Control Is Fear In A Suit

Controlling people are powerful. Dominant characters. It's all about ego and strength.

No it isn't.

Control is fear in a suit. I use the suit deliberately. Suits are symbolic of authority, of knowledge, of someone who has it all handled. That's what control looks like from the outside. The manager who micromanages every detail of your work. The partner who checks your phone. The parent still running their adult child's life. The friend who has to choose the restaurant, the time, the day, and then change some tiny detail anyway.

From outside, it reads as power. Mostly it's just irritating.

But sit with these people properly, or sit with them in a clinical setting, and you find the opposite. Fear everywhere. Fear running right through them. The tighter the grip, the bigger the terror underneath it.

And then it compounds. Because it's not just fear of the world anymore. It becomes fear of losing control itself. I have to control everything because I'm frightened, and now I'm frightened of not being in control. A snake biting its own tail.

Nobody is born controlling. We don't arrive that way. It gets built, usually early, though not always. Sometimes it arrives after a tragedy, a violation, a messy divorce, the collapse of a business or a career. Somewhere along the line the world proves it cannot be trusted, and that chaos will follow if you take your hands off the wheel. The unpredictable parent. The violent parent. The all-devouring parent. The partner who left. Each one teaches the same lesson. Control the environment or get hurt.

And here's the thing. At some point, the control worked. It brought order. It solved a problem. As I say in my forthcoming book, little plug there, the question is never what's wrong with you. It's what were you solving. Control was a solution. Often a genuinely good one, at the time. The trouble is the script keeps running decades after the situation that required it has gone.

Now the paradox. Control kills the very thing it's trying to protect.

You control your partner because you're terrified of losing them. I control you, therefore you don't leave. And what happens? They leave. Or the relationship implodes because nobody can function inside it. One person running on fear, the other one hiding, censoring, managing every sentence. Same at work. People don't stay and fight a controlling boss. They quietly find somewhere they're treated with basic dignity, and they go.

Control breeds secret lives. The teenagers getting drunk beyond drunk because home is a regime. The partner who lets loose everywhere except in front of the person they live with. The colleague who stops bringing ideas, and then stops bringing the truth, because honesty has to be managed around a controlling figure.

And so the controller ends up alone. In a perfectly managed world that looks, to everyone else, like a disaster zone. That's usually the point at which other people start using the word toxic.

Here's the physiological cost, and it matters. Fear cannot relax. Ever. Those two states do not meet. If fear is driving the control, the nervous system is in fight or flight all day, every day. Controlling people are not relaxed people having a lovely time running everyone's lives. They are exhausted people who cannot stop.

If someone you love is controlling, the way in is not "you're controlling, sort yourself out." You're dealing with someone already running on fear. Meeting them with force just gives the fear more evidence. What sometimes works is gentler and firmer at the same time. I'm not going to leave you. But this behaviour is destroying things between us, because I'm already censoring myself around you. I'm already bracing before I see you. What is it you're actually frightened of?

And if the controlling person is you, the reality check is this. Were you right to control things once? Possibly. Decades ago, maybe controlling the environment was the only thing keeping you safe. But look around now. Is the danger still here? Do you actually need to micromanage your relationship, your colleagues, your family?

If the answer is truthfully no, then you can start to relax.

The fear built the suit. You're allowed to take it off.