Discovering the Compulsion to Control

Compelled to Control: Recovering Intimacy in Broken Relationships
by J. Keith Miller

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Chapter 1

Falling Out of the Speedboat
Discovering the Compulsion to Control

“You're controlling my life!” Sue shouted at Roger. Her face was contorted, beams of hot, red anger shooting from her eyes. “You interrogate me about every dime I spend and then you go out and buy a brand new set of golf clubs.”

“Every weekend that football is on TV, we have to stay here so you can watch. You don't like my friends who don't like football, so we never see them any more. We only see your friends.”

“You control what we eat by only eating beef and potatoes and making fun of vegetables in front of the children. I suppose you think it's funny when you say that if you wanted to eat a bush, you'd get a plateful from the side yard hedge!” Sue glared at her husband.

Roger stared back in disbelief. What was she talking about? “I'm controlling your life?” His voice began to rise. He could not believe she was serious. It seemed to him that they always did what Sue wanted. The voice that repeated over and over in Roger's head always seemed to say, “Make your wife happy. Be unselfish. Do what she wants and she'll love you.”

“For God's sake, Sue, I've gone where you wanted to go on vacation, gone to movies, plays and symphonies because you wanted to, made love the way you wanted and deferred to you about how to raise the kids-including what and how much they can do at each age.” As he spoke, Roger felt a rumbling rage churning up his stomach. This was the second most controlling woman he'd ever known-next to his mother. And Sue was saying he was controlling her life! Roger's face was flushed as he tried to get his voice under control. He said evenly, “You try to control me every chance you get. You've done it through our whole marriage and you're doing it now. I'm sick of fighting with you all the time. I don't know, maybe we should just call this whole sorry marriage off.”

Now it was Sue's turn to look at Roger in disbelief. She turned and stalked out of the bedroom, slamming the door.

“And that,” Roger told me, “was how the great war was declared that finally brought us to you for counseling.”

Given my experience-with my own compulsion to control and that of many other couples equally as sophisticated and intelligent as Roger and Sue-I suspected that they were both controlling, but that each could only see the other's control behaviors. At any rate, neither of them knew how to stop. They told me that intimacy had gone completely out of their relationship, except for the occasional sex-truce when they were both frantic to make love. Roger said sadly, “I love Sue and want to be close to her again. But things are so screwed up now that we can't even talk without fighting, let alone begin to like each other again.”

Although they didn't have the words for it yet, what Roger and Sue wanted to know was this: What is this compulsion to control that blocks our communication and pushes us farther and farther apart? How can we become intimate again? Do we even know what authentic intimacy is? Apparently most of us do not. A divorce rate in America of more than 50 percent attests to our lack of understanding about what makes relationships work-and what causes them to fail.

How I Fell Off the Boat

Several years ago, having finally achieved the kind of success I'd always hoped for, my life began to fall apart. I had been an executive in the oil exploration business, a marketing consultant, a personal counselor, a writer and lecturer. I had a degree in psychological counseling, and I had been told that I was intelligent and sensitive. I enjoyed my work and was recognized in my field, and I had an attractive and loving family.

Then, seemingly out of the blue, the people closest to me began to tell me that I “controlled” them. I didn't know what they were talking about. After all, I was generous with them, I loved them and I dreamed of their being beautiful, successful people-like I wanted to be. I was a serious Christian trying to live a good life. What I didn't see was that my controlling presence was like a giant amoeba that slowly spread over my intimate relationships, oozing silently and inexorably across other people's boundaries, until my vocation, my ideas and my expectations crowded out the space for their identities and growth. My controlling behaviors were somehow occupying their emotional territory. Instead of focusing time, attention and love on them, my life had become the central life in our relationships. My vocation and dreams absorbed my thinking and took up the space where their lives would have been free to develop.

The discovery that I had a compulsion to control everything and everybody in my life came as a real surprise to me-I had always seen myself as a sensitive person who wanted everyone to be free to do what they needed and wanted to do. Since I couldn't see that I was always taking up more than my share of relationships, I was angry when others didn't appreciate the good things I thought I was bringing them. The results were bewildering arguments, separations and the frightening sense that my life was out of control. I felt emotionally depressed and lonely, with an even stronger need to “get things under control”-although the idea of “control” never consciously crossed my mind.

I accelerated my social drinking to kill the pain of this bewildering turn of events and what I regarded as false accusations. I tried desperately to get some sanity and closeness back in my life and relationships. But the harder I worked to create a life in which we could all be happy, the more people around me seemed to rebel. As I tried to cover the pain of my bruised ego and sense of inadequacy, I worked even longer hours to get away from the pain.

Of course, I didn't see myself as compulsive; I just thought I was able to get more done than other people. I couldn't see that what I thought was a desire to get the most out of life was really a deeply rooted compulsion to control, which I manifested by working most of the time. I worked more and more and became increasingly irritated and defensive. The fear that my life and relationships would become unmanageable increased. I feared that my inadequacies would be revealed and cause my loved ones to leave. As my feelings became more intense, I felt that a giant spring was tightening, forcing to the surface deeply submerged fears of failing, of being alone and ashamed-fears I'd held in check since childhood.

As my loneliness progressed, I began to seek ways out of my dilemma. I kept reminding myself that I was a loving father and husband, a writer and counselor who had helped many people. But evidently those with whom I thought I had the most intimate connections saw me as a self-centered and controlling egomaniac. It was very disturbing.

The degree of resistance to seeing my own control issues is almost unbelievable to me now. I simply could not believe that I was a controlling person in my home, when all I wanted to be was a good husband and father. Yet the clear evidence of my family told me otherwise. Finally, after several personal tragedies-including a divorce, some serious financial reverses, and much loneliness and pain-I sought professional treatment. As my denial cracked open, I discovered that my controlling attempts to cover my pain had turned into compulsive behavior that qualified as an addiction in itself. I was using this behavior to “fix” my life and was only making things worse. Only when I became aware of my contribution to the problem could I begin making steps toward a new way of living.

That was more than 10 years ago. The help I received in treatment, and later in 12-Step programs, has transformed my life. The quality of my inner experience and personal relationships has changed so much that I often find myself awake in the middle of the night, weeping with gratitude.

All this time I have continued to work the 12 Steps and attend meetings several times a week. I live an increasingly comfortable life that suits what I feel is the real me. For the first time I feel a serene settledness about who I am and how I can relate intimately to those close to me. Although I fail often, I now have the tools to move from separation back to intimacy with people and with God.

Understanding the Compulsion to Control

When I decided to write about the insidious compulsion to control other people and how it destroys personal relationships, my friends either grimaced or smiled as they recognized themselves. “Oh my gosh, it's true. Hurry up and write that book. I need it.”

As I listened to people, it soon became apparent that control problems have an impact on more than personal relationships. Many people offered examples of their self-defeating attempts to control business associates, medical practices and church groups. The resulting destruction of relationships and morale was devastating.

As I began the project, I intended to survey psychological abstracts on the compulsion to control to see if my research would turn up anything that would verify my idea that control is the major factor in destroying intimate relationships. But I ran into a stone wall: there was almost nothing. Though many psychologists and counselors were convinced that the attempt to control was the major issue in many dysfunctional relations, none could recommend anything in the literature to explain it satisfactorily.

In the past few years, several writers, such as John Bradshaw and Pia Mellody, have noted that childhood abuse and the resulting shame, guilt, anger, pain and fear in adult children lead to controlling behaviors that, in turn, have a profound effect on people's ability to have functional intimate relationships. I could find no one who had put forth the notion that there may be a dynamic “disease-like” factor in the compulsion to control that could have an enormous influence in the destruction of relationships.

The compulsion to control infiltrates like a cancer, destroying not only intimate relationships, but the health and happiness of people in educational, religious, political and business institutions. I had the sense that we were a nation of controllers. But how was I to write about a truth that everyone suspects yet no one wants to admit?

The words of psychologist Carl Rogers helped me tremendously:

I came to a conclusion which others have reached before, that in a new field, perhaps what is needed first is to steep oneself in the events, to approach the phenomena with as few preconceptions as possible, to take a naturalist's observational, descriptive approach to these events, and to draw forth the low-level inferences that seem most relative to the material itself.

This is what I had done, albeit unconsciously. I had steeped myself in the experiences of recovery and dealing with the pain in the disease processes involved in addictions, compulsions and broken relationships for 10 years. And now, in a secular context, I was going to write about what I had discovered.

My first question was basic: What is the underlying inner struggle for control all about? And from where does the compulsion come?

© 1997 Health Communications, Inc.

About the Author

J. Keith Miller is one of the nation's most widely known and respected inspirational speakers and authors. He is an oil entrepreneur-turned-author with degrees in business administration, theology and psychological counseling. Miller has more than 15 books to his credit with over 4 million copies in print. His books include facing Co-dependence and Facing Love Addiction, both of which he coauthored with Pia Mellody and Andrea Wells Miler; A Hunger for Healing; Hope in the Fast Lane; his classical spiritual guide, The Taste of New Wine; and The Secret life of the Soul.