Why Are You So Controlling?

With your beloved, romantic partner, why are you so controlling?

Let’s dig a little deeper into the negative patterns between you and your romantic partner. I’m going to describe some of the deeper reasons that these patterns stay in place, because it’s important for you to begin recognizing what part you play in how you treat your partner, and how to get more honest about how your partner treats you.

All couples have a very similar set of frustrations with each other. These frustrations, most often, come from not feeling understood and accepted by each other.

I want to introduce two words, CONTROL and CLOSENESS. Both partners often feel lots of pain about control and closeness.

We all have a wired-in biological need to be close, and your negative pattern prevents you from feeling close and safe with each other.

It may seem different, but you both are most likely having very similar experiences with control and closeness.

Control becomes a problem when you have to continually put effort into trying to connect with your partner, or continually put effort into preventing your partner from being too controlling with you.

You’re both very smart, and yet you allow this frustration to continue, year after year. Why is that? It’s because the human drive to be close is a massive, powerful force.

This means that you might be trying to control, or force your partner to be close to you. But even if you’re doing the opposite, where you’re always pulling away from your partner, you’re still trying to control your relationship.

It takes a lot of effort to constantly chase your partner, and it takes a lot of effort to constantly run away from your partner.

So if you’re the person that often backs away from your partner, what you’re really hoping for is that your partner would learn how to approach you differently without so much pressure.

But your partner will never approach you differently until you both learn more about how this pattern happens. It takes both of you to solve this, not just one of you.

Let me now say the main point of what I want you to understand.

The way you both are controlling your relationship takes you into a circular pattern that goes round and round, and never resolves.

Actually, each time you both control, you reinforce the negative pattern, and it gets stronger and stronger, and your relationship gets weaker and weaker.

Let me give you a general example of how this happens for you. The point is to find any part that you think you’re doing, and any part that your partner is doing.

You might be a wife that feels lonely and unimportant to your husband. You then control and try to be close.

In your control you criticize your husband. Your husband then feels inadequate. He withdraws from you. Now he is the one trying to control.

Remember, he has the same drive to be close. He won’t say the truth of how he feels hurt, because he’s too busy trying to get away from you.

The reason I am calling the control is that he is using his silence to control you in an attempt to get you to be nicer, and to not criticize him.

Once the husband pulls away the wife then gets angry and controls by then nagging, further criticizing, and becoming demanding.

She just reinforced the negative pattern circle, as her husband gets a further confirmation that he is inadequate. Because he doesn’t yet know the option of how to tell the truth about his feelings, he pulls away even more.

Moment by moment, you are either breaking apart this negative pattern and learning how you keep hurting each other, or you are reinforcing the pattern and making it a lifelong way of treating each other.

The antidote to this problem is awareness of what you keep doing to hurt each other, and the biggest solution of all, is vulnerability. Vulnerability is the secret sauce to solving this dilemma.

How to use vulnerability, and knowing what to say, and feeling safe to tell the truth… well, this is what we’re going to learn together… to make it a great relationship.