When it comes to your relationships, are you a control freak?

Are you a control freak in your relationships?  Maybe you are, but the hardest part is that you may not even know it because everyone is afraid to tell you.  But they do find ways to avoid you or ignore you.

This group of experts talks about control freaks in relationships and why this approach isn’t healthy.  They also go to the root causes of such behavior and talk about why it could be detrimental to your ability to have healthy interactions with your mate and children.

Here is some of what they had to say, with the video being below:

If you’re trying to change someone then you really don’t like them. One of the hardest lessons in relationships for women to learn is that we can’t control anybody but ourselves. Women are trying to change their husbands, their boyfriends, their children, their boss, their job. How can we help women to get a grip on this issue?

There goes the media again, spreading all this bad junk and everybody buys right into it and then there’s more bad junk because of the energy it’s all creating. We become unhappy with other people because we’re unhappy with ourselves. In order to become a whole, complete woman and be happy with ourselves, we have to work on our personal growth and our … The self-help books, programs, or whatever you get, that work for you; a coach, a therapist, whatever it is.

Once you start to be happy with yourself it’s okay to let other people be themselves. You understand, even personality styles … If you do the basic thing there’s four personality styles and they’re all very conflicting. If you understand that about people it gives you a whole new understanding. That takes the blame out. The reason we keep wanting to control everyone when we get in that mode is because we’re feeling out of control of ourselves. To inspire someone to do something the way we think it should be done or said gives us that little piece of feeling controlled because we’re controlling someone else, but that’s a power fix and it dies very quickly. It’s like a drug fix and you have to keep doing it. Then no one wants to hang out.

I think it’s conditioned too. You grew up in a house that’s, say, where your parents were controlling everything you did, you couldn’t have your own mind, your own thoughts, your own opinion then you learned that the only way to be in a relationship or to be able to tolerate another person is to control them as well. It’s this cycle that keeps going.