Have a Controlling Spouse? Read This Article!

In this weeks article a girl talked to me about the relationship she has with her 2nd husband. When I asked her to sum up her complaint about her husband in one sentence, she chose: "He is controlling". She backed this statement up with all kinds of information to make sure that she was completely justified.

What occurs to me when I hear a woman call a man "controlling" is that she has the belief that she can be controlled. This interests me. Whenever a person thinks that someone is doing anything TO them, they are giving their power away. When our minds believe that way about anyone other than ourselves, we get to be the one who is attacked by their actions, and we do not need to take responsibility for our own.

In this situation, she was blaming him for why she no longer sings. He wanted her to stop singing in bars, which was something she loved before they fell in love and got married. She complied, and, as a result, stopped singing altogether. She then started being resentful that she no longer lived her love. She chose to end her singing because it made him uneasy, and yet she noticed that he kept acting the way he liked no matter how upset she became.

Why is this problem the case for so many women? It is this way because women like to keep their men happy and also keep them around. Women act on those beliefs and then make themselves unhappy in the process. Resentment sets in and the ladies then turn around and BLAME the men, as if they contributed to it! (Gentlemen, please substitute yourselves accordingly and see that this holds just as true in how you think about women!).

In order to uncover her thoughts and free her from their hurtful outcomes, we worked together on a number of levels: To start, we looked at her history with gentlemen in general and some thoughts she had in place about men and how they are controlling. Second, we discovered her pattern of victimization and the way she used it in the past and how it hampered her relationship in the present. Then, we thought about the way her life would be if she didn't call men controlling. Finally, we gently looked at how she showed up in the exact ways she blamed about her spouse and men in general. As she noticed how "controlling" she was in her thinking about what she wanted him to do in order to please her, the giggling began. Once we "get" what we are really doing, it is hard not to laugh!

Her willingness to take responsibility for how she shows up in relationship to men is the key to her ultimate success. When she focused on all of her husband's faults, the situation was without hope and she was ready to cut her losses and move on. As soon as she noticed how it was her that was getting rid of him because of her resentment, she got to look at a number of options that she could choose to make her different. She changed from without hope and power, to full of hope and power.

What an exciting opportunity to be with someone when they have the chance to dig deep inside themselves and come up with so many kinds of positive possibilities!

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Emily Bouchard, MSSW, offers a free online newsletter to assist blended families. Webmasters! Get a unique version of this article at http://blended-families.com/cs/spin/?f=family_controllingspouse.php