The Controlling & Mistrustful Spouse / Relative
"Men and women are on a journey of discovery which is humanly unstoppable - a search for the truth and a search for a person to whom they might entrust themselves," John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, n.33.
The ability to trust, that is. to feel safe and secure with someone, is the foundation for giving as well as for receiving love. Therefore, it must be protected and strengthened in married life.
Men and women experience great excitement, happiness and joy when they find someone to whom they can entrust themselves. This happiness can last in some couples for a lifetime. However, most couples experience conflicts which can temporarily weaken their safe feeling or ability to trust. When trust diminishes, emotional walls unconsciously go up which then limit self-giving and receiving. Subsequently, spouses feel less love and may experience loneliness and irritabililty toward their husbands and wives. This type of stress also can lead to transitory tendencies to control or to withdraw. These stress related losses of trust normally can be quickly resolved through a process of understanding, forgiving, seeing the good in one's spouse and commiting oneself to trust and to love again.
In contrast to these transitory stresses on marital trust are the difficulties which arise when a spouse manifests ongoing controlling and dominating behaviors. Unfortunately, not a small number of spouses today bring into their marriages personality weaknesses and serious unconscious trust wounds from hurts with a parent or from other important loving relationships which lead them to act in a controlling manner.
The tendency to control in spouse can emerge slowly in response to hurts or character weaknesses or it can be present at the very beginning of a marriage. This serious personality conflict creates a great deal of tension and unhappiness in a married life. The Catechism of the Catholic Church in 1606 speaks to this challenge, Their (marital) union has always been threatened by discord, a spirit of domination, infidelity, jealousy, and conflicts that can escalate into hatred and separation.
This chapter will describe the challenge of dealing with a controlling, dominating spouse or relative and relate a process of healing. The healing of a compulsive need to dominate others is very challenging, but can occur. We have found that a spiritual component in the treatment process, as in addressing the compulsive behaviors in substance abuse disorders, can facilitate the relinquishing of the need to dominate others.
We begin the healing process by uncovering weaknesses in trusting because the more a person's safe feeling has been damaged, the more likely he or she is are to try to control or distance others. The checklist below identifies many symptoms of mistrust, as well as its origins from childhood and adult life. Hopefully, you will find it informative and helpful.
Mistrust Checklist
Please rate symptoms of mistrust in your own life and that of your spouse.
Thinking
- Catastrophic thinking (something bad is going to happen)
- Rigid thinking-a lack of openness
- Excessive criticism of others (as a unconscious way to distance people)
- Negative thinking
- Suspiciousness
- Hypochondriacal thinking (fear of serious illness)
- Paranoid thinking
- Excessive fantasy life
- Obsessional thoughts of controlling others
- View reasonable expectations of spouse as control pressure
Behaviors
- Numerous controlling behaviors
- Won’t listen to spouse
- Inability to show affection (fearful of being vulnerable)
- Difficulty praising others (fearful of allowing anyone to be close)
- Difficulty initiating lovemaking in marriage
- Doesn’t support spouse with children or alienates children from spouse
- Inability to include others in making important decisions
- Overly controlling with money
- Flight from committed relationships by excessive work, hobbies, or other interests - including too many religious activities outside of the home
- Inability to trust spouse with care and guidance of the children
- Few close friends
- Compulsive eating
- Excessive drinking or drug usage
- Addiction to pornography (escape to fantasy world)
- Difficulty pursuing intimate relationships
- Fear of flying, elevators or bridges
- Tendency to isolate and to retreat into oneself
- Difficulty in receiving help or advice from others
- Refusal to allow spouse to discipline children
- A need to have things his/her own way
- Withdrawal from others in front of TV, books, computer, etc.
- Overly strong dealing with others (caused by fear of being hurt)
- Poor team player
- Compulsive masturbation
- Attempt to isolate family from relatives
- Excessive financial fears
- Restlessness and hyperactivity (an absence of feeling safe)
- Aggressive behaviors
- Criticizes spouse in front of children
- Tries to cut spouse off from friends
Emotions
- Regularly irritable or hostile (anger keeps others at distance)
- Overly anxious
- Panic attacks
- Overreaction emotionally to minor life events
- Rarely relaxed or peaceful
- Bad temper
- Overly upset if things don’t go as planned
- Very lonely due to fearful of being vulnerable and of receiving love
- Fear of the future
- Emotional rigidity
- Lack of gentleness
Physical Health
- Irritable bowel syndrome
- Muscle spasms in different parts of the body
- Colitis
- Coronary artery disease
- Vulnerability to all major diseases if mistrust persists for years
- Severe headaches
Spiritual Life
- Weak spiritual life
- Difficulty in listening
- Limited ability to pray
- Excessive restlessness in meditation
- Difficulty in meditating
- Withdrawal into religion (excess religiosity)
- Limited ability to receive God’s love
Symptoms Total:
A score below 10 indicates mild mistrust, a score between 10 and 20 shows moderate mistrust and above 20, severe mistrust.
Origins of Mistrust at Different Life Stages
Now please try to identify emotional conflicts/hurts in yourself and in your spouse which may limit the ability to trust.
Childhood
- Loss of a parent, brother, sister, or close friend(s)
- Serious illness in a parent, sibling, or oneself
- Parent with substance abuse disorder or infidelilty
- Excessive time in day care
- Modeling after a fearful, mistrustful or overly controlling parent
- Legacy of mistrust and fear in the family
- Betrayal by loved ones
- Parental separation or divorce
- Rejection by peers
- Cold, distant or unaffectionate parent(s)
- Victim of the excessive anger of others
- Poverty
- Low confidence
- Numerous emotional conflicts in parents including selfishness, excessive anger, depression, anxiety
Adolescence
- Same causes as in childhood
- Poor body image
- Rejection by peers
- Difficulty in playing sports
- Parental infidelity, separation or divorce
- Intense selfishness and sexual acting-out/hooking up
- Peers who are intensely selfish
Adult Life
- Selfishness
- Repetition of the weakness of a controlling, mistrustful, critical parent
- Betrayal by loved ones
- Unjust treatment by bosses or coworkers
- Serious financial pressures
- Loss of job or health
- Desire to dominate others
- Rejection by significant others
- Weak spiritual life
- Insensitive relatives or friends.
Origins Total:
Mistrust and a Tendency to Control from a Controlling Parental Wound
The experience of a controlling mother or father is one of the major reasons for mistrustful behaviors in a spouse. If your spouse had a controlling parent, he/she will have many of the behaviors listed in the mistrust checklist but probaly will deny that they were the result of childhood parental hurts; worse, they may even blame you for their behaviors.
The emotional trauma of a controlling parent in childhood leads to an intense unconscious fear of being controlled. This fear results in a compulsion to distance or to criticize a gifted and trustworty spouse. The anger, sadness and mistrust from childhood experiences with a dominating parent is misdirected unconsciously at the spouse. The pain of mistrust can be buried for many years only to emerge for the first time after the birth of a child or after some other stress in the marriage.
Without a process of deep forgiveness of a dominating parent and growth in trust, the controlling spouse, in the words of John Paul II, will be "a prisoner of the past", that is, trapped by the hurts of the past. Growth in trust in one's spouse in these individuals is very challenging and difficult, however, it is possible, particularly if a spiritual component is part of the recovery program.
The spouses who are very resistant to give up their dominating behaviors in our experience are those who have embraced the victim role, denied later their family of origin pain and misdirected this pain of mistrust, sadness and anger at their spouses and their in-laws.
Other Factors Leading to the Controlling Behaviors
- Selfishness
- Pride
- Passive-dependency - The person with this personality trait chooses the helpless, victim or sick role in order to control.
- Sense of entitlement
- Weak confidence
- Excessive anger
- A personality disorder
- Harmful educational or psychotherapy experiences which foster the growth of narcissism
- The sexual utilitarian philosophy
- Religiosity
- A strong personality.
From Strength to Control
Those spouses with very strong personalities can engage in behaviors which they view as being responsible and caring, but which their husbands and wives can experience as being controlling and disrespectful, particularly under various types of stress. When this occurs, it should not be denied, as often occurs, but honestly discussed. Often a strong spouse can recognize an overreaction, apologize and make a commitment to be strong and loyal, but not controlling. In addition, growth in the virtues of gentleness and patience can refine and modulate the special character trait of strength and protect the marital friendship.
Case Studies
The following case studies I’ve written on dealing with the controlling spouse are taken from Helping Clients Forgive: An Empirical Guide for Resolving Anger and Restoring Hope. Since they have helped many couples, they may be of assistance to you as well. Forgiveness helps to break the control patterns, purifies the memory in a sense and enables one to live with less anxiety and anger. Forgiving those who have damaged one's trust is essential maintaining trust in a marriage.
The Controlling Husband
In our clinical experience, forgiving the distant or unaffectionate spouse is an easier task than forgiving the controlling spouse because the latter one is usually more rigid and arrogant. Also, the domineering spouse is much more resistant to therapy because he or she is defending the self against serious unconscious emotional conflicts. When the person enters therapy, initially there is a compulsive attempt to control the therapist.
The most common causes of controlling behavior in a spouse are the result of modeling after a controlling parent or of a narcissistic personality. Another reason is a stressful and traumatic childhood and adolescence as a result of having an addicted, extremely angry or narcissistic parent. Also, many of those abandoned in childhood will be highly controlling in their adult lives as a compensation for the lack of security they experienced. Finally, some spouses are extremely controlling due to their narcissistic personalities which result in their insistence on always having their own way.
It is challenging and quite difficult to resolve the emotional conflicts of controlling spouses and help those individuals let go of their excessive anger. One reason for this is that most of these individuals have a weak foundation in trusting others as a result of their childhood and adolescent traumas with parents.
Once the client is aware of the origin of the spouses need to control, it is possible to become more confident and assertive and point out the weakness of the controlling partner. In the work phase, the offended partner needs a great deal of patience because a significant change in this type of behavior can take a considerable amount of time. Also, it is usually difficult to continue forgiving the controller since domineering behavior is repeated on a regular basis.
When one forgives a controlling spouse, it does not mean that the individual decides to tolerate insensitive treatment. Instead, forgiveness can remove the stress of anger and strengthen the spouse to be assertive and to make the necessary decisions that need to be made to protect oneself and ones children, and improve the marital relationship. Finally, if the spouse is unwilling to give up the controlling behavior, marital separation might be indicated. Such a step may be the only thing that will motivate some spouses to work on their compulsive need to control.
Jed is a twenty-eight-year-old married man who was controlling, overly critical of his wife and irresponsible in the home. His wife, Violet, entered therapy because she could no longer tolerate his behavior. For a long time he refused to participate in marital counseling and only agreed after Violet threatened separation and divorce.
Initially, Jed blamed Violet for his anger. He was highly resistant to examine any conflicts from his family of origin and blamed Violet and her family background for the stresses in their marriage. Clinical experience has shown that there is more resistance in the uncovering phase of the treatment of marital conflicts than in the treatment of any individual disorder. For months Jed reluctantly came to therapy and did very little work because he wanted to maintain control over his wife.
Violet accused him of not working in therapy and again threatened marital separation unless he worked on his own conflicts. It took many months for Jed to accept that his difficulties with trusting and anger were the major source of the marital conflicts. Until that time he tried to pressure his wife to end therapy and, when that failed, he attempted to control most of the sessions by blaming his wife for the stress in the marriage, by using humor to defend against his own weaknesses and by not following the advice of the therapist.
Violet had great difficulty coping with her anger with Jed because, for months, he did not appear truly motivated to change. She tried to resolve her anger for the good of the marriage by forgiving him. This forgiveness did not limit her ability to be assertive with him. She was able to express her anger in an appropriate way when he was being controlling. It is not unusual during treatment of such cases that therapists experience anger toward a controlling client. The therapist may benefit by forgiving such clients during or after the sessions.
Under the threat of separation, Jed finally admitted that he had grown up in a family with a very controlling mother and with several older sisters who treated him in the same manner as his mother had. He reluctantly accepted that he might have an unconscious fear of being controlled by his strong wife, as he had been by his mother and older sisters. Even though he would not admit the presence of anger with these women, he was given a cognitive forgiveness exercise in which he was asked to reflect that he hated being controlled when young and that he wanted to try to forgive the controllers in his world.
Again he manifested a great deal of resistance, not truly entering into the work of forgiveness. He continued to try to control numerous aspects of their life together including the care of their home, their time together, their leisure activities and regularly overreacted in anger when he was unsuccessful. His ability to invest trust was so limited that he did not begin the hard work of forgiveness until he felt considerably safer with the therapist. In order to build that trust, the therapist would regularly reiterate that he did not want to control Jed and was not an agent of his wife. Also, the therapist expressed the view based on many years of clinical work that unless he resolved his anger with the offenders of his childhood that they might control him for the rest of his life. Specifically, they would limit his ability to enjoy a trusting, relaxed relationship with Violet. The fear of being controlled by others motivated Jed to finally work on letting go of his deep resentment and to try trusting his wife.
Jed grew in trust as he reminded himself daily that his wife was a trustworthy woman who did not desire to control him. The growth in trust facilitated his ability to let go of the resentment toward his mother and sisters, which he had been misdirecting for years toward his wife. The recovery process was stormy with intense quarreling and threats of separation necessitating several years of therapy because Jed, like many controllers, was ambivalent about giving up the control.
Violet, during this period, worked daily at trying to forgive Jed so that she would not overreact each time she saw his controlling behavior manifest itself. Jed, in the deepening phase, grew to become more trusting of Violet and felt greater love for her. Furthermore, he regularly expressed remorse to his wife for all the ways in which he had hurt her.
The Controlling Wife
Several months into their second marriage, Dave, 53 years old, and Marsha, 50 years old, came into therapy because of their marital fighting. Dave complained that his wife, Marsha, was driving him crazy because of her constant criticism and because of what he viewed as her compulsive need to control every part of his life. Dave was profoundly discouraged and talked about giving up on their new marriage. Marsha disagreed with him and claimed that her criticisms were fully justified. However, Marsha grew slowly to understand that she had difficulty trusting Dave because of all the ways she had been betrayed by her first husband who had left her for another woman as well as by her own mother, who had been an extremely critical person.
Since Dave was more receptive to understanding the concept and benefits of employing forgiveness, he was asked to use it first to resolve his strong anger with his wife. Marsha was resistant to uncovering her anger, but she eventually agreed to employ past forgiveness exercises for hurts from her mother and former husband. She became highly motivated to resolve her anger toward her mother. She did not want it to control her and she knew it was essential to reestablishing a healthy, loving relationship with Dave.
Marsha had far more difficulty in forgiving her former spouse, whom she was trying to forgive at the same time she was forgiving her mother, because she had never fully recovered from the betrayal pain he caused. She related, "I gave myself totally to him and he used me and left me for a former friend. Thinking of forgiving him is so hard. He should be punished and suffer for what he did to me." However, Marsha committed herself to the very hard work of forgiveness because, as she stated, "I don't want him to control me and I want to be freed from that part of my life." As her anger with her former spouse diminished she was able to admit that she feared that Dave would betray her as severely as her former husband had and that this fear gave rise to a need to control.
Other therapeutic interventions which helped improve this marital relationship were for Marsha to reflect daily that she wanted to trust Dave and not control him and to ask Dave for forgiveness for her compulsive need to control. Their love became stronger as anger lessened and trust grew.
Resolving anger with those who have damaged one’s ability to trust is very effective in diminishing the emotional pain of the past and in building a safer feeling in the marital relationship.
Common Reactions to a Controlling Spouse/Relative
- Withdrawal
- Anger
- Sadness
- Anxiety and muscular tension
- Correction
- Excessive use of alcohol
- Seek friendships outside marriage
- Loss of confidence
- Exhaustion
- Failure to connect
- Rebellious behaviors including infidelity
- Excessive anxiety secondary to loss of trust
- Enable controlling behaviors
- Avoidance of the home
- Psychosomatic disorders such as irritable bowel, headaches, etc.
- Failure to work on the marital friendship.
Response to the Controlling Spouse
When this conflict is present in a marriage, it should be discussed in a calm and charitable manner. First, however it is helpful for the offended spouse to try to understand why their spouse has this weakness. Next working on forgiving him or her is essential on a daily basis so that when this issue is discussed there is less likelihood of overreacting in anger. This type of forgiveness can be challenging because the controlling tendency may lead to frequent emotional pain and hurt and because there is significant resistance to facing this weakness in the personality. Spiritual forgiveness in which one gives up anger with the controlling spouse to God can be the most effective way to diminish this resentment.
The offended spouse can consider relating that being treated in a controlling manner is demeaning and harmful to their personal dignity and to their marriage and family. Fear often blocks the honest discussion of this marital conflict. This anxiety can be overcome by entrusting the marriage to the Lord on a more regular basis. Then a request can be made for the offending spouse to try to make a commitment to try to overcome this weakness. Growth in the virtues of faith, hope, trust, patience, sacrificial self-giving and fortitude are helpful in this challenging healing process.
In Christian marriages another beneficial intervention can be to remind the controlling spouse on a regular basis that the Lord is in control and not either spouse.
Stress with controlling in-laws
Relatives can engage in numerous controlling behaviors which are often masked and which can create severe stress on a marriage. These offending behaviors include:
- criticizing unfairly responsible parenting
- trying to influence the number of children in the family
- demanding excessive attention and time
- pressuring a couple to live in a certain area
- demanding more loyalty to them than to the spouse
- pressuring a couple to embrace the contraceptive mentality and caferteria Catholicism
- ignoring in-laws
- trying to dominate through the victim role
- withholding grandchildren
- attempting to interfere with and criticize the parenting of grandchildren.
The strategies for dealing with a controlling spouse can also be effective in dealing with these relatives. The identification and labeling of controllings behaviors is the first step in dealing with these individuals. Then a request is made to end the offending actions. If this request is ignored, some young Catholic couples may decide to stop meeting with their in-laws until they agree to cease their controlling and critical behaviors.
The Role of Virtues
A daily commitment to grow in the following virtues can help to diminish the need to control and anxiety:
- trust
- faith
- forgiveness (of those who have damaged trust)
- fortitude
- gentleness
- humility (to face family weaknesses)
- prayer (meditating on feeling safe and protected at every life stage).
The Role of Faith
A survey of nearly 37,000 men and women, which was presented at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in May 2005 in Atlanta, showed that people who regularly attend church, synagogue, or other religious services are less likely to suffer from depression, anxiety and other psychiatric illnesses than those who don’t.
The lead researcher of this study, Marilyn Baetz, MD, of the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, stated, "The higher the worship frequency, the lower the odds of depression, panic disorders and mania,”
As stated in other sections of maritalhealing.com, faith can play a beneficial role in the healing of emotional pain and conflicts. (See faith and healing at the National Library of Medicine web site, Medline.) A number of spiritual interventions help in resolving control conflicts and in building deeper trust in marriages. These include employing daily modification of the first two steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and thinking “I am powerless over my tendency to control and want to turn it over to God.” The process of meditating daily “Lord you are in control, not me” and “Lord help me not to act like a controlling parent” are also effective.
For those Catholics who could not trust their mothers, attempting to meditate upon Mary as a trustworthy mother at each life stage can deepen their safe feeling. People with mother conflicts also report that they have been helped by asking the Lord to give them a gift of Mary as another loving mother who has always been with them.
Similarly those who could not trust their fathers report being helped by meditating daily upon God the Father or St. Joseph as another loving and trustworthy father at each life stage. Again, some find this process very challenging and find it easier to ask the Lord to give them a gift/sense of God the Father’s love and St. Joseph’s love during each phase of their lives.
Since the tendency to want to control others is often the result of modeling after a controlling parent, being thankful for the gifts one has acquired from parents and then asking the Lord to free one of the acquired parental control weakness can slowly help to resolve this compulsive habit.
When a decision is made to try to overcome the personality and emotional weaknesses which lead to controlling behaviors, Catholic spouses report being helped by taking these weakness to the sacrament of reconciliation on a regular basis. Some spouses believe that their control tendencies diminish also as a result of asking to be healed of this conflict after receiving the Eucharist. Also, husbands and wives have found that trusting more in the graces of the sacrament of marriage to be assistance.
A deeper understanding of marriage, human love and sexuality acquired from a study of John Paul II’s outstanding books,.Love and Responsibility and Theology of the Body, lead to a deeper respect for the spouse and the sacrament of marriage. These insights usually help to diminish the tendency to control.
The Vatican document, Letter to Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World contributes to an understanding of some of the present cultural conflicts which have contributed to mistrust and the need to control and of God’s plan for collaboration and not for control struggles between men and women.