The Direction of Your Control

Have you ever been told that you have a controlling personality or have you accused someone else of that behaviour? Traditionally it's a common accusation from teenagers to their parents.

When we feel like someone is being controlling, it's often due to them imposing their opinions onto us and the way we should live a certain part of our life. That's never a pleasant experience, particularly if it lasts for an excessive amount of time, resulting in a toxic relationship.

One of the main reasons that someone might develop a controlling behaviour over one or more people, is that they're lacking control in another area of their life so compensate by projecting control in the direction of an innocent bystander.

Returning quickly to my earlier example of parents and teenagers, this is primarily not a matter of overcompensating as it's the job of a parent to supervise, guide and discipline the child. So apologies to any teenagers reading this who thought I was going to justify their accusation.

A common misunderstanding of where the line is can occur in employment with managers and employees working with an indistinct framework of expectations from each party. Sometimes the manager may also project their unrelated insecurities onto their team by micro managing them with no freedom to operate autonomously.

Another example could be caused by the above examples where an employee is being overly controlled in their job, so they look to regain some control through their behaviours at home with partners, friends and family.

There could be a number of other reasons that cause someone to develop controlling behaviours, and it's not always easy to spot how these manifest so could be subtle and happen over a long period of time before the straw breaks the camel's back and the person being controlled seems to be overreacting.

For this latter example it's important to create an awareness of ourselves and our relationships with those around us so that we can identify if we're being subtly and not deliberately controlled by someone else, or if we are exhibiting some controlling behaviours ourselves.

Once this has been identified then it can begin to be addressed with a number of different solutions, resulting in a break in the cycle and more freedom to control only our own life.

For further exploration into this for yourself why not book a one on one video chat session with me by clicking here.