How to control your emotions in a relationship even if you’re a control freak
By Orit Krug | December 20th, 2020
Do you have a good handle on most things in life, but feel like a total failure on how to control your emotions in a relationship?
Do you find yourself arguing, overreacting, and feeling overly emotional with your partner? Perhaps you try to put such a tight lid on your emotions that you end up exploding at the first sign of conflict?
Let’s talk about why this is happening and how to control your emotions in a way that eliminates the drama and creates a healthy, lasting loving relationship with your partner.
Past trauma makes us feel the need to control everything so life doesn’t fall apart again.
Being a “control freak” is a common symptom of trauma because you experienced a huge loss of control when the traumatic event happened. You were hurt, abandoned, or rejected by someone else in a way that was immensely painful.
If you were able to have control over the event while it was happening, you would’ve gotten out of the situation earlier or prevented it altogether.
But now, the story and belief living in your body is that you get hurt when you don’t have control. Things become unsafe and bad things happen. So your primary way of coping today is to have tight control over as much as you can in your life, so that these bad things don’t happen again
On one hand, it feels good to have control so you can prevent horrible things from happening again. But the reality is we don’t really have control over most things in life, and this false sense of control is more harmful than helpful.
Holding onto THAT much control creates a lot of tension in our bodies. It often makes people feel like prisoners in their own bodies, because even though the control feels sort of “good”, there’s a bigger part of you that just wants to feel FREE and have some damn fun.
Imagine how letting loose and being more spontaneous would improve the connection and fun in your relationship. You might laugh more and experience new adventures together without all the drama and fear showing up from the past.
Even “control freaks” have a hard time controlling emotions in their relationship.
I find with my clients that these are the top 3 reasons why this happens:
1. You finally feel safe in your current relationship
This might not make logical sense at first. If you feel safe in an amazing relationship right now, wouldn’t you have a better handle on your emotions and not be so reactive?
Well, actually, because this is your first time in a safe, healthy relationship, you FINALLY have the ability and freedom to show your emotions in a way that was never allowed before.
In your past traumatic relationships from childhood to adulthood, there were negative consequences when you expressed your emotions, so you were forced to shut them down. You weren’t allowed to talk back or share your real feelings.
In your relationship today, you can yell at your partner if you’re angry and they’re not going to hurt you. You can talk back and be in your power. It’s a totally new experience for you.
While this is a GOOD thing that you’re finally in a healthy relationship, it’s also uncomfortably foreign. It’s like you’ve opened a lid to a jar that’s been shut for many years. All that energy and pressure that’s been pushed down is exploding all over your partner now.
2. You’re trying to heal your old trauma through your current healthy relationship.
Your safe relationship feels like a safe space to finally work through your old trauma and repair the hurt from the past.
It may even feel productive for you to yell or cry whenever you have conflict with your partner, as if you’re working out old, heavy emotions. But it’s actually counterproductive if you want to create a healthy lasting relationship. It makes you sabotage your connection and push your partner away instead.
We ALL need a safe relationship to heal the trauma from our past unhealthy relationships. This safe relationship CANNOT be the one you have with your partner. They’re not qualified to heal your trauma, and even if they are, that’s not their role in your life. That’s your therapist’s role.
Once you’re doing the trauma healing work with a safe, qualified therapist outside of your relationship, you’re much less likely to explode with your partner.
3. You have so much control with everything else in your life that sh*t explodes when it comes to your relationship.
While old trauma taught you that having control will protect you from getting hurt, it’s not an effective or sustainable plan. You may feel comforted by all the to-do lists and event-planning, but you’re bound to explode somewhere else in your life. We can’t hold everything together all the time.
Imagine the emotional and physical energy it takes to always be holding it together. It’s a lot! You might even feel that tension in your body from holding it all in (or you’re completely numb). It’s like a pressure cooker. Eventually, your body needs to release it. Fast and hard.
You might even experience this tension-release pattern in cycles. Everything is good for a while. You hold your sh*t together and then BAM! 2 weeks later you’ve exploded again.
What you really need is a rhythm and flow that is much healthier. One where you consistently express your emotions calmly, even when you’re angry. You don’t push your feelings down, but you don’t let them explode either.
Get into the habit of expressing your emotions in a calm, cool regulated way.
When you’re storing past trauma in your body, your nervous system automatically reacts to the tiniest triggers in your relationship.
Despite knowing that you’re currently in a healthy relationship where your partner won’t hurt you, any reminder of your past trauma puts you in such a primitive state of fear during conflict.
This can make it feel impossible to control your emotions in a relationship with your partner because this survival response kicks in before you can even THINK about how you want to respond.
If you’ve tried talk therapy and couples counseling to break these unhealthy patterns without success, it’s not your fault. You are NOT broken.
You just need to heal the trauma from your BODY and rewire your nervous system, so you can be in command of your responses and have a healthy lasting relationship with your amazing partner today.
Get on the right path to healing trauma from your body and nervous system.
Many people spend decades and thousands of dollars in traditional therapies trying to heal their trauma. Unfortunately, even the most popular therapies are scientifically shown to be limited in accessing trauma stored in the non-verbal brain and body.
Even alternative approaches, such as EMDR and Brain Mapping, are often not enough to fully heal from the physical body or the nervous system.
This makes trauma healing a very frustrating journey for so many people. They often blame themselves for being “un-healable” and decide that they’re broken.
This is NOT true!
Every human being is 100% neurophysiologically capable of healing from the past, because we all have wiring and neural pathways that can be rewired from fear and overprotection, to love and openness.
My unique, scientific-backed process via Dance Therapy has helped hundreds of clients finally heal from past trauma and transform their relationship (even after decades of trying in other therapies).
You can heal too, but you need the right methodology.
Sign up for my online course (ranges from free to $20 USD) to begin a unique, body-based learning experience that will teach you:
- Science-backed education about how trauma is stored in your body and nervous system. You’ll gain an understanding why it has NOT been your fault you haven’t healed yet from past trauma.
- Gentle, guided body-based movement that is necessary for integrated healing. This is crucial if you want your mind’s intentions to match your body’s behaviors in relationships.
- An embodied approach to healing that has helped hundreds of clients break unhealthy relationship patterns and let in healthy, lasting love.
