Imperfect Control Our Lifelong Struggles With Power and Surrender [Paperback]

In her remarkable national bestseller,Necessary Losses,Judith Viorst explored how we are shaped by the various losses we experience throughout our lives. Now, in her wise and perceptive new book,Imperfect Control,she shows us how our sense of self and all our important relationships are colored by our struggles over control: over wanting it and taking it, loving it and fearing it, and figuring out when the time has come to surrender it.
Writing with compassion, acute psychological insight, and a touch of her trademark humor, Viorst invites us to contemplate the limits and possibilities of our control. She shows us how our lives can be shaped by our actions and our choices. She reminds us, too, that we sometimes should choose to let go. And she encourages us to find our own best balance between power and surrender.Introduction
Control: The capacity to manage, master, dominate, exercise power over, regulate, influence, curb, suppress, or restrain.
Control is a rich and resonant word, a word that evokes strong feelings, a word that is familiar to the tongue, for it touches on lifelong concerns with power and helplessness, with freedom and limitations, with doing and being done to, with who's on top, with whether we see ourselves as someone who goes out and gets what we want or as someone who, for the most part, takes what we get. Control is a hard-edged word; it has -- at least it seems to have -- no poetry in it. It's something we want, need, seize, fear, lose, give up. In our feelings about our place in the world, in how we define ourselves, in our personal and professional relationships, we -- consciously or unconsciously, positively or negatively -- are constantly dealing with issues of control.
Do you think that control is always a negative concept? I'd like to persuade you of another view. Do you think that concerns with control do not apply to how you live or who you are? I'll argue that they apply both to me and to you. For whenl37