“I know it’s a hard lesson to learn, but you cannot love yourself and love someone who hurts you at the same time. Please choose you.” Stephanie Bennett-Henry
My client’s husband is controlling.
- She wants him to hear her thoughts and perspectives, without immediately discounting them or her.
- He needs to be more relaxed and carefree in how he shows up with the family.
- She wants him to not monitor every dollar she spends and then require her justification for the expenditure.
- She wants him to see that different approaches – while different than his – are not “wrong.”
- He should not bring that same controlling energy to how he parents their daughter.
Here’s the problem: She wants her husband to be a completely different person than he is.
Controlling energy is NOT a behavioral issue. It is a long-standing wound that makes someone not feel safe in this world. So in order to feel safe, they controlled the circumstances and people around them, including their kids and their spouse.
The problem is that no one on this planet is here to be controlled.
Not our parents or siblings…
Nor our kids…
Not the boss at work… not our friendships…
By no means our spouse.
No person is on this planet….in this life…at this time….to be controlled by another human being. Not. One. Person.
Each of us came into this life to create our own life experience – not to live out the life as someone else thinks it should be so they can feel safe.
The reason my client had been stuck in indecision for so long is because she kept trying to get her husband to change his behaviors.
But his behaviors were a result of acting upon deep insecurities.
The behaviors weren’t going to go away until that old wound was healed.
Once she knew where the behavior was coming from, she could begin to have a different conversation with him…
One where she set a healthy boundary for herself and said that if he was not willing to work on healing the root cause of his need to control her, she was no longer willing to remain in the marriage.
That’s when sh*t got real, and lasting change became a possibility.
To remedy the struggles inside our marriage, we’ve got to stop looking at the band-aid, surface-level, quick-fix approach. Instead, we’ve got to understand the root cause of the individual’s behavior that’s creating the issues in the marriage.