Controlling Personality

How To Recognize If You Have A Controlling Personality

If you have a controlling personality, you will find that this condition raises problems for you in life and work.  In most cases, people will not want to work with you, stay friends with you, or even be around you.  A controlling personality can be a special problem when it comes to your intimate relationships.  You may find that you drive many potential partners away just as things start to build, because you cannot control your need to control their every action and thought.  If you do manage to get into a long-term relationship, you find yourself wearing your partner down by your controlling behavior and inevitably not only harming them, but yourself.

For most of us who suffer from control issues, it takes us a long time to recognize that we have these issues.  We will find a million reasons outside of ourselves to justify our behavior.  However, in the end, the first step to turning things around is to recognize that we are our own worst enemies.  This usually only occurs when something particularly drastic has occurred—as when our latest lover has left us, our boss has fired us, or we have driven a friend away.  So how do we break this cycle?

Recognize Your Problem

The first step to changing is recognizing your control issues.  If when you start to enter a relationship, you find that just as things start to get serious you start to become increasingly insecure and jealous, this may be a sign of a controlling personality.  Typically, after the honeymoon period is over, you will start worrying that your partner is losing interest and start to question whether they are sneaking around with someone else.  Suddenly, everyone in your partner’s life becomes a potential secret lover or conspirator against your happiness.

Your partner will typically start to complain that you are being too pushy and that they feel interrogated, which may likely make you even more insecure and maybe even pushier.  You may even have bouts of anger in which you yell at your lover.

Another typical sign of a controlling personality is that you will tend to get deeply into a relationship very quickly.  You go from the first dates to considering yourself a “couple” in a relatively short amount of time.  This may also mean you go from one relationship to another with little grace period in between.

All these are signs of a controlling personality and if you seem to fit into these patterns, it is good to admit it and get the help that you need.

Getting Help

In order to break from your pattern and develop healthy mature relationships, you will need to address the sources of your insecurity.  Typically, the person who feels the need to control has had a deep hurt during their developmental period.  Usually, this involves the loss of a parent or a relationship with a parent that was particularly difficult.  A chaotic home environment during your developmental years can make one feel as if every aspect of life is volatile and in need of surveillance and control.

A good therapist can help you to recognize the connections with your childhood and to develop ways of overcoming these insecurities.  This is not an easy process, of course, and it will require you to open yourself up in a way that will make you uncomfortable.  However, until you can open yourself in this way in the safety of a therapist’s office you will never be able to do so in the much more complicated world beyond the therapist’s couch.