Are You in a Controlling Relationship?

Healthy relationships require freedom. Boundaries are set in order to protect the individual thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of each person, so that they can bring their whole selves to the relationship. Boundary-less relationships can experience many types of dysfunction, but one way that a lack of boundaries may play out is that you may sometimes find yourself vulnerable to being controlled by another person. They take your freedom away. This will sometimes happen without you even having noticed that it is taking place.

When this happens, we need some kind of wake up call. Sometimes in our relationships we are asleep to the patterns. We don’t recognize that we are oversleeping, so we need to be startled out of our slumber with some sort of alarm.

Our alarm clock is the pain we experience in these types of relationships.

Many people develop an especially high tolerance for this kind of pain. They learn to ignore it. Soon, they don’t even recognize it as pain. They make choices that limit the scope and possible depth of their lives, their array of choices, their feelings and responses, what they will or won’t say to the other person. They make their lives smaller. In order to escape the pain, they learn to avoid it.

It is like having an injured tooth and failing to seek treatment. You learn to chew with the other side of your mouth.

Here are some symptoms and situations that may indicate that you are experiencing this type of pain:

Do you find yourself feeling overextended? Run around, ragged, and depleted?

If so, do a time audit and ask yourself if your time was spent purposefully because of things you’ve chosen to do, or whether you are in the pain of being overextended and fatigued because you’ve been pulled into a bunch of stuff and you’re being depleted. You don’t have time to rest or hobbies or the other things you need which bring you joy, fulfillment, and fuel your growth. This is a path to burnout.
Depression can be another symptom. Depression may set in when people have sunk into a state of powerlessness and learned helplessness, feeling as if they don’t have agency, or as if there are no choices available to them.

Look at some areas of pain:

Do you find yourself being overextended? Run around ragged and depleted.

Anxiety may also often be an indication that you aren’t in control of your resources. You don’t feel like you can say no or you don’t feel like you can live up to someone’s expectations. This stress will manifest as anxiety, as you work tirelessly to please someone else and meet their expectations, failing to nurture your own needs and wants.

Do you find yourself self-medicating? Overeating, alcohol abuse, trying to escape the deadness or emotional pain of your relationship?

Do you feel fulfilled? Loved? Satisfied? Those may be wake-up calls as well. A relationship with someone who is exerting control over will leave no room for the tenderness, emotional connections, and mutual exchange that we all need in order to truly be ‘in’ the relationship.

Do you find yourself leaving your own dreams and desires in an unrealized state? Are you constantly pushing them back on the timeline in order to do what someone else expects you to do? Do this long enough and you’ll realize that it’s been a long time since you tuned into your own heart and asked: what do I want to do?

Remember the Proverb: “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.”

In addition to setting boundaries, another tactic we can use is to do internal audits of our own feelings, thoughts, actions, and resources. Do a time audit to see how and whether the time you’re spending is contributing to your individual wants and needs. Likewise, do an emotional audit to see whether your needs are being met there. You can do the same for your dreams and passions, and your finances.

Escape the patterns of a controlling relationship by examining what your needs are, assessing whether there are structures in the relationship to make those things possible to meet, and then set appropriate boundaries in order to protect them.