Recognize your control strategies

Recognize the feelings and ideas you are attempting to avoid.
Take a pen and paper and finish the following sentence: “The thoughts/emotions I’d most like to get rid of are….”

Recognize your controlling behaviors and strategies.
List down the actions you usually take to avoid or eliminate negative thoughts and feelings. For example, avoiding unpleasant events, abusing alcohol or drugs, blaming others, putting things off, replacing bad thoughts with good ones, etc.

Eliminate controlling strategies.
Look at the list of your controlling strategies and ask yourself: Has this behavior helped me eliminate my negative thoughts and feelings? How much money, time, and health did this cost me? Has this behavior helped me live a better, more satisfying life? Through this, you’ll see how useless controlling strategies are; thus, you must eliminate them.