Confession of a Recovering Control Freak

 Hi, my name is Cris, and I’m a control freak.

And the room echoes back, “Hi Cris.”

Can I get an amen from all my fellow control freaks out there? Come on now, I know I’m not alone.

The funny thing is, my desire to control has never really been about controlling other people. I’ve never wanted to run everybody else’s life. Honestly, most days I can barely keep my own circus in order. What I’ve always wanted to control was my environment. My feelings. The chaos. I wanted to make the world feel safe and predictable.

But I think that makes sense when you grow up as the child of an addict.

When my dad was drinking, we never knew what version of life we were walking back into day to day. You learned to read the room before you ever walked into it. You learned to tiptoe. You learned to become “good.” You learned how to shrink yourself down into whatever version caused the least amount of damage.

So I did what a whole lot of kids from alcoholic homes do. I became compliant. Hypervigilant. A people pleaser before I was even old enough to know what that meant.

And somewhere along the line, I also learned to numb myself.

At first it was food. Food was comfort. Food was predictable. Food didn’t leave. But eventually food quit doing the job, and before I was even ten years old, I started sniffing inhalants. That opened up a whole new world for me because suddenly I discovered something magical: I could chemically control how I felt.

Or more accurately… what I didn’t feel.

And away we went.

The next thirty years of my life became one long dumpster fire of addiction, chaos, bad decisions, and trying desperately to outrun myself. Looking back now, it’s almost ironic. Had you looked at my life from the outside, you would have seen somebody completely out of control. But internally? I thought I was managing things just fine.

As long as I could escape my feelings, I thought I had life handled.

Eventually meth became my drug of choice, though honestly, asking an addict to pick a favorite substance is a little like asking somebody stranded at sea to pick their favorite life raft. By the end, my days usually looked something like this: meth to get going, opioids to level out, and alcohol to go to sleep at night.

And somehow I still thought I was the one in control.

Addiction like mine only ends a few ways. Prison. Death. Recovery. In my case, it took two of those to save my life.

In 2005, I got swept up in a federal drug bust. And as strange as this sounds, I thank God for it now. By then I was exhausted. Thirty years into addiction is a long time to be at war with yourself. I was ready for an off-ramp but couldn’t seem to find one on my own.

I honestly believe that arrest saved my life.

Not long after I landed in jail, I remember kneeling down on the dirty floor of my cell and finally admitting something I had spent decades trying to outrun: I was powerless. My life was unmanageable. Everything I had done to try to control my pain had only created more pain.

So right there on that nasty jail floor, I called out to Jesus.

Now mind you, this part still cracks me up a little because at the time I considered myself an agnostic. Mostly because I didn’t think I had enough faith to qualify as an atheist. But desperation has a way of stripping things down to the truth.

And the truth was, I needed help.

So I took my first shaky swing at surrender.

I told God that if He was real, I needed Him to restore me to sanity because I clearly was not doing a stellar job of running my own life.

Turns out, He’s been far more patient with me than I’ve ever been with myself.

These days, I’m a licensed clinical social worker with nearly two decades of experience helping other people navigate anxiety, trauma, addiction, grief, and all the complicated messiness that comes with being human. And if you had told the old version of me that this would someday become my life, I would have laughed directly in your face.

But grace has a funny way of rewriting stories.

One thing I want to make clear though is that my faith does not fit neatly inside the boxes people often try to hand me. I’m not especially interested in labels or culture wars or pretending I’ve got God all figured out. The God I met in my recovery has always been far more compassionate, merciful, and grace-filled than the versions many people try to sell.

The God of my journey has never seemed shocked by my humanity.

He has never recoiled from my anxiety.
Never demanded perfection before offering love.
Never waited for me to “get it together” first.

He met me right in the middle of my mess.

And honestly? I think He does the same thing for all of us.

These days I still catch myself trying to control everything sometimes. I still worry. I still overthink. I still occasionally try to wrestle life into submission like a raccoon fighting a garbage can behind a Waffle House.

Old habits die hard.

But recovery has taught me something beautiful: peace was never hiding inside control in the first place.

What I was actually looking for all along was grace.