The Powerball jackpot was hovering around $500 million. The old NY Lotto slogan echoed in my head: “Hey, you never know.” I accepted I was likely throwing away $10, but then again—you never know.
I wondered: Is there any statistical edge to playing the same numbers over and over versus Quick Pick? I asked Google, and the answer was a definitive “No.”
But then I went down the Google rabbit hole on the psychology behind why it feels like there’s an edge to picking your own numbers.
I came across various psychological effects like the Illusion of Control, The Gambler’s Fallacy, Pattern Bias, Near-Miss Effect, and Regret Aversion. As I read through the brief descriptions of each, one topic connected with me: the illusion of control.
The illusion of control: We tend to believe that choosing something gives us a sense of influence or control over the outcome, even when logic says otherwise. Picking your own lottery numbers feels more powerful than letting a machine do it—even though both have identical odds.
As I read through the explanation of illusion of control, I recognized something immediately—patterns I see in therapy sessions that have nothing to do with lottery tickets at all.
The illusion of control isn’t just about choosing numbers. It’s about the human brain’s desperate need to find “why” in randomness—and then use that “why” to create a sense of influence over things we actually can’t control.
The Need for Why
Over the years as a therapist, I’ve developed a personal theory: We have an innate need to understand “why” things happen. Not just curiosity—need. And when we can’t find a real explanation, we create one. Because that explanation, even if it’s false, gives us something the brain craves: control.
When we experience something that creates struggle, hurt, or emotional pain, there’s a huge difference in getting “stuck” versus our ability to process and move through it. I’ve noticed that when we can find some logic or reasoning behind what happened, we tend not to get stuck. But when there seems to be no reasonable explanation, we stall. We get stuck desperately trying to find the “why.”
Because the “why”—even a painful “why”—feels like control.
Let me show you what I mean.
When the Brain Can't Tolerate "I Don't Know"
I’m working with a client—a father who grew up with an emotionally abusive father and a detached mother. We’ve spent months challenging the negative narratives. There’s been real improvement—but it’s fragile. When something challenging comes up, he falls back into the old belief: “I’m not good enough.”
In a recent session, I asked: “What would be so scary about believing you’re a good person? A good spouse? A good employee? I’m not saying perfect or the best—just good.”
He immediately started defending why he wasn’t good at any of those things.
I gently challenged his objections, then asked: “Could you ever imagine saying to your daughter the things your father said to you as a child?”
“Of course not.”
“You decided to be a different parent because you knew it wasn’t right how you were raised. You broke that intergenerational pattern. So how did little you—when your parents were your whole world—how did you do anything that deserved to be treated or talked to the way you were?”
Silence. I found my opening.
“You had to believe you were the problem. It was the only way to make sense of your world. By the time you were old enough to realize different, it was so entrenched you couldn’t break free from it—even though you pushed back and left home when you could. That negative narrative stuck.”
The Child's Impossible Problem
What I am describing to the client is the illusion of control.
The need for order and predictability doesn’t develop in adulthood—I believe it’s innate. So what happens when a child, who doesn’t have the capacity to understand that bad things sometimes just happen—that caregivers struggle with their own issues, that the world doesn’t revolve around them—encounters chaos or trauma?
The only way they can make sense of it: by identifying that the cause must be them.
Not the parent’s own mental health issues. Not the substance abuse. Not intergenerational patterns or emotionally unavailable caregivers. It must all be because of them.
That’s the illusion of control. If you’re the problem, you can fix it. You can try harder, be better, earn the love that should have been freely given. It’s the same psychology as choosing your lottery numbers—it doesn’t change the odds, but it feels like you’re doing something.
Self-blame gave my client a “why.” And that “why” gave him the illusion that he could change the outcome by being better, quieter, easier.
He couldn’t. But the belief persisted—because letting go meant accepting something unbearable: complete helplessness.
Our sense of self and the world is developed by how we experience it and interpret it. By the time we’re old enough to have perspective, that filter we process everything through has already formed. And it reinforces itself: “It must be because I am the problem.”
It’s a safety mechanism to make the world feel safe—even at the cost of our own sense of wellbeing.
Because randomness—”sometimes bad things happen for reasons that have nothing to do with you”—is inconceivable and unbearable. Especially to a child’s brain.
"Knowing" vs. "Feeling" Truth
I often tell clients that there’s “knowing” and there’s “feeling” truth.
Clients usually can clearly articulate that their parent struggled with addiction, or depression, or their own unresolved trauma. They know, intellectually, that their childhood chaos wasn’t about them.
And yet they’re still driven by perfectionism. Still exhausted from people-pleasing. Still convinced that if they had just been quieter, easier, better—maybe things would have been different.
I might ask a client: “If you had a friend who was going through this same situation, would you tell them what you’re telling yourself?” The answer is almost always no. They would tell their friend it wasn’t their fault, that they deserved better.
“So why is that not true for you?”
Usually I get silence. Or “I don’t know, that’s different.”
When this belief is challenged directly and without a well-established therapeutic relationship, you almost get a sense of the client doubling down and shutting down. That’s how strong that emotional protection mechanism is.
Even as adults, the idea that they were innocent and had nothing to do with what happened is too scary.
Because accepting that means accepting something unbearable: that you were genuinely helpless. That no amount of being better, quieter, easier would have changed what happened.
Self-blame feels safer than that kind of powerlessness.
What Actually Helps
I’m not trying to convince my clients that their childhood wasn’t their fault. They already know that.
The work is exploring what letting go of that belief would mean. What it would feel like to accept that you were, genuinely, powerless to change what happened to you as a child.
That’s grief work. You’re not grieving the facts—you’re grieving the illusion of control. The belief that if you had just been different, better, enough—you could have changed the outcome.
You couldn’t. And accepting that is painful.
I said to that client: “You know what’s scary about accepting that it wasn’t your fault? What’s scary to think about is: what if you’d had a dad like you? Your whole adult life would have gone in a completely different direction. Because of something that had nothing to do with who you are or your value, you missed out on a life where you could feel loved, accepted, and enough.”
That’s the grief. Not just accepting “it wasn’t my fault.” It’s grieving the life you could have had. The childhood where you felt loved. The adulthood where you didn’t have to fight that voice telling you you’re not enough.
I introduce this by talking about what was taken—that you deserved a different childhood and didn’t get it. That it’s unfair. I speak to the helplessness of a child and how we need to make sense of our world. That you did deserve a different experience, and there’s real grief in accepting the loss of the childhood you didn’t get.
Sometimes I’ll ask clients to write a letter to their younger self. The prompt is simple: “I would like you to write a letter to your [age] year old self. Just start with ‘Dear [your name],’ and just start writing. No editing, no re-reading, no thinking—just write until you feel like you have nothing left to write.”
For clients who are parents, I approach it differently: “Imagine if you could be your own parent. Knowing what you know now, what would you say to that small child?” This really challenges them to be honest, because if they’re harsh on themselves, that reflects poorly on them as a parent in the present.
For young adults in their early twenties, sometimes I model that parental role through the therapeutic relationship itself—unconditional positive regard and acceptance, encouragement, telling them I’m proud of them, empathizing and just holding space. This gives them something they may have never had: a constant, trusted presence who genuinely believes in them. Not just says it—believes it.
What all of these approaches create is something fundamental: the experience of being believed in. Not conditionally. Not based on performance. Just believed in as you are. For many clients, this is the first time they’ve felt that—and it becomes the foundation for believing in themselves.
The grief process isn’t quick. But here’s what opens up on the other side:
Real agency.
Not the illusion of control over the past, but actual power in the present.
I told that client: “That negative voice you hear is your dad still having control over you. But you aren’t that little kid anymore. And you don’t have to choose to listen to it.”
You couldn’t control your childhood chaos. But you can control how you respond now. You can choose differently. You can decide what “enough” means for you. You can create relationships where love isn’t something you have to earn.
The shift sounds like:
- From “If only I had been better” to “I couldn’t control that, but I can choose differently now”
- From “I need to be perfect to be worthy” to “I get to decide what enough looks like”
- From trying to earn love retroactively to creating relationships where love is freely given
Three Words
Three words I came across a few years back really solidified this all for me. I can’t remember where I read them, who wrote them, or even the context of them, but they hit deep: “Why not me?”
It opened space for helplessness.
And strangely, that helplessness feels like relief. Not because helplessness is comfortable—but because it means we can stop trying to retroactively control what happened. We can stop searching for the “why,” searching for what we did to deserve it. The randomness that felt unbearable as a child becomes, as an adult, the thing that sets us free.
Let me be clear—this isn’t saying you deserved to experience something painful or traumatic. It isn’t about accepting blame. It’s about being reminded of the reality that we are all just as susceptible to experiencing painful events as any lottery number is likely to pop up.
It’s about accepting the randomness of life and being comfortable in the helplessness and lack of control.
It shifts our pattern of seeing the world around us and filtering things through the lens that used to serve as emotional protection in childhood and now serves as a hindrance in adulthood.
You Can't Control the Draw
I probably won’t win the Powerball. The odds are astronomical, whether I pick my numbers or let the machine do it. But because I can accept that it’s pure randomness and I have no power over controlling the outcome, I’m not left blaming myself or stuck in feeling upset I didn’t win.
Because the same psychology that makes me want to choose lottery numbers to control the outcome is the psychology that keeps you believing you’re not enough.
You can’t change what happened in your childhood. You couldn’t control the chaos, the absence, the hurt. And accepting that—really accepting it—means letting go of the belief that if you had just been different, things would have been different.
The work is hard. It’s grief work. It requires accepting a helplessness that your child-self tried desperately to avoid by making yourself the problem.
But on the other side of that acceptance is freedom from the belief that you’re not enough—because that belief was never true. It was just a child’s solution to an impossible problem.
That shift—from “why me?” to “why not me?”—opens the door to real healing. Not because you’ve convinced yourself of anything, but because you’ve accepted the randomness you couldn’t control then, so you can exercise the agency you have now.
If You're Ready to Let Go of "I'm Not Enough"
The work of grieving control you never had and creating agency you actually have now is something we can do together. If this resonates and you’re curious about what that might look like, I’d be happy to talk.