Why Love Turns You Into A Control Freak

Everyone has a divine core, a soul, a Self containing the infinite power of the universe.

Everyone is also born in a pure yet fragile state. This paradox encapsulates the entire experience of becoming — you are at once infinitely powerful while teetering on the edge of human limitations and death. For this reason, maintaining control is crucial to keep from tipping over into the abyss.

The process of actualising into a self-sufficient and powerful human being is a delicate process. A baby senses how precarious its situation is. It has no capacity to defend, regulate or nurture itself. For this reason, the baby depends wholly on the love of its mother (and father), as well as its attachment to its parents.

The baby is on a constant pendulum between safety and calm on one end, and panic and chaos on the other. Attachment is like an emotional umbilical cord which helps the baby regulate its emotions as well as connect with the world and feel safe in it. Every positive experience with the parent reinforces the baby’s attachment to its primary figure, and the baby is able to thrive. The parent enables this process by attuning to their baby using facial expressions, body language, sound, touch and timely responses to distress. In effect, the baby outsources its ego to the parent, allowing them to control and nurture the baby’s growth and sense of well-being via attuned decision-making. If this is done well, the baby internalises the parent’s healthy ego, and develops from it a blueprint for love and relationships. Forming future relationships then becomes almost seamless.

A primary figure may however be distracted, rageful, unpredictable, cold, distant, snappy, sadistic or downright terrifying and destructive. Whenever the parent is behaving this way, the child’s fragile sense of control is lost, and the child becomes flooded with negative emotions. Shame, terror, panic, anger, guilt, anxiety; you name it, the baby feels it. This becomes so overwhelming to the fragile child, they dissociate from it. When they grow up, they have no conscious memory of these experiences.

Yet the body never forgets.

This trauma remains lodged inside. Furthermore, the now-grown person has a faulty attachment circuit. Because of the chaotic and haphazard nature of the parent’s attunement, the traumatised person associates love with fear, closeness with pain, and relationships with chaos. This is imprinted in them on a core level, beneath the level of consciousness.

As a result, such people tend to have an unhealthy relationship with control. They easily feel jealous, become clingy and desperate, panic often about the other person leaving, and have rigid expectations in their romantic relationships. All of this is fuelled by their original trauma, along with the countless terrifying memories imprinted in their core Self from a bygone time.

Little of this is rooted in reality or the present moment. An insecure baby feels protective over their parent because they are aware that this person is their lifeline. They get so overwhelmed by not being regulated and loved enough that it turns to rage. Their cells are filled with fear from all of the times they were terrified of their unstable parent blowing up and abandoning them for good. Remember that the baby is teetering on the edge of chaos and death. It was no joke for them.

Relational, attachment-based trauma remains with the adult at a core level, beneath their consciousness. Some people have so much core trauma, most of their relationships turn them into control freaks. Such people are having constant flashbacks to childhood, as situations in the present resonate with experiences in the past. Others remain relatively fine in most relationships that are not romantic. However, once they get close to that special someone, their authentic Self feels progressively safer to emerge. It begins with exhilaration and hope, until at some point they reach the attachment threshold — the level of intimacy which activates their trauma.

The chaos begins with an undercurrent of anxiety, a worried thought, or a spike of panic when their partner acts independently of them. Over time, the traumatised person is transported back to childhood, except now they have an adult mind and body. Their actions are carried out in an adult context while being rooted in an irrational, childish terror. The further the insecure person goes into the relationship, the deeper they move into their original trauma. Their triggers get pressed more and more, and their sense of safety and calm they had before the relationship is washed away. Panic dominates their every waking moment, and they cling desperately to control to help manage their panic.

To the uninitiated person peering from the outside, this person seems to be acting crazy. But from the inside-out, looking at it from the core, it makes perfect sense.