If you perceive yourself as sometimes being out of control, trying to gain control would make sense to me. You would end up with a circle of "failure"? I think there are different ways to think of "control". When I get really afraid and feeling helpless, the thing that helps gets me out of that is anger. It seems like fear and anger wouldn't go together but if you think of it as inertia and movement, it makes a weird kind of sense :-) I think your control thing could be like that; you "want" to be in control of yourself but don't know how to make it work, you end of feeling you "can't cope", the opposite of control.