Fighting, anger, financial problems, infidelity, addictions, lack of sex, or even communication isn’t the reason your relationship isn’t working.
You’re thinking you’ve grown apart because you can’t see eye to eye on ANYTHING!
On the surface these things are important but if you look beneath the surface you will see the common issue that we tend to overlook is:
the need for control!
I can see you saying right now, “I am NOT controlling!” “I don’t need to be in control!”
I felt the same way when I learned this too! The control that I’m taking about is the one that kills the connection and sabotages your relationship. There are two kinds of control I’m talking about, overt and covert.
Overt- is obvious it’s the demanding, aggressive, bully, and jealous kind of control.
Covert- is much harder to recognize. It’s a subtle form of control. You don’t realize you’re doing it.
Again, we all have the need to control. We learned this when we were children and were too little to handle our BIG emotions.
No matter how good our parents were to us we all have had some experience with pain. It could be a heartbreak, disappointment, loss, anger, betrayal, break ups, etc.
These feelings scare us if we’re being honest and we try to do everything and anything we can to make ourselves feel better.
As a child some of us rebelled thinking if we caused a big fuss we would get more attention from our parents. Some of us conformed and made a little fuss in hopes that it would earn us the love and comfort we desired. Either way we were trying to control other people in order to feel loved and avoid pain.
We didn’t have the tools to cope with our emotions so we did the best we could and learned other ways to cope. We’ve carried some of those same control mechanisms over into our adulthood.
Childhood Tools Don't Work in Adult Relationships
Problems occur when we try to use childhood tools in adult relationships! Those childhood mechanisms can develop into being possessive and jealous and you try to control your partner by keeping close tabs on them, spending all of your time with them, or have them doing things a certain way to make you feel safe.
Some of us, meaning me, developed into people pleasers to control whether or not people rejected you. Taking care of others while losing ourselves. I felt back then it was safer to ignore my needs rather than be rejected. Thank GOD for growth and healing!
Maybe you became over accommodating and felt that if you didn’t speak up about what you wanted that people would love to be around you and or stay in a relationship with you. This controlling behavior means you’re nice in order to get something in return.
You could have even become fearful to the point where you withdraw, withhold, or shut down in order to control how close your spouse gets to you. You don’t let them into the inner deeper parts of you because you are too afraid to be vulnerable with them to say what you truly feel inside.
Anything that has the “if you do this, I will do that” narrative is a form of control. When your intention is to control you are trying to get love from your spouse to feel safe.
You allow your feelings to take the drivers seat. Must I remind you that your feelings aren’t facts!
Let me prove it to you, if you’re always waiting for your spouse to prove their love for you in order to feel safe you will always be at their mercy. You’re relying on them to make you feel loved when in reality you should already know that you’re lovable no matter what they say or do.
No matter how much your spouse loves you they CAN’T complete you! It is not their job to fill up your love bucket 100%.
That is an impossible burden for them to bear and for you to drop at their feet.
Honestly, you end up pushing away the love you truly want. Until you find your own un-ending source of love within for yourself, you will forever try to control what’s meant to come easy!
Did you notice any childhood control mechanisms that you have used or using currently?
Relationships are one of the most important factors to our well-being and happiness, yet most of us enter them with very low preparation but have high expectations.
Which leads us to throwing in the towel too soon because we never take the time to learn the tools on how to do them successfully. That’s where we come in.
If you’re ready to step into the realm of solutions and feel excited about your relationship again, book a FREE consultation call to see how we can work together!
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