3 exercises to fix relationships with family and friends

Relationship with a child

The controlling parent wants to know everything about the child, wants him to be transparent to him in his actions, emotions, feelings. What is his unconscious purpose? To keep the child completely for himself and fashion him into something that meets the needs and expectations of the parent.

One of the reasons is the panic fear of separation and the existential emptiness that follows it. The second is the inability to present the child as an independent person, and not as an extension of himself.

The parent expresses this fantasy through cold dominance or emotional extraversion, intrusion or overprotection, affective blackmail, denial of intergenerational differences, turning himself into a god to his son or daughter.

Results

A child treated in this way is unable to get in touch with his desires. To give pleasure, to support, to be a “good object” for parents is the condition of his mental survival.

Always on the alert – “am I doing the right thing?” – he puts all his energy into suppressing aggressive impulses. As a result, in communicating with his peers, he often takes a position of either excessive restraint or authoritarianism.

Exercise: revisit your past

The controlling parent is a former child who grew up in an affective relationship based on fusion and intrusion.

Viewing your childhood through this lens, revisiting your personal history—on your own or with the help of a therapist—will help reduce the tension that comes from repressed aggression and find a more appropriate distance in your relationship with your child.

Specifically, this means respecting his territory – bodily, emotional and spatial – depending on his age and personality.

Relationship with a partner

Treating the other like a child – anticipating and satisfying all his desires and needs, being jealous – blocking the way for any third party intervention, real or symbolic – or devaluing the partner, showing affective coldness, the controller unconsciously tries to reduce the physical, emotional and symbolic distance between himself and others.

He hopes to relive the initial merger, or, conversely, to compensate for the inferiority of the first relationship, which lacked parental attention. At the beginning of a love relationship, it is not easy to draw a line between the expression of love passion and the desire for control.

Both passion and control are equally characterized by the desire to merge, jealousy, bordering on the obsession of thoughts and feelings. It is only with time that controlling patterns of behavior emerge more clearly. Then two options are possible.

Results

Either the couple operates in a dominant-subordinate pattern and both are comfortable with it for reasons related to each’s personal history—same is the case with the fusion pattern—or the dynamics of the relationship is driven by one partner, the controller, and the other tolerates it. Again and again conflicts arise, and flight is often the only salvation for the one who is being mistreated.

Exercise: Get More Independence

The controlling partner lives without being aware of his needs and desires. His energy is in the service of the illusion: “If I weaken the connection, then I will be abandoned.” But it is by taking care of our basic emotional and affective needs that we can establish a relationship of intimacy.

Developing your own interests, caring for your body, starting psychotherapy are all ways to restore a shattered sense of inner security and a damaged self-image.

Relationships with friends and colleagues

Control can be done in two ways. An active controller builds relationships with his environment, saturated with affects, always based on dominance, sometimes conflicting, like “who is not with me is against me.” The passive prefers not to come to the fore, go with the flow and avoid conflict in every possible way.

The active controller is more feared and respected than loved. This brings him suffering and can increase his aggressiveness. The passive, on the contrary, silently suffers from the fact that little attention is paid to him and he is not respected enough.

In a relationship, the controller may identify with the controlling, invading parent and dominate, or remain as the child who holds back their emotions and desires. He is too depressed to enter into a genuine, equality-based relationship in which communication takes place “with the visor up.” To win love, he “pleases”.

Results

In both cases, it is about keeping at a distance another person who poses a potential threat, trying to maintain affective power over him and not be excluded from the circle of relations.

Exercise: stop being the center of the world

It is difficult for the controller to imagine that the world does not revolve around him. A friend hasn’t called in a long time? This does not mean that the friend has problems, but that he is opposed to the controller. The employee does not support the project proposed by the controller? He does not just defend a different point of view, but attacks the controller personally.

To cope with such feelings, you can make a list of possible motivations for other people, trying to take into account all the options. The passive controller can learn to assert himself in a secure environment with people he trusts.

About the author: Isabelle Korolitsky is a psychoanalyst, author, and expert in French Psychologies.