Every so often I write about a client story to help illustrate a point. This week it’s all about how harmful our own coercive control of ourselves and our lives is for women. This is such a huge issue for women, and I write here about why women often feel everything is on us (hence the need to control) and if we can just struggle and juggle and spin and grin we can bear it and manage the mayhem of our busy lives. Women in midlife are the busiest, and least supported, cohort of society, and we face unprecedented pressures and expectations. This is Part 1 - Part 2 next week!
“I just hate the fact that everyone is living their life and I’m supposed to just facilitate theirs but there is no room for mine! It’s just all so fucking hard!”
‘Everyone’ is her husband and her four kids.
‘She’ is a client I spoke to yesterday but this was one of several conversations like that I’ve had recently. Let’s call her Aoife.
Aoife is 49 with four kids aged 7-17. She’d had to take two years off work a couple of years ago because she just couldn’t manage the juggle and felt constantly so stretched she thought she was going to break. Now, she’s realised she still just does everything at home, but is thanked for none of it, everyone now assumes she is responsible for everyone and everything, and she had none of the money, independence and recognition from her work. So she’s decided to go back to work and has come to me because she is terrified of not being able to mange it all (her husband works very long hours and so seems to have an automatic get-out-of-jail-free card when it comes to housework, homework and childcare.) She is not unusual at all. I see this over and over again. And I have lived it myself.
I always watch for body language when I work with my fabulous women clients. And yesterday, another women, let’s call her Mary, in her late 40’s, was telling me how she was planning her week off. At one point her chest was so lifted with panic, her breath so tight she had leaned right into her laptop and I thought she was going to internally combust and I’d be splattered with bits of her through my zoom screen. Her “week off” was being laid out like a military operation, with literally a spreadsheet (I was her once, and mine were colour coded so my desire to help her is strong).The panicked bit had come when she was listing the things that had to get done to allow her daughter back to school. New uniforms. Books. Stationery. She then listed the times she had allocated to “just be” with her daughter, time blocks that looked like chores, squeezed between chores. I didn’t see a lot of joy or relaxation. It was a week off, after all.
She continued to tell me she was realising this week was beginning to feel quite stressful (no shit, Sherlock) so she was cancelling some coffees with pals she’d arranged… feeling pressure rather than pleasure from the thought of fitting in the one thing that might actually give her some space to be her, not the roles she takes on.
Over the weeks we have been looking at her intense need to control everything.… her often repeated line “I have to be prepared” fired out at me like a verbatim manta throughout each session. As we’ve worked together I’ve learned that “I have to be prepared” translates into "work like a dog for everyone in my life and job, so I can get to some stage of feeling in control of everything.” What I’m also learning is that I rarely hear her reaching that stage. That’s because ‘control’ feels like if you can get everything done, everything will be done (perfectly and everyone will be pleased) and you can finally sit down and relax with a cup of tea and a hobnob. But as every woman knows, there is never a time when everything is done (and never perfectly and NEVER when everyone is pleased) so the heightened state of controlling frenzy just keeps on rolling.
Once she’d whizzed off her itinerary for her “week off” I asked her to take a deep breath and sit back. Her body was so tightly bound up, this took a bit of effort.
Then I asked her to think about the week’s To-Do list from two different energies. She’s a Type A, A+ student so was already grabbing the pen ready to do her task, getting her body back into spring-off position. (I’ve been watching the Olympics and marvel at the prised and ready to launch position so many athletes get into just before their race starts and it reminds me of an almost permanent state I find many of my clients in.)
Firstly I asked her to prioritise the jobs and activities in order of importance from that familiar energy of tight control / pressured perfectionist preparedness.
Easy. She’d already done that.
Then I said, “Now that you have that done, you can relax because you won’t forget anything and you have your plan. You can see what “prepared” will look like in the week. So now I want you to let that sense of being-prepared-ness panic go - don’t recoil! - you have it done the list already and we can go straight back to it if you need to. But just for the fun, relax, and write the list again from an energy of enjoyment. Of being present and less tight. Of doing what might actually boost you as a person, where your slots with your daughter are about you and her having fun and connecting, not being a wound-up taught-feeling, time-pressured box to tick.”
It took her a moment, but as I watched her body and face slowly relax a little, and she connected back into some work we had done previously on how she wants her life to feel, she began to jot them down and slowly started to smile at me abashedly as she saw that immediately the priorities had changed. The coffees with pals where back on. The urgent, “stressful” school-ready jobs became a more enjoyable activity with her daughter rather than a fraught frenzy of panic.
She looked at me and nodded. We’d been doing so much work on this, she knew what had happened.
And she was able to do this because I’d introduced the concept of stepping away from the tightness of control to the flexibility and breathing space of gentle leadership.
Gentle Leadership
When I work with a women who is clinging on by her fingernails thinking control is the only answer, I can watch her physically recoil when I suggest letting go a little. So this column isn’t about letting go of control, but shifting its energy so you manage yourself (and life) with a sense of gentle leadership rather than coercive control.
When you live in a state of coercive control of yourself and your life (and again, I explain why women do this here), your energy is tight, inflexible, dictatorial, panicked, with an urgent / emergency pressure. There is no time to waste on experiencing each job / task / goal as it is being done -even the fun and enjoyable ones, because it’s all about the ticking off the list and on to the next. To take Mary’s example, even the time spent with her daughter was a box to tick, rather than a time to experience.
When you live with a state of gentle leading however, there is compassion, learning, empowerment, flexibility. There is still intention and focus but it has a more relaxed, less tight energy and is open to thinking and experiencing.
That’s because control is led by thoughts of “what's wrong with you? do better! must do! no room for rest! it’s all on me!”
Good leadership however asks “what support do I need?; what can be realistically done?; where do I need to shift priorities?; how I can make this about team work?”
There is flexibility and empowerment v tightness and rightness.
There’s something about Mary
I already knew Mary had had a very challenging childhood in many ways which has left her feeling she must control everything. She controls work, home and herself in an autocratic, panicked way, yet as a leader in work, she treats her team differently from herself and so much of our work was about her realising that childhood emergency primer isn’t serving her anymore as an adult.
So when I asked why her whole body changed and why there was a sense of panic around the school-readyness jobs, she told me the summer before she started secondary school, she was abroad on a language exchange. For some reason she came back so late, her mum hadn’t got her uniform and so on her first day of secondary school, she went in with no uniform and was brutally mocked by everyone in her new class. I can only imagine how devastating that must have been. Her sense of needing to be prepared already stemmed from a long sense of needing to feel in control from way back in her life, and that experience of being mocked over her uniform was compounding her daughter’s back to school needs. She then confessed she knew she was obsessed with her child going to school perfectly and was afraid that was affecting her (a different conversation for another day on repeating our Good Girl expectations on our daughters).
So I asked Mary, if the worst happened and she suddenly broke both legs, and couldn’t get to a shop, and given her child has already been in school a couple of years, if worst came to shove, could they pull together a uniform for Day 1? She nodded. If Mary broke both legs, could her husband go to a shop? She nodded. If Mary broke both legs, could she order the uniform online? She nodded. I asked her was there any chance at all, that her daughter would go to school with no uniform and she shook her head.
Control was stopping her leading.
Controlling meant she was blinkered by panic. Leading means she can see why it’s important but then follow on from that thought and also understand it’s not going to happen to her daughter.
So I asked her to think about what would it feel like if she let go a little of the tight control and started to gently lead instead. Starting with herself, would that mean she could asses where she needed help, get a perspective view rather than narrow alarmed goal (just make shopping for uniform the ULTIMATE pressure this week), understand the outcome is not just about results but about the journey?
She got it. She realised that when she leads (that it’s not letting go of the responsibilities and tasks but letting go of the tightness, the attitude problem that comes with control) she has more room for mental manoeuvre, that she can bring rationality into to equation over blinkered panic, that she can prioritise what really matters whiles also getting stuff done. And most of all, she can change the story. Her daughter will never be mocked like she was, and buying the school stuff can become a fun experience for them both. As I pointed out, she has 10 more years of Back to School modes so she has the power to choose now between making them all pressure cookers or pleasurable chores.
As for Aoife, we can’t pretend it’s not going to be tough when she starts back at work. But Control means she is responsible for everyone. Gently leading herself and the family home means she gets to add her own priorities into the mix, understand her family needs to undergo a period of retraining as she empowers and guides them to take on more, and that when she leads herself with compassion and direction rather than being beaten up by self-coercive control based on a lot of external patriarchal narratives, she can matter as much as everyone else in her family.
In practise
Controlling feels panicked and tight. Gentle leading feels empowering and wider.
Control means you are constantly beating yourself over the head with To-Do’s. Gentle leading means having direction but there is room to go with the flow and shift speeds when needed.
Control is about the doing - tick, tick, tick Gentle leadership is about the being - achievement and experience
This theme has come up so often recently (I think the summer holidays drives everyone crazy) and I spoke about it here in a recent interview earlier this year on Sile Seoige’s podcast Ready to be Real.
I’d love to know your thoughts! I’m going to write more about shifting from a state of constant controlling everyone and everything to a style of gentle leading next week and how it has changed my own life, my parenting and my work.
I absolutely love hearing from you, and I’d love to know how you feel about how control is ruining your life, so please join me in the comments below (if you’re reading this in an email, please click on the link below to go through to the website to join the conversation.).
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