Control Issues | Suite101.com

One of the most frequent complaints I hear from people in relationships has to do with a spouse or partner with control issues. While the problem of needing control over others is certainly not exclusive to men, there does seem to be a majority of complaints of this sort coming from women. The man tells the woman what to wear, where and when she can or cannot go, whom she may speak to and what friends she may have. It often even boils down to how she may wear her hair or what kind of job she can hold. There are many women who are, at this very moment, prisoners in their own homes.

I have heard about this so many times in so many cases, that it prompted me to think about what this may mean in a symbolic sense. After all, when there are control issues on the forefront of a relationship, the issues must have a hidden or interpretive meaning.

It is just too easy to say that it all stems from low self-esteem on the controller's part. While this may be true to an extent, and someone may feel they need to be in control of other people because they feel a loss of control over their own selves, I think that treating esteem issues alone cannot completely solve this problem.

The masculine archetype is assertive. Both consciously and unconsciously, we all recognize masculinity as being powerful, aggressive, effectual, and confident. While we all know somewhere deep inside that each and every one of us encompasses both the masculine and feminine archetypes in our personality, consciously we find males more properly to be masculine and women to be feminine. So, why do some people take this part of their consciousness and make over-use of it?

It is possible, that in the case of controlling men that they need to be more in-tune with the proper way to express their own masculinity. Rather than as esteem problem alone, the crisis the need for control brings to their lives may possibly be a fear that they lack basic masculinity, and therefore over employ what they already have. A mix of low esteem coupled with a need to over compensate for the masculine archetype in the personality may also explain why this behavior is more common in younger men and teens than in mature adults.

So, what about women? We are less than innocent in the control game. Many women use control quite the way men do, but it more often comes in the form of being passive-aggressive. When a woman feels the need to test her handle on how to use the feminine archetype over and over again, his begins a different set of problem. The universal feminine is receptive. Femininity is known to be nurturing, intuitive, responsive, and observant. So, if a woman has a problem with her esteem and it is directly linked to whether or not she knows how to act on her feminine personality, she is going to direct that archetype into using it for control over others. This can manifest into passive control. Manipulation with words, emotions, or sorrow is common with these problems.