I'm Natalie Lou in your listening to the baggage reclaim sessions.

Hello hello. How are you doing?

I'm back. It's been yeah, eight weeks since the last episode. I've been on my summer break and you know what?

The weather here in England was a bit of a washout, but never mind because I actually got to leave the country for the first time in 18 months to go a little bit across the water to my home city of Dublin in Ireland.

I was home for almost two weeks and I feel rebooted and rejuvenated.

It was so good to go back and I am raring to go. What am I going to be talking

about on this very first episode back? Well, I thought it was time to

dig into something that so many of us are familiar with, even if we don't want to admit it and it's really about our rather funny

our relationship with control now what got me really thinking about this is I talk about control in its various guises all the time.

If you engage in people pleasing, perfectionism, overthinking, overgiving, and over responsibility,

guess what? You try to control the uncontrollable. You have these habits as a way of trying to manage yourself

and to manage your environment and yes to sometimes influence and control the

feelings and behavior of others. If you find that you are trying to avoid certain things all the time,

you might not realize that the things that you do to try to avoid whatever it is are strategies for control.

And we tend to be uncomfortable with the term control because we immediately it where you're this controlling abusive person and I'm going to come

back to that later on in this episode, but actually many of us, most of us, probably all of us, have engaged in habits of control. I know that I have had issues with trying to control the

uncontrollable because it's what I learned to do in response to what was a

chaotic childhood at times. I learned to be afraid and I

never really learned where not to be. I learned that it was important to please

people, to avoid disappointment, to focus on trying to avoid abandonment, to try to

control all the elements around you so that you could try to feel safe and secure.

As we all eventually discover, the more that we try to control the

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