Is your Spouse Controlling?

While hope may keep many in controlling relationships, blindness may as well. Another reason why many women don’t leave controlling relationships is that the manipulation is so subtle and slow in developing that the victim may is often not be aware. “It is such a slow tedious process, like the old analogy of slowly boiling the frog,” said Fay. “When this person first meets her, he zones in on the fact that she has the right vulnerable traits that he wants to attract. And she thinks, ‘Someone finally gets me. I don’t want to lose him.’”    

“Control can feel good in the beginning. He wants to take the lead. He puts together the dates and all you do is show up. It feels really good to be taken care of, but it often masks the kind of control that is not healthy,” said Tina B. Tessina, 64, a Long Beach, Calif.-based psychotherapist and author of "The Commuter Marriage: Keep Your Relationship Close While You're Far Apart (Adams Media, April 2008). "

This tendency, she says, is one of the signs to look for at the beginning of a relationship to detect whether or not you might be dating a controlling person. Testing the water by not agreeing with one of his ideas is another. “I would say if he has a bad reaction when you don’t fall right into his plan, whatever it is, if he gets really upset, that is a bad sign. If there is an emotional response, more temper tantrummy or pouty than just crestfallen, that’s a problem,” Tessina said. “He should be able to handle that.”    

Seeing the behavior early by paying attention and noticing the signs is perhaps the only way to detect the true nature and intent of the person trying to draw you in. “We teach people how to treat us. This behavior starts out in dribs and drabs, but there are always signs. If we are on date three or four, and he says to me, ‘My God, Mary Jo, are you always this stupid?’ and I ignore this strong signal, if I make excuses for him and don’t acknowledge that he even said that, I am teaching him it is OK to call me ‘stupid,’” Fay said. “The next time, he calls me ‘a stupid fucking bitch,’ well, maybe I think, ‘Yesterday, he was fine, and now today, he called me this. Nothing has changed, so it must be me.’”    

“But a healthy woman, the first time he called her ‘stupid,’ would say, ‘No one calls me names.’ But we don’t do that, because in part we are worried that if this guy disappears there won’t be another one.”    

In any situation with a partner that might be controlling, standing up to that person is the best way to flush out the truth. But be forewarned, though, sometimes that truth can be dangerous. “Standing up to a controlling person and letting him know you refuse to obey will have one of three results,” Tessina said. “He may say, ‘OK, I get it’ and drop the control, but you need to be vigilant; it may crop up again. He may just go find someone else he can control and good riddance. Or he may escalate into abuse and violence. The third one is the dangerous one. If this happens, you must protect yourself immediately by getting family or friend support, or calling the police if necessary.”    

Which in many extreme cases is what happens if you should decide to leave the relationship. “If he is in control of everything, you walking out threatens his belief system,” Fay said. “You just left, and if he is control of everything, that just doesn’t fit. He will either rage to get you afraid, or he will attack in some other way. Or he will suddenly do all sorts of things to get even with you. Or he will simply ignore you as if you don’t exist. Then you are not in his life to wreck his paradigm and he will find a replacement for you.”   

For Elliot, it was a combination of all of the above. “After a particularly abusive episode, we separated, and even then he tried to control me. When he would take the kids for visitation, he would threaten to keep them if I didn’t listen to him and do what he said. Only through my therapist advising me to tell him, ‘Go ahead and keep them,’ did I start to zero in on what was going on. It took me most of the first year, but it was intense therapy, support groups, 12-step meetings. I threw myself into it. I just didn’t want to dance anymore.”

Lenore Skomal is author of nine books and columnist of an award-winning weekly column in the Erie, Pa., Times-News, she also teaches college journalism in Pennsylvania.