A clinician with 20,000 hours of practice explains why men become controlling: they grew up without control over their environment or emotions, so they try to regulate themselves by dominating everything around them. Real self-control comes from managing only your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, not other people.
Over a decade, I worked in the trenches of mental health. I logged over 20,000 hours of clinical experience. 20,000 hours with clients working through their issues. And amidst this process, I began to see patterns, a pathology which helped me develop a deeper understanding about behaviors that A lot of things look different on the surface. It look like we have different problems, but there's nothing new under the sun. In reality, it all stems back and leads back to the same place. You could follow that trail of breadcrumbs which always leads you back to the same core issues. And when it comes to people needing control, what I found is that a man who is desperate for control, who needs control in his life, was truly a child who didn't have any, who didn't have control, who didn't have control of his environment, who didn't have control of his emotions, who didn't have control of anything around him. What happened to him, what he experienced, what he went through Lots of men are so desperate for control because they never had it. So if you're a wife who has a husband who's desperate for control, please understand where this is coming from. This is not coming from a place where he wants to control you, although it may feel like that. It comes from a place where he doesn't know how to control himself on the inside. And so he seeks to control the external. His whole life he's tried to fix the inside from the outside. Help him understand this. Help him understand that he doesn't need to control external variables in order to be control— in control of himself. Help him understand that true control comes from controlling the only 3 things that he ever could control, which is how he thinks, how he feels, and how he behaves. Do your best to not take it personal when this man wants to control everything in your lives, everything in his family. Try to get into a conversation with him where he can truly see that his need for control externally is really a need for control internally.
