Those who cannot control themselves try to control others

 Sometimes people who are unable to handle their fears, gaps, insecurities and frustrations experience a compelling need to control others. They try to impose their opinions and decisions on them, forcing them to conform to their wishes and satisfy their needs. This behavior leads them to establish dominant relationships in which they end up suffocating others, depriving them of the essential psychological oxygen to live.

This need to control others manifests itself in different contexts, times and situations. It can be an insecure parent who tries to control their children so that they remain in their responsibility for as long as possible. It can be a person who controls the partner trying to create a relationship of emotional dependence in order not to be abandoned. Or they can be friends, colleagues or difficult bosses who develop controlling behavior, manipulation or blackmail.

Whoever fails to put order inside tries to impose it outside

Many people try to control others because they lack self-control, inner discipline, and emotional autonomy. Their desire to control others is a compensatory strategy: they cannot regulate themselves, so they try to dominate and subdue others.

These are generally people who need to assert themselves through the relationships they establish. By controlling others they build a more powerful image of themselves and develop a perception of self-efficacy that they cannot achieve with self-control. This means that, deep down, they are insecure people, who have low self-esteem and severe difficulty in managing their emotional world assertively.

Indeed, this almost obsessive attempt to control others reveals a deep need to be "fed" and a deep fear of abandonment.

Their requests usually reveal this contradiction, showing that they project their own shortcomings onto others. They can tell us, for example, that we have to go on a diet when they are obese, or that we waste money when in reality they are not managing their finances well. A colleague may accuse us of not being efficient when he is wasting time, a partner may complain that we are controlling him when in reality it is the other way around.

The parent personalities also have difficulty coping with uncertainty, do not tolerate well the unexpected. Failing to adapt their emotional responses to uncertainty and adversity, they try to control those around them, in a vain attempt to find the security they need. In practice, they shift their locus of control from the inside to the outside.

Between the devil and the deep sea

Psychologists at the universities of Wurzburg and Basel have found that people with poor self-control tend to take extreme, "all or nothing" attitudes. This means these people react more impulsively and don't manage medium terms well, so their need for control doesn't allow for latency or excuses. These people will continually put us between a rock and a hard place: either we are with them and give in to their demands or we are against them if we decide to defend our freedom.

This inability to see the middle ground and understand that we need our living space, without it meaning that we love them or appreciate them less, is what usually creates tension in the relationship. People who feel an urgent need to control us continually push us to the limit, forcing us to give up many of our interests or postpone our needs out of love or compromise.

As a result, this type of person will ask us for everything: time, emotional support, loyalty, dedication and, of course, blind obedience, to the point of annihilating our "self".

Do not look in others for what you do not find within yourself

People with poor self-control need to understand that controlling others will not improve their situation because the problem is not external but internal. Dominating people only limits their freedom and, in the long run, creates friction in relationships that increase the chances of being left alone.

Therefore, they need to appropriate the psychological tools that allow them to develop self-efficacy. A good place to start is to try to be less self-centered.

An experiment conducted at Stanford University revealed that self-control depends, among other factors, on our ability to see things from another person's point of view. These psychologists have found that imagining how our future "me" would respond improves self-control by increasing our ability to postpone the gratification of the here and now to a later time.

Therefore, when you feel the need to control others, stop for a second and ask yourself what you have to manage within yourself. Tidy up inside, first of all.

Sources:

Hofmann, W .; Friese, M. & Strack, F. (2009) Impulse and Self-Control From a Dual-Systems Perspective. Perspect Psychol Sci ; 4 (2): 162-176.

Hershfield, H. et. Al. (2009) Don't stop thinking about tomorrow: Individual differences in future self-continuity account for saving. Judgm Decis Mak ; 1; 4 (4): 280-286.