09/10/2025
Unlearning: The recovering Control Freak
When life gets overwhelming, we develop creative ways of gaining control to prevent outcomes we fear. Our strategies have an expiration date beyond which they don’t work, if they ever really did, and begin to cause stress and misery.
Do you recognize in yourself or a loved one, the control freak strategy? When we are fully invested in the belief that we are responsible for fixing every detail of every problem before it gets too big for us to handle. We craft a plan that involves others and get upset when they won’t comply. Anxiety spikes like crazy. If only they would listen to us.
A mistaken belief that you’re responsible for everything is a particularly heavy burden. We pick up this burden in early life when we painfully learn nobody is coming to save us. If we feel abandoned because the ones that we depend on are not there for us physically and/or emotionally, we must learn to cope alone and solve our own problems. Sometimes we learn to capitalize on this learned skill of problem solving to try to protect others from disastrous consequences that will affect us as well. We expect them to love us for this.
We know how to anticipate and plan for every possible negative outcome because that’s how we made it this far. We expect others to make things worse doing it their way. We do not consider that in doing so, we are robbing them of the chance to learn to manage their own lives.
This approach works just often enough to keep us trying but strangely enough nobody’s grateful, even when our plans temporarily succeed. People don’t care for the unspoken message in this, which is that we don’t believe in them, don’t trust them. They don’t want our advice or direction. We take it personally.
There may be several people in our lives we are trying to manage like this and now we’re constantly juggling problems which creates an anxiety that makes us physically, mentally and emotionally sick. If everything is miraculously ok for a minute, we implode from having forgotten who we are and neglecting ourselves in the process.
Healing this pattern happens once the desire to be free from the burden gets bigger than the desire to fix and control. I wish you a moment of deep realization that you are responsible only for yourself. Therapy can help us make the necessary changes; like focusing inward, where the pain is, and heal it at source. But if we can summon the courage for that, we are on the way to self awareness and freedom.
