Why are women so controlling?

Let's sing "let it go" instead.

Feb 21, 2024

Me in that lake last year, knowing what I’d lost is still there

Every so often I write about a client story to help illustrate a point. This week it’s all about control.

With a slight shade of shame, my client told me it was the first time she’d ever said out loud that she is controlling. When she subsequently looked back up at me, she seemed shocked that I hadn’t pushed back my laptop in horror and made an X with my fingers to ward away her evilness. I laughed.

“Yeah, you, me and most women I know.”

She was stunned into momentary silence. “You mean it’s not just me?”

“No,” I smiled. “It’s a little bit you but also a big bit of circumstance. And a lot of conditioning. There has been a time when everything was on your shoulders. You’ve been forced to be independent of family support from a very young age, a single parent for all of your daughter’s young life, and you ran your own business. Your modus operandi that was perhaps necessary for a period, hasn’t been updated to match your current reality. Now you have a partner, your daughter is stepping into adulthood, but you still run on the assumption that you are responsible for everyone and everything when in fact, you are simply not. That’s why you feel so resentful. Somewhere inside of you, you know how unfair it all is, but you haven’t updated your internal software.”

She stared at me like I had revealed State secrets. And then the part of coaching I love the most happened; her face slowly softened as the realisation steeped into her brain. It wasn’t all on her.

But then her face fell again. And I have seen this many times… for a second or so a woman finally comprehends it’s not actually all on her, that we were sold the lie we could have it all, but it just feels an awful lot like we’re doing it all, before the fear ripples through her body and out through her horrified face as she contemplates that that might mean she has to ……………….. let go.

As a Recovering Perfectionist, I know this trembling terror very well. Because controlling everything is the only way we can feel we have a grip on a life where in reality, we have very little control. It’s very confusing for women because we feel so resentful that we carry such a physical and emotional burden, while simultaneously fearing the failure of not doing everything.

Which is why she asked me the next question: “Why are women so controlling?’

I adjusted my soapbox and began.

There are three reasons why so many women end up trapped in a cyclone of control, leaving a devastating wake to their own emotional landscape and connection to self; where they just become a reactor to external demands and expectations, rather than a responder to their internal drives and desires: circumstance, conditioning and standards.

Circumstances of chaos

There may well be periods of our lives where we have to roll up our sleeves and (wo)man the controls. I often call this Emergency Mode. I’ve certainly had my fair share of them. Women in particular take on care roles like they’re going out of fashion, and can end up being the wiper of arses and ticker of tasks to such a degree that it becomes second nature. With no nurture. The problem is that - and reinforced by the second reason below - we can forget to come off Emergency Mode as the situation changes and evolves. Much of my work is helping women see it’s ok to take a breath, that they can start to slowly shift from Survival to Thrival mode. One scary step at a time.

Traditional Conditioning

This big bad boy that has kept women down for centuries, and for most of history, when women have tried to fight it they’ve been hung as witches or trolled as bitches, and it still cuts a deep groove in our psyche. Firstly women have been conditioned to believe our main value comes in what we do for others, as self-sacrificing givers. There is also still a heavy hangover from the societal storytelling that a woman’s worth lay in how clean and tidy her house was. More often than not, the voice in our heads that whispers the constant ‘shoulds’ and tuts loudly when we think of resting or rebooting or God forbid, doing something fun and nourishing for ourselves, are NOT OUR VOICES. Our voice is screaming to be heard, wailing for a moment to herself, banging the reinforced window to let her out, but the glass ceiling extends down to a glass wall that often keeps our true self from us.

Research was done in 1990’s that revealed that women are often caught up in what was called a Double Bind. Not only did we have to be good at the female traits (actually, be ‘A Good Girl’ in general) such as nurturing, loving, being kind, self-sacrificing, be a cool cat in the kitchen and a tiger in the bedroom, we also now had to be great at all the male traits such as being ballsy, ambitious, strong and dynamic, which is often at odds with the female stuff, and a total head-fuck for most of us as we end up pleasing nobody any of the time. When the research was revisited and developed a decade later, they found that not only had things not got better, but we are now in a Triple bind. Not only do we now have to be good at all the female and male stuff, we now have to also look and perform perfectly as per Instagram please.

We’re meant to look like we’re not trying and try like we don’t care, keep up the standards of the fashion fascists du jour, while presenting to the world a happy and habitable home (happy - because everyone’s happiness is your responsibility, and habitable because it needs to be homely, warm and cosy while also not looking lived in). I remember one client having a moment when she was stressed about her 19 year old adult son not ironing his shirt, and when I asked why this was her business, she wilted that it would be a reflection on her. “No it fucking isn’t!” I wanted to scream at her (and may have pointed out in a slightly less fuck-y way, although I can’t promise that). But the hangover persists, like a menopausal woman on wine.

Standards

Yes, circumstance and conditioning aside, we’ll all have our own individual standards by which we like to live. While one person likes to be meticulously tidy but doensn’t care about the dust behind the sofa, another will bleach everything in sight but not care if the hall is full of everyone’s trainers. One person’s penchant for towels folded in accordance with colour and size is another person’s idea of hell.

The key is to try and distinguish between your standards and those of the Social Police. As Mark Manson points out in The Subtle Art of not Giving a F*ck, you have to choose your problems. Nothing in life comes problem-free so choose which set of problems in any situation you can most live with.

So in the face of the fear of abandoning control versus desperately wanting release from all of the responsibility, you may have to choose which jobs you can live with not being done as well as you, then hand them over. There will be some that you just have to do your way and others you’ll have to live with being done so you don’t have to do them, but them not being quite a perfect as the Curtain-Twitching Standard. But first comes the understanding that it’s not all on you.

As I went into recovery a few years back - not for the Rosé, but the perfectionism - I found the Buddhist idea of non-attachment incredibly helpful. It took me a long time to really understand what it meant, fearing it meant I couldn’t love my kids or have ambition. The day to finally sunk in that it means not attaching yourself to expectations, not cornering yourself into one suffocating box, not being held to account or standards not of your making, not attaching yourself to things you own, not being defined by your circumstances, was when I lost something very precious to me.

I used to wear a charm bracelet. I carried a charm for each of my glorious girls, each silver piece representing their unique charm. There were four butterfly charms to represent the four babies I part carried but never held. I had other charms - to represent my freedom, my love of the sea. And finally I had a charm - made when my mum was dying - of her handprint. A reminder of the hand that had held mine throughout my life, a reminder of her hand always on my back. I wore the bracelet constantly and it even graced the cover of my first book, The Sandwich Years. As part of my midlife awakening, I had started cold water swimming, something that had previously been utterly abhorant to me. At a particular writers retreat as I was piecing my life back together, I plunged into the cold dark lake waters, baptised by the shocking glory, only to emerge with a bare wrist. The bracelet was gone.

I could feel the panic rise, the frantic horror that wept through me. But then I stopped. I looked back out to the lake and I finally got it. I never owned the bracelet. I had no control over it, and as the bracelet itself proved, very little else. And maybe now was the time to stop carrying death around on my wrist. The love and memories are in me, not in cold metal. And my mum’s hand was always on my heart, and I had to actually learn to be the hand on my back. And so I let it go and walked away. Each time I go back there to write, I swim in that lake, knowing it is somewhere beneath me, reminding me not of what I lost, but what I really have.

So how do you know what to let go of?

It is an on-going practice, letting go. A constant process of reminding myself what’s really important and then not crucifying myself with the idea that I am responsible for everyone’s happiness and everything in my home. As a single parent to three teenagers, this is an ongoing battle. But here’s the thing I see with myself and with my clients.

If we constantly do everything for everyone we disempower them.

Often I ask a client to keep a note throughout her week of her yeses; the yeses she is asked for, and the yeses she does without being asked. The latter list is often much longer. Then I ask her to mark the ones that felt good to do and those that caused resentment. And finally I ask her to mark the ones where she got thanks and recognition and those that didn’t. It can often be a really emotional moment as they realise how much of their energy goes on thankless, resentful tasks. And then I ask them to start practising letting go of them….. the house may get a bit messier but the world will not implode. After doing this exercise, one client stopped cleaning her 17 year old son’s trainers. A few days later he mentioned that she hadn’t done it. She simply replied that he had never acknowledged or thanked her for doing it so she assumed he didn’t want it done. It was an important moment for them both. He suddenly got that she had done this for him as an act of love, but even acts of love need recognition. He thanked her profusely and wondered would she go back to doing it but she had let that shit go, so showed him where the wipes where and suggested he do it himself every Sunday evening from now on. And she got back to living her life.

Recently another client was caught up in trying to control everything and everybody because she thought it was all her responsibility, and then realised she was wasting so much energy on stuff that ultimately wasn’t in her control. That the only thing she had any control over was herself, her boundaries, distinguishing her own voice from the out-dated cultural narrative, and where she wanted to direct her energy. I always ask at the end of a session what the takeaway was. And even though we’d just revealed that so much of what she was carrying was not her baggage, she automatically said “I need to get control of everything.” Then she looked at me aghast and I smiled as she realised how deep the groove of conditioning is. And so I asked her again and she laughed and replied, “that I need to let a lot of the shit go.”

We all need to let a lot of the shit go, and use the space it leaves to invest that energy on ourselves.

I’d love to know how much control you feel you have to exert over your family life, and what happens when you feel like letting some of it go, 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.)

Why are women so controlling?

Let's sing "let it go" instead.

Discussion about this post