Does Your Partner Really Want to Control You?

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It certainly looks like control. And doubtless, you feel controlled. But how much psychological sense does it make to conclude your partner’s aim is to subordinate you simply because your experience—or rather, your interpretation of your experience—catalyzes that reaction?

Below, I’ll enumerate six ways that the motives of your partner’s apparently controlling behavior may have little or nothing to do with their intent.

1. Poor Self-Esteem

If someone questions their worthiness, their defenses could drive them to demonstrate their importance by illegitimately exerting power or influence over their partner’s thoughts and feelings. Unable, as compared to others, to confirm their intrinsic value, they could be compelled to validate their significance through attempts to make their significant other’s status secondary to their own.

Unaware of the manipulativeness of their tactics, their abusive compensatory behavior will, unfortunately, lead them to put their partner down to (however superficially) raise themselves up.

2. Anxiety About Feeling Vulnerable

Many individuals fear that their actions may be subject to criticism. Insecure about how others view them—possibly because while growing up they frequently experienced being neglected, excluded, or rejected—they can be unduly critical of others. With their partner, they can stave off distressful feelings of exposing their vulnerability by being aggressively demanding, even dictatorial.

The reason they typically keep their partner at an uncomfortable emotional distance—a common complaint of those close to them—is that intimacy for them is linked to the loss of relational control. What constitutes having enough intimacy to their partner is experienced by them as having too much intimacy.

Or maybe, “too close for comfort.” In such instances, what they do to avoid being hurt, demeaned, or disappointed is to make themselves less susceptible to their partner’s criticism by painstakingly “managing” the relationship. And their cagey maneuvers have the effect of making their partner feel taken over—or, in a word, controlled.

3. Unresolved Issues and Past Trauma

Disturbing experiences, generally from childhood or adolescence, tend to leave these individuals with troubling emotional residue, negatively sensitizing them and making them more reactive than others. Yet endeavoring to protect themselves from reliving what originally overwhelmed them renders it impossible for them to authentically resolve such trauma.

So in contriving to feel safe with their partner, they avoid having their as-yet-unrectified past overtake their present. That way, it’s much harder for their partner to trigger them. Here, it’s not that they want to humiliate, deceive, or destabilize their partner, but that they need to safeguard their sense of well-being by not being reminded of what they never came to grips with.

4. Need for Order and Predictability

Anxious to feel secure about their environment, their irresistible impulse to take charge of their mate may be accounted for by their need to avert the chaos they experienced in their upbringing. And that includes how their parents disciplined them, as well as how they inconsistently related to each other, which may have been muddled, nasty, or confused.

Trying to regulate their partner’s choices and predilections can definitely be seen as engaging in duplicitous, controlling, dirty pool. But their intent may not be to exhibit indiscriminate power over their partner but merely to feel secure with them. Deep down, experiencing themselves as living in an aimless, arbitrary world, they’re desperate to control what otherwise might seem altogether beyond their control.

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And it’s this need for predictability that culminates in their behaving in ways that make their victim experience their own life as externally controlled, and thereby unpredictable.

5. Doubts About Their Autonomy

Ironically, these hyper-controllers can gravely threaten their partner’s independence as they struggle incessantly to safeguard their own. Wary of intimate relationships because they’re perceived as reducing their significance or undermining their identity, they do to their partner what unconsciously they fear their partner could do to them.

If they offer their partner unencumbered freedom, they assume their own will somehow be forfeited. So, enforcing restrictions on their partner’s decision-making feels imperative. In effect, they’re imploring their significant other not to be with them in the way they earlier experienced from their family of origin.

6. Deficits in Communication Skills

Not even mentioning the tone of their utterances, people who have difficulty finding the right words to diplomatically convey their relationship concerns may (yet again, unawares) employ high-pressure techniques to do the job. As opposed to communicating their relationship issues constructively and respectfully, they resort to attacking their partner, thus making their partner feel helpless and defensive.

One of the worst ways to goad their partner into accommodating their preferences is by gaslighting them. But if they don’t know how else to communicate—and, here as before, their family’s poor modeling may have imparted to them all the wrong avenues of conveying personal needs and desires—this could be their unmindful default.

In sum, if the partner being abused can consider their over-controlling mate in a less negative way—that is, not guilting them for how they’re making them feel, but sympathetically recognizing and communicating about what probably underlies their objectionable behavior—their erring mate will be more likely to start looking within rather than (defensively) without.

Once the abuser realizes that, repeatedly and regrettably, what they’re doing to their partner runs counter to their own ideals, as well as what they’d want their partner to be or do for them, they’ll be more apt to change their unprincipled behavior vs. forcing their partner to change theirs.

If, underlyingly, they have a serious personality disorder, such carefully measured yet honest communication can’t be very effective—with or without professional assistance. Because by definition their character structure is rigidly fixed, virtually unmoveable.

Barring that, however, speaking to them kindly but emphatically should move the needle that, till now, has stayed stubbornly in place.

© 2024 Leon F. Seltzer, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.