Couple
You see yourself doing it and each time you intervene you promise it's the last time and it isn't.
You manage what they wear before the event. You correct their driving. You take over the conversation when they’re talking to someone important. You re-do the chore they did because you don’t trust how they did it. You know exactly when they should leave to make the appointment on time and you make sure they know it. You see yourself doing it. You promise yourself you’ll stop. The next opportunity arrives and you do it again.
You’re not doing this because you’re a bad person. You’re doing it because the alternative feels intolerable to you. Both things are true.
The next moment of slipping into control still arrives.
You very likely came up in a household where things going wrong had consequences that didn’t fit the size of what went wrong. You may have grown up with a parent whose moods turned on details, and you started controlling everything you could touch so the household couldn’t be derailed. You may have been the kid who was responsible for younger siblings or for an unstable adult, and you learned that taking charge was the only way to keep things from collapsing. You may have lived through a stretch when something specific spun out of your control and you decided you’d never let it happen again.
Each intervention delivers brief relief. Things are now done correctly. The relief reinforces the intervention. The next opportunity to control feels even more necessary because not controlling feels even more uncomfortable.
The control is also a way of managing your anxiety about what would happen if you let go. The anxiety doesn’t go down when you don’t control. It goes up. Then you control to bring it back down. The cycle is now running on the anxiety, not on the actual stakes of any specific situation.
If the partner you’re controlling is suffering for it, see My partner is controlling for the view from their side.
You can’t decide your way out of control. The deciding doesn’t reach the anxiety that the controlling is managing.
Strategic therapy interrupts the sequence at the second the discomfort spikes and the controlling response answers it. We change what you do at that exact point, and we address the anxiety the control has been managing rather than asking you to white-knuckle through it. Letting go stops requiring willpower because the thing willpower was fighting gets dealt with directly.
You’ll let them load the dishwasher their way. The day won’t cost you anything.
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