Controlling without bad intentions!

Not all coercive control comes from a narcissist.

When we hear the words coercive control, We think about the abusive partner who deliberately isolates someone from their friends and family, controls their money, monitors their every move or intentionally chips away at their confidence until they become dependent. This is what i thought anyway!

But I believe we’re missing a big part of what coercive control is. A part i have come to see everywhere, and to be honest, a part i am guilty of doing myself in the past when i knew no better! Long before I faced my pain and own bulshit. I cringe in shame when i look back.

I think coercive control can sometimes show up in places we would never expect because the person doing it isn’t necessarily trying to dominate another human being on purpose. Sometimes they’re simply trying to escape themselves.

Before anyone starts coming for me, let me be really clear. i'm not excusing controlling behaviour and Understanding where a behaviour comes from doesn’t make it acceptable. But it does help us understand why these patterns can become so normal that neither person even realises they’re happening. When you begin to understand human behaviour, you begin to see the need for control everywhere!

One of the things I see quite a lot is people who have never really learnt how to understand their own emotional world. They know they’re uncomfortable, but they couldn’t tell you whether that’s fear, shame, loneliness, rejection or anxiety. They’ve spent so much of their lives surviving that nobody ever taught them how to sit with difficult emotions, let alone communicate them. So instead of recognising what’s happening internally, they instinctively begin trying to organise the world around them in a way that makes those feelings disappear.

Without even realising it, they begin outsourcing the regulation of their nervous system to the people they love.

If they’re feeling anxious, they need constant reassurance. If they’re frightened of rejection, they become uncomfortable when you spend time with other people. If they feel emotionally unsafe, they may need to know where you are, what you’re doing or why you didn’t reply quickly enough. If they’re overwhelmed, they may become irritated when things don’t go exactly as they expected.

From the outside, it can all look fairly harmless. In fact, some of it can even be mistaken for love.

Regardless of why it’s happening, your behaviour slowly starts changing in response to theirs. You begin editing yourself. You think twice before making plans because you know it’ll upset them. You become responsible for reassuring them before you’ve even considered what you need. You soften your opinions, explain yourself more than you need to, apologise for things that don’t actually require an apology and slowly, almost without noticing, another person’s emotional comfort starts taking priority over your own.

Nobody sat you down and told you to do that.

Then very slowly, One person gradually becomes smaller while the other person’s emotional world quietly dictates the rules of the relationship.

From a neuroscience perspective, Human beings are constantly trying to move away from discomfort and towards safety. If someone has never developed healthy emotional regulation, they may unconsciously believe that controlling their environment is the same thing as feeling safe. But that can't ever really work because no amount of controlling another person can permanently settle a nervous system that has never learnt how to settle itself.

Ive noticed The world loves to divide people into villains and victims, but real life is rarely that simple. Humans are not simple creatures. We are messy and complex. Sometimes people genuinely have no idea they’re creating controlling dynamics because they’re acting from survival patterns they developed years ago. Some long before they even had language for f*ck sake!

I think this is one of the saddest parts of all of this. The person needing control isn't aware and neither is the recipeient. So many people don’t realise they’ve been adapting until somebody asks them a really simple question.

What do you want?

And they genuinely don’t know or if they do, they feel guilty or in trouble.

Healthy relationships don’t require one person’s nervous system to become responsible for another person’s emotional stability. They allow room for disappointment, disagreement, independence and honest communication. They recognise that every adult is ultimately responsible for learning how to understand, communicate and regulate their own internal world.

If reading this has made you think, “Shit… I’ve done some of this,” please don’t disappear into shame. Most of us were raised by people who were doing the best they could with the emotional tools they had, and we naturally inherited some of those strategies ourselves. And some of were raised by raging narcissist where we inevitably pick up traits.

The minute we think others have to act in a way that pleases us in order for us to feel settled within ourselves, is the minute we need to check in with ourselves. We need to understand that people are not in this world for our own benefit. If something unsettles our thorns inside of us and something stings us, that isn't the responsibility of the other person (unless they are a c*nt and it's intentional) but rather our own responsibility. We can't go around telling people what to do and how they should make us feel.

The moment another person’s emotional stability depends on you abandoning yourself, it stops being love and starts becoming control. You can have compassion for someone’s wounds and still recognise that they are responsible for healing them. Your job is never to shrink yourself so someone else can feel safe.

10 self reflections!

1. Maybe the question isn’t whether someone intended to control you. Maybe it’s whether you stopped feeling free to be yourself.

2. Because the moment you have to abandon yourself so someone else can feel okay, something has already gone very wrong.

3. intent matters. But so does impact. And your nervous system only ever remembers the impact.

4. Sometimes the most dangerous control isn’t loud enough to hear. It’s quiet enough that you slowly mistake it for love.

5. If someone can only feel safe when you’re smaller, quieter or easier to manage, that isn’t emotional safety. It’s dependency wearing a different outfit.

6. The healthiest people don’t need to control your behaviour to regulate their emotions.

7. Love should never require you to become someone else’s emotional life support.

8. Healing isn’t learning how to keep everyone else comfortable. It’s learning that you don’t have to disappear for someone else to feel okay.

9. You can have compassion for someone’s wounds without volunteering to become their bandage.

10. Maybe freedom isn’t finding someone who never gets triggered. Maybe it’s finding someone who takes responsibility for what they do when they are.

Loads of love