Control as a grief response

Van der Kolk writes about how the need to control the environment is often the body's response to having once been unable to. The nervous system learns: if I manage everything carefully, the bad thing won't happen again. This is not irrational. It worked, once, or seemed to.

What I recognize in this is that my productivity systems, my planning, the vault itself — some of this is competence and some of it is a hand that doesn't know how to open.