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The Psychology of Control. Reality Breaks The Spell · Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Hello and welcome back.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: This is Kim Lee, child and adolescent psychotherapist from the Children's Consultancy.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: The next episode is the final episode in the series about the psychology of control.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: We've covered quite a lot of different things, the different ways in which control finds expression, the effects upon recipients, and how patterns form, both in terms of one-to-one relationships, but also in terms of family systems and how people become organized around the control in different ways.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: At the beginning, though, people usually think control is about power and dominance, about one person overpowering another.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: But by now I think we can see there's something more complicated.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: Because the most powerful controlling systems rarely begin with force.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: They begin with confusion, adaptation, silence, ambiguity, guilt, emotional withdrawal, and the gradual erosion of self-trust.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: And by the time somebody realizes what's happened, they're no longer simply trapped in a relationship or family system.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: They're trapped in a psychological reality that slowly reorganized the way they think, feel, perceive, and exist.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: A reality in which survival replaced freedom.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: This final episode is about what happens when reality begins to return.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: Because throughout the series we've explored ambiguity, emotional withdrawal, guilt, family secrets, gaslighting, etc.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: But underneath all of these dynamics, there has always been one central theme.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: The struggle between reality and control.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: Because psychologically, controlling systems ultimately depend on one thing above all else, and that is the suppression of reality.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: Control doesn't merely shape behavior, it shapes consciousness and awareness.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: Over time, people inside controlling systems begin censoring themselves, doubting themselves, adapting automatically, suppressing instincts, and abandoning emotional truth, their emotional truth.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: And this happens gradually.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: And it happens so gradually that many people don't realize how psychologically organized they've become until much later.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the deepest tragedies of controlling systems is that survival strategies often become identity.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: The compliant child, the hyper-vigilant partner, the endlessly accommodating adult, the guilty son, the emotionally responsible daughter.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: I've spoken about these things in other podcasts.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: But survival isn't the same as living.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: And eventually many people will reach a moment where the cost of adaptation becomes unbearable.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: They're exhausted, emotionally fragmented, disconnected from themselves and unable to trust their own instincts, and psychologically organized around fear rather than truth.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: Now this is important because reality rarely returns dramatically at first.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: It usually begins quietly.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: A moment of clarity or a contradiction that's too obvious to ignore.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: You know, a child speaking openly or a body no longer tolerating the stress, sudden recognition that this isn't healthy.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: And once that awareness genuinely enters consciousness, the controlling system begins weakening.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: Because control depends upon participation, not necessarily conscious participation, but psychological participation.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: The individual must continue doubting themselves, minimizing reality, overriding instinct, and maintaining the emotional structure internally.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: But when self-trust starts to return, the system destabilizes.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: Now here's a paradox why separation feels so difficult.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: Even destructive systems often feel emotionally difficult to leave, because familiarity creates attachment, not a healthy attachment, but an attachment nonetheless.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: So people may remain emotionally connected, not to safety, but to hope, guilt, fear, responsibility, longing, or the fantasy that the system will finally become what it promised to be.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: And this is why psychological separation matters so profoundly.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: Because true separation happens internally before it happens externally, and this is incredibly powerful.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: Going through the process of internal separation is what makes the external or the expressed separation so much more effective.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: And so psychological separation means something very specific.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: Because the person begins reclaiming perception, thought, emotional legitimacy, boundaries, and independent reality.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: They begin saying things like what I feel actually matters, and what I experienced was real, and I am allowed to think independently, and I am allowed to exist separately.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: I define me.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: And although these statements may sound simple, psychologically they are revolutionary inside controlling systems.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: They really are powerful.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: The fear of reality in controlling systems is because they expose the truth and they're resisted, openness is resisted, accountability, differentiation, therapy, and emotionally separate thinking.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: But because reality destabilizes control, children who think independently become harder to manage and to organize.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: Partners who trust their instincts become harder to manipulate.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: And adults who no longer feel fear guilt and essentially wake up to the illusion, that sounds a bit critical, I don't mean it that way, become harder to contain.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: And once reality is consistently spoken, the structure will collapse.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: Now we must also understand something important, and this has to do with the intergenerational cycle.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: Because control often travels through generations.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: Children raised in ambiguity, guilt, emotional withdrawal, secrecy or instability may unconsciously recreate these dynamics later.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: Not because they're malicious, they're not consciously aware, it's because psychologically the familiar often feels emotionally convincing.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: And this is how unresolved systems perpetuate themselves across the decades until somebody begins recognizing the pattern consciously.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: I see a lot of this when I'm working with parents who, when we look at their experiences of being parented, will very often be something that they realize is influencing their own patterns.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: And when we look more deeply, we can see that their parents' parents, i.e.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: the grandparents, may have had very similar kinds of patterns.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I always point out to them so here is the opportunity to change that.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: What you do now as parents could very well result in healthy grandparents.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: I'll try that again.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: It could result in healthy grandchildren.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: What I mean by that is that what we're investing into our own children will generationally find expression with their children and so on.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, it's not a fate it complain if you've if you look back and think, well, my parents were like this and their parents were like that.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I hear that quite a lot.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: That's true, but actually that is the point where change becomes possible if we realize where we're stuck.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: And this isn't just about control, it's about a whole number of other things, which is you know, for another series.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: A person who stops adapting automatically, and sometimes this is the child who finally speaks, the partner who leaves, the adult child who names reality, or the individual who finally trusts their own perception again.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: I liken this sometimes to the story of the emperor's new clothes, and the child who in the crowd shouted, Why does the emperor have no clothes on?
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: It is very much that what we call reality confrontation, and it is powerful because it's not about asking somebody if your feelings and your mistrust and your your experience of them is true or not.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's not asking, it's telling.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: I am telling you, this is how it is.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: And often that person is initially described by the system as difficult, selfish, unstable, disloyal, cruel, or something else, because systems don't like change.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: And when when a person starts to challenge it, it it implies that something needs to change.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: But actually, just because the individual is changing doesn't mean that they have to they have to suppress that change or seek permission for it.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: It is the system that has to change or end.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: Psychologically, truth tellers therefore destabilize controlling structures.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: Something else here, and that is the difference between love and control.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: And perhaps the most important distinction in this entire series is this.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: Love and control are not the same thing.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: Love allows reality, freedom, emotional truth, differentiation, repair, and psychological psychological existence as a separate person.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: Control is about management, suppression, adaptation, fear, guilt, or emotional dependency.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: There's also another thing here where a person who may describe themselves as loving, as being loving, as being caring, etc.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: A patient once said to me that somebody somebody told them, but I call you every day.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: I'm still here, implying that there was some something valuable in what was happening.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: But actually, it it transpired that when they called every day, they never asked about the other person.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: They spoke constantly about themselves, about their latest drama.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: So they were controlling the narrative, another form of control, and put the other person who told me in a very difficult position because they didn't feel they could confront it.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: Eventually they did, but they didn't confront it directly, they just left the situation.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: But I think the point here is again we we have to understand what control looks like.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: The assumption is that it's obvious, it isn't.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: Not always.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: So although control may sometimes disguise itself or try and describe disguise itself as love, the emotional consequences are profoundly different.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: So if this is love, gotta hate to see what hatred looks like.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: But what healing looks like.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: Healing isn't becoming emotionally invulnerable.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: It is not never feeling triggered again.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: Healing means recognizing patterns earlier, trusting yourself more consistently, tolerating emotional reality and no longer abandoning yourself to preserve psychologically unhealthy systems and relationships.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: It means remaining connected to reality, even when reality is painful, because pain that is processed truthfully heals.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: But pain managed through distortion usually repeats.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: I think that one of the deepest tragedies of controlling systems is not only the suffering that they create, but it's the number of people who spend years believing I'm too sensitive, too difficult, too emotional, too reactive, too needy, or fundamentally wrong.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: When in reality, they have simply spent too long inside environments that required them to mistrust themselves in order to survive.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: Very often we can track these things back to the earliest family, and how the child learned this in their early experiences, and how that's influenced their attachment styles, their unconscious choices of relationships, and the inevitable replaying of loops and patterns that all have the same outcome.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: The deepest act of psychological recovery isn't revenge, it's not punishment, it's not even confrontation, it's reality, the quiet, steady return to what is true.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: We don't need someone to acknowledge and accept and take responsibility for their actions.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: It would be nice, but you know, we live in the real world, that's highly unlikely.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: If somebody controlled you in this way in in the beginning, then they're not likely to have an epiphany anytime soon.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: It comes about as a consequence of self-validating.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: When I talk about the recovery process, I I do so in terms of it being three stages.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: The first is the recognition, actually seeing and saying, albeit to yourself, what's happening.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: This happened, that happened, this is a pattern.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: I've I felt this and and I suffered in this way.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: And actually all these things come to the surface and give you a picture.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: And the next stage is the reckoning.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: The reckoning is the action stage.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's kind of what do I do with this?
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you confront the other person, maybe you don't, maybe it's an internal confrontation.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: And it could just be the agreement, I'm not doing this anymore.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: I can't do this, I'm not going to allow this anymore.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_00: And that very often then takes people to the point of what do I do where this relationship is concerned?
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: It depends on the context, but a lot of people will at that point say, either this changes or I walk.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: Not so easy to do in families, but certainly not unheard of.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_00: And the final stage is about redefinition.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's about rules and boundaries, about agreements you make with yourself, about what you will tolerate and what you won't.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: It is about asserting without being aggressive.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: It is about quietly learning the truth that is right for you.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: Because actually, truth doesn't stop existing once it's been silenced, and the human self, however deeply buried beneath adaptation, fear, guilt, and survival, continues searching for freedom.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: And perhaps healing really begins at the moment you finally stop asking permission to believe your own experience.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: I sincerely hope that this series has been helpful.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: What I hope is that people can move away from being stuck, that they can take that first step into recognition.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: What is happening and move through.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: Real change and recovery takes time, and that's okay.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't arrive dramatically, it's not done in a single graceful leap.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: You do it in bits, and you have to do it in bits because you're consolidating something new.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: But what it means is that you will be alert to a pull towards controlling relationships, identifying controlling patterns early on, and probably more than anything else, trusting your own instincts.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: You have nothing to prove.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: In the next series, I'm going to be looking in some depth at attachment.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: I'm doing this because I think people talk about attachment, they talk about bonding or feeling attached, and that's all fine.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm going to look at it more forensically in terms of the psychology of attachment and the different attachment types that there are, the way that attachment is formed, why we need attachment, what happens when attachment is compromised, how different attachment types show themselves in behaviors, patterns, reactions, and how we learn to manage the attachment type that we have when it becomes problematic.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: This is all about the work of John Bowby and Mary Ainsworth, for those of you who wish to Google.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_00: And it truly is fascinating.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_00: I remember teaching my trainee psychotherapists who were doing master's training about attachment theory, and I I I knew quite a lot already, but I what I didn't realize was the wealth of material, research, and evidence of this fascinating, invisible process.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: For now, thank you for listening, and I'll be back soon.