Most of us became control people for a reason. Somewhere along the way, staying in charge of the details felt like the only way to keep things from completely unraveling. And honestly? For a season, it worked. Or at least it felt like it did.
But solo parenting has a way of exposing the limits of that strategy. The more you carry alone, the harder it gets to loosen your grip on anything. And before long, control stops being a tool and starts being the thing that’s quietly costing you your peace.
Robert Beeson, Founder and CEO of Solo Parent, and Elizabeth Cole, single parent and co-host, bring that tension into the open in this episode, joined by Amber Fuller, a counselor with a Master’s in Marriage and Family Therapy (MMFT) and single parent. Together they unpack what is actually underneath the urge to control, what it takes to live with uncertainty without completely checking out, and how to tell the difference between the things you genuinely can manage and the things you were never meant to carry.
It is a conversation full of honesty and a little self-deprecating laughter, and it goes somewhere real.
Solo parenting strips away a lot of the structures that used to make life feel stable. And when stability disappears, the instinct to control what you can goes into overdrive. It shows up differently for everyone. For some it’s perfectionism. For others it’s anxiety that won’t quit. For many it’s a low-grade resentment that things aren’t going the way they were supposed to.
It might look like redoing your kid’s chores because it wasn’t done right. It might look like spiraling at two in the morning over a situation you can’t change. It might look like rigidly trying to predict every outcome just so you don’t get blindsided again. It might look like running so far ahead into what-ifs that you’ve lost all contact with what’s actually happening today.
The real question this episode explores is not whether you try to control things. Of course you do. The real question is what it’s costing you, and whether there’s a way to hold life more loosely without feeling like you’re losing yourself in the process.
Key Insights from This Episode
- Control is often a counterfeit for peace.
- Letting go is not the same as giving up.
- “What if” lives in the future; “if only” lives in the past.
Control Is a Counterfeit for Peace
Before the conversation even got going, Elizabeth admitted she had spent the drive over trying to control a woman in the car in front of her. Honking her horn. She laughed telling it, but there was real self-awareness underneath. The tightening in the chest. The reaching for something to push against. That is what the beginning of a control spiral actually feels like in real time.
Underneath the urge to control is almost always fear. The recognition of our own limits. The feeling of powerlessness that comes with that. And so we start managing. We start gripping. Amber, speaking as both a therapist and a single mom who has lived it, was clear about this. If we can just get this one thing under control, the thinking goes, maybe everything else will stop feeling so unsteady.
Control is a counterfeit for peace. It looks almost exactly like stability. It mimics the feeling of things being okay. But it is an illusion, and chasing it costs not just your own peace but the peace of the people around you.
It plays out in small ways too. When there is powerlessness in the big things, the energy often redirects to the small ones. The way the dishwasher gets loaded. The exact placement of the cups. The compulsion makes sense in the moment because at least this feels manageable. Amber noted the same pattern in her own life. When the house was in order, everything felt more okay. The control felt good precisely because it was something she could actually manage.
The point the group kept returning to is that control is not inherently the enemy. It is a survival mechanism, and for a lot of solo parents it is what helped hold things together through the hardest seasons. The problem is when it becomes the only tool, and when the grip tightens on things that were never ours to control in the first place.
Letting Go Is Not the Same as Giving Up
Robert shared a story about a friend navigating something potentially catastrophic, and how that friend had landed in a surprising place of peace. Not because the stakes were low. But because he had stopped trying to manage what he could not change, and in doing so had found something more grounded and real. The honest question put to the group was whether that was just giving up.
The picture that came back is a hard one to shake. Clenching the reins of a horse, forcing a direction, forcing a speed. That is control. Dropping the reins entirely and heading off the cliff. That is giving up. But there is a third option. Holding loosely. Staying present. Aware that you may need to respond, but not reacting from panic. That is a completely different posture.
Rigidity does not just drain energy. It narrows vision. When you are white-knuckling an outcome, you lose the ability to see the other possibilities in front of you. The open-handed version of Robert’s friend was not resignation. It was a wider field of view. The capacity to look at a hard situation and say, here are the things that could happen, now let me make a wise decision about what I actually can do.
Sometimes control is so effective that you get exactly the outcome you forced. But what if that was not the best outcome available? What if the grip itself was limiting something better from coming through? Some of the greatest things that happen to us have nothing to do with our planning or strategizing. And the energy spent clinging to outcomes that did not happen, only to be replaced by something far better, rarely makes sense in hindsight.
“What If” and “If Only” Are Both Traps
At one point in the conversation, a framework landed so cleanly that Robert stopped and asked for it to be said again. When you are saying “what if,” you are living in the future. Anxious. Trying to control outcomes that have not happened yet. When you are saying “if only,” you are living in the past. Trying to undo things that cannot be undone. In both places you are completely powerless. The only place where there is any real agency is right now, in the present, in the very next right step.
Elizabeth had worked through one of those spirals just before recording. She journaled everything out, all the swirling feelings and fears. And then she stopped. She sat with herself. What she found underneath all of it was not a strategic problem to solve. It was something much simpler: a need to feel loved, seen, and cared for. She gave herself that compassion, and something settled. The internal connection quieted the external noise.
The practical tool Amber brought for this is what she calls the three buckets. What you can control, meaning your own actions, values, and effort. What you can influence, through your words, conversations, and relationships. And what you must accept, the outcomes, other people, and the things genuinely beyond your reach. When everything feels tangled together, sorting it roughly into those three categories can give the nervous system somewhere to land.
On the harder question of when to act versus when to accept, the honest answer is that the urgency to do something is often just the control reflex running. The feeling that you must fix this right now is frequently not wisdom. It is anxiety. The healthier move is to pause, get quiet, gather a little perspective, and then respond from steadier ground. Think of it like zooming out of a maze. Inside it, all you see is the locked door in front of you. From above, you can see the other passages.
You Were Never Meant to Hold All of This
If you are in a season right now where everything feels like it is riding on your decisions, your management, your ability to keep it all moving, that weight is real. Nobody is going to tell you it is not.
But there is a difference between responsibility and control. You are responsible for your kids, for your home, for showing up as best you can. But you were never meant to control the outcomes of every situation, the choices of every person in your life, or the pace at which healing happens.
The invitation in this episode is not to let go of everything and hope for the best. It is something quieter and more courageous than that. It is to notice when you are gripping. To ask what is underneath it. To name the fear rather than outrun it. And to take one next right step from a place of presence rather than panic.
As Robert said at the close of this conversation, if you are feeling locked down and heavy right now, you are not alone in it. The community around this podcast exists exactly for moments like this one. And the God who sees you in the middle of the maze knows the way through.
