The False Safety of Control. Why Your Need for Control Might Be Keeping You Stuck
The need for control is one of the patterns I see most consistently in women in corporate, and one of the most misunderstood. It shows up in the women I coach who are managing anxiety, burnout and the relentless pressure of high stakes careers. And it shows up for me…in all aspects of my life, although definitely some more than others.
Control often feels like safety, and so when life is uncertain, when your relationship is new, or going through a difficult period. If there is a lot of change in your workplace. If you are going through perimenopause, or have just turned 40, or had a baby and your carefully constructed plan is coming apart at the seams, the human instinct to grab hold of something makes complete sense. We often mistake it as a weakness, but really it is your nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do, to find something stable, something you can manage, something that is familiar. Because our brains like certainty, what is known, is what it thinks is safe.
The problem is that the things we try to control are almost always external. And external control never actually gives us what we're really looking for.
When the Need for Control Backfires: A Client Story
I worked with a client once who was going through a painful divorce. Everything in her personal life felt out of control. The future she had planned was gone. The certainty she had built her sense of safety around had collapsed. And during one of our sessions she told me she had decided to quit her job and so I asked her to talk me through her reasons.
As we talked, something became clear. Her job wasn't the problem. If anything, her job was the most stable thing in her life right now. She was performing well, she had a team she trusted. She enjoyed her work, she had structure, purpose and somewhere to be every day that had nothing to do with what was falling apart at home.
But her brain was in survival mode and everything felt out of control, so it went looking, as brains in survival mode always do, for something that would give it the sensation of agency, even if the agency was illusory.
Quitting her job would have created far more chaos and uncertainty than it solved. It would have removed the one thing that was actually holding her steady at that moment, but that's what unexamined control does. It feels like agency, but often it’s actually avoidance dressed up as a decision.
Where the Need for Control Actually Comes From
Most of our need for control doesn't start in adulthood. It starts much earlier, in the years when so much of our life actually was out of control. When we were children navigating family dynamics, uncertainty, instability, or simply the ordinary powerlessness of being young in a world run by adults.
Control becomes a coping mechanism, a way of creating predictability in an unpredictable environment. And for a long time, often well into our careers and adult lives, it works.
We become the person who has everything handled, who plans ahead, manages the details, anticipates the problems before they arrive.
From the outside that can look like capability. and in many ways it is. But there's a cost that doesn't always show up immediately.
Because when control becomes the primary way we manage our anxiety, we stop being able to tolerate the uncertainty that comes with growth. We stop taking risks we can't predict the outcome of.
We stop opening ourselves up to experiences, relationships and opportunities that require us to let go of the reins. We keep ourselves ‘safe’, and often that sees us keeping ourselves small.
What Your Need for Control Is Really Protecting
Here's what I've come to understand, both from my own work and from sitting with clients in this pattern. The need for control is rarely about the thing being controlled. It's about what losing control feels like. The vulnerability underneath it. The fear of what might happen if we stop managing, stop organising, stop staying one step ahead of every possible outcome.
For some women it's the fear of being seen as incapable. For others it's the fear of being hurt again. For others it's the fear that if they stop holding everything together, everything will fall apart, and somehow that will be their fault.
The control isn't the problem. It's just the solution to a deeper fear that has never been properly examined. And until we examine it, we will keep reaching for external control as a way of soothing an internal feeling. Which is a bit like turning the lights off to avoid seeing something that's still there in the dark.
What Happens When You Let Go of Control
So I do want to clarify that I'm not suggesting that control is always the enemy, or that the answer is simply to stop planning, preparing, or caring about outcomes. Not at all, what I'm talking about is the specific kind of control that closes us off. That keeps us in our heads and out of our hearts. That prevents us from connecting with other people, with our own instincts, with the possibilities that exist just beyond what we can currently predict. I am talking about the control that often feels urgent, that makes you think you need to take action straight away.
Because what I've seen happen when women start to examine their need for control and loosen their grip in the places where it's costing them most. They stop micromanaging their team and start actually leading. They stop avoiding the conversation that needs to happen and discover it wasn't as catastrophic as they feared. They stop trying to control the outcome of a relationship (or the other person in the relationship) and realise in doing so they gain so much more control over themselves. This one is a huge one, it is so easy to find yourself trying to control someone else’s reaction, or behaviour so that you can feel and think in a certain way.
People pleasing is one way so many of us try and control the reactions of others. We tell ourselves that if we do everything for them, or don’t say no, or not say what we really think, then they will like us, accept us, or whatever it is you are hoping to influence. But it is an illusion, as unfortunately (probably fortunately actually…) we can’t control how other people think and realising that looks like being out of control, but it is actually the opposite.
Journal Prompts: Examining Your Need for Control
So if you are finding yourself often leaning on control, below are a few journal prompts to help you start exploring what could be going on. As without realising it, the need to control might be costing you something you actually want.
Where in your life do you feel most compelled to control the outcome? What are you afraid would happen if you didn't?
Is the thing you're trying to control actually within your control? If not what can you actually do?
If you were to loosen your grip in one area of your life, what might that open you up to? What would that change feel like?
Think of one area of your life where your desire to control feels urgent. What is the need for control protecting you from feeling?
Where has your need to control actual cost you? In energy, in relationships, at work?
The One Thing That's Always Within Your Control
What I come back to, both for myself and in my work with clients, is that you can’t control most of what happens around you. You can’t control other people, or the inevitable uncertainty of being alive. But you can control your internal environment. How you think about what happens. How you respond rather than react. How you support yourself through the moments that feel most unstable. How you manage your nervous system so that survival mode stops making your decisions for you.
And that's not a consolation prize, its actually the most powerful form of control available to any of us and the best news as it is completely within our control.
The women I see make the most significant shifts, in their careers, relationships, their experience of their own lives, are almost always the ones who stop trying to manage everything outside them and start taking genuine responsibility for what's happening inside.
Because that is where the real agency and freedom lives. That's where the real, true safety really is.
If this resonated and you're ready to start doing that work, understanding what's driving your patterns and learning how to respond differently, I'd love to have a conversation. You can book a free consultation with me here.
