Relationships are crucial to our well-being as humans. We need strong connections to friends, family, romantic partners, and community members to feel safe, accepted, and to give meaning to our lives.
Alongside that need for connection, we also need to feel that how we are expressing ourselves is accepted and safe. For some people, especially those who have lower self-esteem or struggle with feelings of worthlessness, tightly controlling how we behave and express ourselves is how we find this sense of “being okay” around other people.
This kind of overcontrol is, unfortunately, an exhausting and inconsistent source of a sense of safety that relies on hiding how you feel and who you are. You can end up in a constant struggle between control and connection, feeling lonely, misunderstood, and just “wrong”, even when you’re in a relationship.
What does overcontrol look like in relationships?
People who overcontrol in relationships may avoid fully expressing how they feel, or play a part in their relationship that they think fits who they should be, not who they are. They may plan out their conversations and try to rehearse reactions to create a specific outcome. They may be overly vigilant, self-conscious, and constantly looking for problems. Feeling open and honest with others may feel threatening, not rewarding. Perfectionism, envy, comparisons, and insisting that things go a certain way are also components of overcontrol.
For some, overcontrol in a relationship can look like detachment. Being “above it all” and “not emotional” in a relationship is a way to control behavior to try to prevent closeness, avoid vulnerability, and ultimately reject someone first, so they can’t reject you.
For others, overcontrol can look like a carefully curated persona who does all the “right things” to have relationships go the “right way.” It can be fake smiles, disconnect from feelings, and avoiding all expression of needs or wants in the hopes that sustaining the connection will fulfill you.
Why does overcontrol damage relationships?
Strong relationships require authenticity and spontaneous responses to bids for connection. They require a willingness to be open to possibility, a radical acceptance of how you feel, and a willingness to express it. Overcontrol eliminates the possibility for you to receive or provide a spontaneous and authentic connection. You can’t get close to anyone when you’re trying to stay in control.
When you overcontrol, your relationships may end prematurely, or never grow into an open, honest connection where you make room for vulnerability, uncertainty, and trust. You may feel lonely (even while in a relationship), and may feel you have few friends; you may even worry you weren’t meant to have any connections in your life.
The good news is that overcontrol is something you can overcome. You can have authentic, rewarding relationships! Radically Open Dialectical Behavior Therapy, or RO-DBT, at Suffolk DBT, is designed to help people who deal with emotional overcontrol. It teaches you skills in how to use radical acceptance to find room for openness to new experiences, mental flexibility, and emotional expressiveness.
Radical acceptance in DBT is a long-term practice of honesty and authenticity
A relationship needs to feel real and trustworthy to feel meaningful. It requires radical acceptance of how things are, who you are, and what is happening in the moment, both within you and around you.
So how does RO-DBT teach radical acceptance? It sounds simple. Take an honest look at the current situation, and accept that what is, is.
How do you really feel? What is happening between you and your partner at this moment? Do your actions reflect how you feel, what you think, and who you understand yourself to be? As you think this through and thoughts of “should be” or “well if I just do this, then…” pop into your head, redirect your attention to the facts of the moment; what you feel, what you think, what you are doing, what’s happening around you.
Notice, and accept. This is happening. You might not like it, and you don’t have to approve of what’s happening. It might not feel comfortable; you might not even be sure yet what you’re feeling, as you’ve spent so long over-controlling. You may want to make some changes in the near future. But right now, accept that this is what it is.
Radical acceptance is the opposite of overcontrol
For people who struggle with overcontrol, this can be a distressing experience at first. Mindful reflection on how you feel, what your values and needs are, and whether or not you’re expressing them openly is the opposite of control. Your immediate instinct is to jump to changing how you express yourself or what you do in the relationship to try to mitigate the pain.
You might want to act disengaged and “over it” to shut down a connection that could lead to vulnerability, or you might have urges to frantically fake a smile, over-give, and over-agree to try to steer the relationship toward connection, at the expense of your own needs. Instead of being present and open, you want to shut yourself down. This is overcontrol, not acceptance, and it’s what’s keeping you from having satisfying connections.
Mindfulness and radical acceptance help you let go of overcontrol and embrace the moment
When these urges to overcontrol strike you, stop everything for a moment. Recognize your desire to overcontrol, name the emotions that are driving it, and take a mindful look at your inner emotional world in this moment. Accept that you are someone who reacts with overcontrol right now, and accept that you are learning a new skill of radical acceptance, which can take time. Steer your mind toward accepting and experiencing the moment first, before you decide on any actions to take.
It’s the same principle as learning anything: you try, and try again. Radical acceptance is something that sounds very simple, but takes a lot of practice. As you work on it, you’ll find your mind reaches for acceptance instead of overcontrol.
Radical acceptance reduces suffering and releases mental resistance
Often, overcontrol in relationships is linked to shame, fear, and self-consciousness; you feel ashamed of having emotions, or of the possibility of rejection or failure in a relationship. You fear loneliness, and you fear the pain that shame brings you. It is constant, stressful, and causes you suffering. You try to control the past, present, and future.
Radical acceptance helps you use DBT principles to experience a moment of pain without attaching yourself to it. Pain is something that will happen in life, and it is normal to have miscommunications, disagreements, and to experience rejection in relationships.
Radical acceptance of the normalcy of painful moments in relationships helps you let go of overcontrol and so reduces your suffering. Instead of going over the experience again and again, resisting that it happened, trying to think or argue your way out of it having happened, and trying to figure out how to control the relationship so it goes the way you want in the future, you can accept that it happened. It hurt, but it happened.
You can’t change the past, and it’s not your responsibility or within your control to do so. You can only do so much to alter the future, and the best starting point for creating a life that feels worth living is to notice what’s happening now, without struggling against reality. With radical acceptance, you release the suffering of wanting to change something out of your control.
RO-DBT at Suffolk DBT can help you let go of overcontrol and build better connections
Overcontrol in relationships leads to unmet needs and unstable connections. This can lead to loneliness, weak social connections, dissatisfaction, arguments, and resentment.
One of the most crucial things we need to form high-quality relationships is the ability to be open, expressive, and authentic. At Suffolk DBT, our therapists want to help you find a different way to approach relationships, one that helps you create satisfying connections. By using the support of RO-DBT and radical acceptance, you’ll be able to stop trying to control your relationships through overcontrol of how you behave and express yourself. Radical acceptance in DBT will let you make room for uncertainty, vulnerability, and spontaneity, that allows a relationship to feel real and fulfilling.
RO-DBT is most useful for people who have gone through a regular DBT program through Suffolk DBT, but still struggle with symptoms of emotional overcontrol from conditions like eating disorders, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), trauma, social anxiety, paranoid or avoidant personality disorders, Autism, treatment-resistant depression, and more. Previous DBT experience is not required, however. Anyone can benefit from using radical acceptance as a way to let go of control and welcome satisfying connections.
If you are interested in Suffolk DBT or want to schedule a free 15-minute consultation, or if you want to access our Long Island DBT therapy or our Manhattan DBT therapy services, please contact us today.
