Sinatra & the Stoics do Group Therapy
Monday, December 11, 2023. This one is for Junta, who would probably know…
What “My Way” gets right about control, acceptance, and the stories we tell about our lives.
Frank Sinatra and the Stoics would have made an interesting therapy group.
Sinatra arrives immaculate, naturally. He takes the chair nearest the door and announces that he planned each course, endured every blow, and did the whole damned thing his way.
Epictetus clears his throat.
Marcus Aurelius looks tired.
The therapist asks Sinatra whether he has ever considered that quite a lot of life was never under his control in the first place.
And there, perhaps, the real conversation begins.
We Love Control—Until Control Becomes the Problem
Human beings like agency. We want to choose, influence, repair, improve, persuade, and occasionally rearrange the furniture at eleven o’clock at night because something in the room has become psychologically unacceptable.
Control feels good because helplessness does not.
Much of adulthood depends upon what psychologists call primary control: changing the world to better fit our intentions.
We pursue the job. We confront the problem. We make the appointment. We apologize. We leave the destructive situation. We ask for what we need.
Primary control says:
Something must change, and I may be able to change it.
This is not merely ambition. It is competence.
But life eventually introduces us to another category of experience: the things that will not yield.
A diagnosis. A death. A betrayal that has already occurred. A childhood that cannot be revised. An adult child’s decision. A partner’s temperament. The passage of time. The fact that another human being possesses a mind inconveniently separate from our own.
When reality cannot be changed, more effort does not necessarily produce more mastery. Sometimes it merely produces more abrasion.
This is where the Stoics become useful.
Not because they taught indifference. They did not.
They taught discrimination.
The Most Important Question May Be: What Kind of Control Is Possible Here?
The Stoic distinction is often reduced to a refrigerator magnet:
Some things are up to us. Other things are not.
Simple enough. Living by it is another matter.
Psychologists Erik Helzer and Eranda Jayawickreme examined a related distinction between primary control and secondary control.
Primary control involves attempting to alter circumstances through effort and goal pursuit.
Secondary control involves adapting to circumstances through interpretation, acceptance, and meaning-making. We cannot always change what happened, but we may still influence how the event is understood, incorporated, and carried forward.
Secondary control says:
This may not change. But my relationship to it can.
That is not surrender in the pejorative sense. It is not passivity, learned helplessness, or pretending that the terrible thing was secretly wonderful.
It is the refusal to spend the remainder of one’s life demanding a different past.
What the Research Actually Found
The original version of this post made the findings a little tidier than the study itself permits. Research rarely arrives wearing Sinatra’s tuxedo.
Using undergraduate and online samples, Helzer and Jayawickreme found that the two forms of control were associated with different dimensions of well-being.
Primary control—the drive to alter circumstances through goal-directed action—was more consistently associated with people’s everyday emotional experience.
Secondary control—the ability to create meaning and psychological coherence around circumstances—showed a stronger association with overall life satisfaction in some groups, particularly students and community participants who were not in committed relationships.
That qualification matters.
This was correlational research. It did not establish that acceptance automatically causes happiness, nor did it show that secondary control is always superior. The findings were more interesting than that: the good life may require more than one kind of mastery.
Sometimes mastery means changing the conditions.
Sometimes mastery means accepting that the conditions will not change and deciding who you intend to become inside them.
The skill lies in knowing which moment you are in. The published study is available through Social Psychological and Personality Science.
The Couples-Therapy Version
Couples often enter therapy attempting to exercise primary control over another human being.
“If she would become more affectionate, I could relax.”
“If he would admit exactly how wrong he was, we could move forward.”
“If my partner communicated the way I communicate, we would communicate beautifully.”
There is usually a kernel of legitimacy in these complaints. Partners should be accountable. Behavior matters. Marriages require negotiation, repair, generosity, and change.
But intimate relationships become miserable when every difference is classified as a defect awaiting correction.
Your spouse may become more responsive. Your spouse is unlikely to become you.
Couples need primary control when a solvable problem requires action:
We need a fairer division of labor.
We need clearer boundaries with extended family.
We need to stop contemptuous exchanges.
We need transparency after an affair.
We need a plan for money, sex, parenting, or caregiving.
But couples also need secondary control when reality presents a durable limitation:
My partner processes emotion more slowly than I do.
My spouse cannot undo the injury already inflicted.
We did not receive the marriage, family, fertility, health, or future we expected.
Some differences between us will have to be managed rather than cured.
Forgiveness, if it comes, will not make the history disappear.
A great deal of marital suffering comes from using the wrong form of control.
We accept what should be confronted.
Or we keep confronting what must eventually be grieved.
Acceptance Is Not Approval
This is the point at which acceptance acquires a bad reputation.
People hear “acceptance” and imagine a therapist encouraging them to tolerate neglect, betrayal, abuse, or chronic irresponsibility with a wan little smile.
That is not acceptance. That is abdication.
Acceptance does not mean that something was fair, harmless, or morally acceptable. It means recognizing that reality has already cast its vote.
The affair happened.
The diagnosis is real.
The years passed.
Your parents were who they were.
Your partner may never offer the flawless apology that would make the injury feel retrospectively safe.
Acceptance begins when we stop confusing our refusal to accept reality with the power to alter it.
That can be painful. It can also release an extraordinary amount of energy.
Sinatra Was Doing More Than Bragging
“My Way” is usually heard as an anthem of radical self-authorship: I chose, I acted, I endured, and I bowed to no one.
That is primary control with an orchestra behind it.
But the song is also retrospective. Its narrator is looking backward, assembling triumphs, mistakes, losses, and regrets into a coherent life story.
That is secondary control.
He cannot go back and improve the record. He can only decide what the record means.
This may explain why the song carries more emotional weight than its bravado should permit. It is not really about having controlled everything. No one does.
It is about claiming authorship of the story after life has finished making its revisions.
And the Bowie connection, incidentally, is not merely cocktail-party folklore.
As a young songwriter, David Bowie wrote an unsuccessful English adaptation of the French song “Comme d’habitude.”
Paul Anka later wrote the English lyrics that became “My Way.” Bowie subsequently created “Life on Mars?” partly in response; the back cover of Hunky Dory even carried the handwritten note “Inspired by Frankie.” The history is summarized by David Bowie’s official site and in this musical account from the Independent Society of Musicians.
Apparently even artistic rejection can become secondary control if you write a sufficiently magnificent song about it.
The Good Life Requires Both Forms of Courage
There is courage in exerting control.
It takes courage to act, confront, protect, repair, and change direction.
There is also courage in relinquishing control.
It takes courage to grieve what will not be restored, tolerate uncertainty, revise an old dream, and stop organizing your life around an argument with reality.
Wisdom is not choosing action over acceptance or acceptance over action.
Wisdom is learning the difference.
Change what can still be changed.
Tell the truth about what cannot.
Then build a life large enough to contain both.
Sinatra may still insist that he did it his way.
The Stoics might gently remind him that the roads, weather, other travelers, and final curtain were never his to command.
But the manner in which he traveled?
That part was his.
Why Work With Daniel?
Couples therapy is not only about improving communication. It is also about determining what can be repaired, what must be accepted, and what neither partner should be asked to tolerate.
I help couples distinguish between solvable problems, enduring differences, accumulated injuries, and genuine threats to the relationship.
That distinction often replaces years of circular argument with something more useful: clarity, responsibility, and deliberate choice.
If your relationship has become a prolonged struggle over who must change first, a focused couples-therapy intensive can help you understand what kind of control the situation actually requires.
Schedule a free introductory call.
Musical Coda
Listen again to Sinatra’s “My Way”.
Then listen to Bowie’s “Life on Mars?”.
Two artists, one musical family, and two very different methods of making meaning from a life that refuses to remain entirely under human management.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Helzer, E. G., & Jayawickreme, E. (2015). Control and the “good life”: Primary and secondary control as distinct indicators of well-being. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 6(6), 653–660. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550615576210
