building a more balanced self-concept for your clients. Not “I’m powerless” but “Sometimes I struggle… and sometimes I act effectively, and what I do makes all the difference!”

That shift opens the door to change.

It’s worth remembering, and reminding clients, that no one has total control over life. We’re not supposed to be controlling everything.

I actually made that point to a client once, and they were blown away. He said later that he kept calling those words (which were, after all, just articulating a simple truth) to mind whenever he felt he was losing control of something. He would ask himself:

“Am I actually supposed to be controlling this?”

We can help our clients distinguish between control and (potential) influence. We can maybe influence whether someone likes us or appreciates us or gives us the job. There may be things we can do to tip things toward the outcome we desire, but we certainly can’t control these things unless we are a god.

So there may be a kind of – whisper it! – hubris in feeling we must be controlling all and everything, just as there is a self-diminishment in believing we can control or influence nothing.

Uncertainty, loss, and unpredictability are part of being human.

Psychological wellbeing doesn’t require total control. It requires:

A sense of influence where influence is possible
Acceptance where it isn’t, and
An ability to act meaningfully despite uncertainty.

When clients begin to feel that “I can do something here”, even if that “something” is small, their world changes.

Our role is not to give them control over everything. It’s to help them rediscover the control they already have and learn how to use it.

When clients begin to feel that 'I can do something here', even if that something is small, their world changes. Our role is not to give them control over everything. It's to help them rediscover the control they already have, and use it. Click to Tweet

How to Treat Helplessness in Depression

Do you work with clients whose sense of helplessness has tipped into depression? The How to Lift Depression Fast Course equips you with an evidence-based approach to help clients shift out of depression quickly and effectively. Explore the How to Lift Depression Fast Course.

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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.

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