Addressing How Control Impacts Relationships

Let’s look at how control can impact relationships.

My aim is to discuss how control negatively impacts relationships and further how it may serve as avoidance for dealing with our own fear and anxiety.

This conversation can be generalized for all types of adult relationships; family, romantic, friendship, coworker.

What is it?

Let’s begin looking at definitions of control. Webster helps us out with a few definitions:

Power or authority to guide or manage.

Or

To exercise restraining or directing influence over.

How does control impact relationships?

From the therapy chair and personally, I witness control coming from a place of fear inside of us. Fear fuels acts of control to influence desired outcomes.

Unfortunately, a sense of control donates the illusion of responsibility for other people’s behavior.

Once we designate our role as the “responsible party” for other people’s behavior, it creates an anxious cycle that is excessively invested in what is outside of our control. This cycle has the tendency to make us feel ironically, out of control.

Control is an illusion. It’s an illusion because we don’t truly have control over other people’s behavior in adult relationships.

Certainly I believe many understand and agree with this from a logical perspective, controlling others isn’t a great pattern to continue but many view behaviors not as controlling, but rather as helpful and necessary.

In short, control behaviors feed anxiety and by extension increase codependent behaviors.

What’s healthier?

Healthy relationships relinquish the right to control and manage each other.

I sit with many who know intuitively that control negatively impacts relationships but have fallen into patterns that temporarily mitigate anxious fear. These behaviors take the spotlight off of our own anxiety and projects it on to others.

To our demise this behavior offers the comfort of our favorite shoe, it’s going to feel more “right” to take on roles of control if that has been our pattern.

Reasonably, it takes time to change this behavior. This relationship change will absolutely take work and time of personal reflection.

Change will bring a need for defining new roles and value in relationships. *Recall, these behaviors often feel helpful and necessary.

What should I focus on instead?

What we might experience by giving up controlling behaviors is an uncomfortable focus inward.

This inward focus requests our investment.

So we take a breath and we begin the process of mindful change:

• We learn to name our own fear and anxiety and resist the temptation to project it onto others.

• We decide that there are limits to our influence on others.

• We then get clear on our personal boundaries and the elements of the relationship in which we can influence.

• We practice making peace with our limits.

And then we practice. Again, and again, and again, until it feels like our new comfortable shoes.

The process of change brings mindfulness that our impulse to control in relationships is about us and not other people.

We tether ourselves to the value that health comes to our relationships with addressing our own stuff. In exchange we reap the benefits in our relationship where each person takes responsibility for themselves, thus developing healthy partnerships with mutual respect.

Peace. Love. Gratitude.

Spotlight Photo Credit | Shoe Photo Credit | Coffee Cup Credit