How the need for control affects relationships

Control can take many forms. At its most visible it is overt - demands, rigidity, an insistence that things go a certain way regardless of the impact on others. At its quieter end it can look like a refusal to compromise, an inability to yield to another person's preferences, a subtle but persistent expectation that the terms of a relationship are set by one person alone.

For the person on the receiving end, the experience is recognisable even when it is hard to name. A low-level monitoring of the other person's mood before speaking. Editing what you say before you say it. A sense that refusal or pushback will come at a cost. Organising your behaviour around someone else's reactions rather than your own needs. A relationship that functions, but lacks the spontaneity, warmth and genuine reciprocity that make closeness feel safe.

What tends to be absent in relationships where control is present is intimacy. Not because the controlling person doesn't want it - often they do, acutely - but because intimacy requires conditions that control, by its nature, dismantles. Safety, reciprocity, trust, a degree of surrender to the unpredictability of another person. When one person sets the non-negotiable terms of a dynamic, a power imbalance exists and real intimacy cannot take root in that imbalance.

Where control comes from

In my experience, what sits behind controlling behaviour is rarely malice. It is almost always anxiety - and beneath the anxiety, a history. The motivations behind controlling behaviour are not always the same - in more complex presentations, other factors are at play. But what I most commonly encounter, and what I aim to address here, is control rooted in anxiety and early relational experience.

Attachment theory helps us understand why. The nervous system learns what to expect from its earliest relational environment. When that environment was unpredictable - when safety was inconsistent, when the adults responsible for providing stability were themselves a source of chaos, threat or uncertainty - the developing nervous system adapts. It learns to scan, to anticipate, to manage. Control becomes an adaptive strategy. An external structure erected to regulate what the internal world cannot.

A person who needs things to go a certain way, who struggles to relinquish the terms of a situation, who finds other people's spontaneity or unpredictability genuinely threatening - they are not operating from a desire to dominate. They are operating from a nervous system that never learned that unpredictability could be survived. That things going differently to plan did not mean catastrophe. That it was safe to let go. The controlling behaviour is, in this sense, the nervous system doing exactly what it learned to do. The problem is that what once provided safety now creates distance from others.

The cost - to everyone

Self-determination theory proposes that human beings have three core psychological needs - autonomy, competence, and relatedness. All three must be met for genuine wellbeing. When one person's need for control consistently overrides another's autonomy, the relational damage is significant. The person on the receiving end loses their sense of agency and ease within the relationship.

The cost to the controlling person themselves is less often named, and it deserves to be.

Controlling the external world is a fragile and exhausting way to exist. It requires constant maintenance - rigid structures that must be upheld, the management of one's own anxiety when things inevitably don't go to plan, the vigilance of anticipating and pre-empting unpredictability at every turn. And underneath all of that effort, the very thing that is being sought - genuine closeness, the feeling of being known and safe with another person - remains out of reach.

Because intimacy, by its nature, cannot be controlled. It requires a degree of surrender that the controlling person's nervous system experiences as dangerous. And so the fortress that was built for protection becomes the thing that keeps connection at a distance. Two people end up carrying the weight of one person's anxiety. And the loneliness that was always the thing to be avoided, takes up residence anyway.

What begins to shift this

Understanding the origin of controlling behaviour is not the same as excusing its impact. The person on the receiving end of it deserves their experience to be named and validated - the loss of autonomy, the eggshell quality of the dynamic, the slow erosion of ease in the relationship.

But for the person who recognises this pattern in themselves - who has perhaps received feedback from people in their life, or who has begun to notice the distance that exists in their closest relationships despite their best efforts - understanding where it comes from is where change begins.

A nervous system that learned control as its primary means of staying safe can, in the right relational conditions, learn something different. That unpredictability does not always mean danger. That relinquishing control does not mean catastrophe. That it is possible to feel safe from the inside rather than having to manufacture it from without.

That process is slow, and it asks something significant of a person. But it is possible. And the relational experience of therapy - consistent, boundaried, attuned, predictable without being rigid - can be one of the places where that learning begins.

If this resonates and you're considering therapy, you're welcome to get in touch.

Written by Layla Eissa MBACP