We all need some control to feel safe, but it becomes a problem when we try to control the uncontrollable or other people. When life feels unpredictable, the mind looks for something it can manage. We may try to anticipate what other people will do, prevent conflict, make everyone happy, avoid mistakes, organize everything perfectly, or think through every possible outcome. We tell ourselves that if we can stay ahead of things, we will finally be safe.
But control has a cost. Instead of creating security, we create anxiety. We watch other people’s moods, worry about what might happen, and feel stressed when the unexpected happens or our plans go awry.
How Childhood Instability Can Lead to Control
Not every controlling person has a history of childhood instability, but many rely on vigilance: If I can anticipate what is coming, perhaps I can prevent something bad from happening. Environmental conditions may also contribute, but often, the cause begins with dysfunctional parenting. A child who grows up with emotional neglect may learn that their needs will not reliably be noticed or met. A child raised by an authoritarian parent may learn that safety and love depend upon getting things right. When there’s addiction or an unpredictable emotional environment, a child monitors moods, anticipates crises, or takes on adult responsibilities. In enmeshed relationships, blurred boundaries can lead to chronic control. In an abusive environment, closely watching another person’s behavior can become a genuine survival strategy. When we can’t reliably lean on a parent emotionally, we may develop self-sufficiency but often don’t develop self-trust.
Control, Codependency, and Anxiety
Control is a core feature of codependency. You may become preoccupied with another person’s happiness, feel responsible for solving other people’s problems, or believe that maintaining harmony is their job. They may have difficulty saying no, feel guilty when someone is disappointed, or constantly look for signs that something is wrong in a relationship. They may rescue, fix, explain, reassure, anticipate, and manage.
Underneath these behaviors, there may be anxiety: If I stop managing everything, I will get in trouble—something bad will happen that I will not be able to handle.
The irony is that control promises relief from anxiety but keeps it alive. If your sense of safety depends on making sure other people behave a certain way, you constantly watch other people. If safety depends on knowing what will happen next, uncertainty becomes a threat.
Self-Nurturing: Becoming the Safe Person You Needed
If you did not receive enough reassurance, protection, or emotional steadiness as a child, you watched, anticipated, and performed to stay one step ahead of whatever might go wrong. In adulthood, the impulse to control can be an attempt to give yourself the security you did not consistently experience when you were young.
Self-nurturing is essential to letting go of control. When anxiety rises, instead of trying to fix the external situation, turn toward yourself. Put a hand on your chest, slow down, and speak to yourself with the tenderness you might offer a frightened child in words that convey, “Whatever happens, I will not abandon you.” Over time, instead of needing the world to become predictable, you begin to trust that you can comfort yourself, set boundaries, ask for help, and meet whatever comes.
How we speak to ourselves matters. “Why am I like this?” and “I should be over this” add shame to an already anxious system. A gentler response is, “Something in me is scared right now. I don’t have to solve everything this minute. I’m here. I’m listening. We can take this one step at a time.”
Curiosity Minimizes Fear
Genuine curiosity to look beneath our fear allows us to become interested in the fear rather than reacting to it. Curiosity helps us distinguish what is happening now from what the present may be awakening from the past.
When curiosity replaces fear, freedom has already begun.
Instead of asking, “How do I make get certainty?” or “How can I make this turn out the way I want?” curiosity asks:
- What about this situation frightens me so much?
- What am I trying to protect myself from?”
- Why does someone’s disappointment feel unbearable?
- Why do I need this person to understand or agree with me?
- Why do I feel responsible for making everything okay?
- What am I afraid will happen if I cannot control it?
- What would it mean about me or the relationship if I fail?
- Does my attempt to control benefit me and the relationship?
- Is my need to control driven by perfectionism?
Sometimes the answer is deeper than the situation itself. We may discover that we don’t really fear someone’s anger; we fear that they will leave. We may not fear making a mistake; we fear it will prove we are inadequate. We may not be trying to control a relationship because we are demanding. We may be trying to prevent an old experience of emotional abandonment from happening again. The need for perfection defends against shame; both can be overcome.
Rilke and the Wisdom of Living the Questions
Some answers cannot be obtained through thinking alone, but become clearer through presence and intimate experience with the body and with life itself. Sometimes the mind wants an answer that only experience can provide. This is what Rainer Maria Rilke understood when he wrote:
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves… the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
We can analyze a relationship endlessly, but eventually we have to experience the relationship. We can keep analyzing, but eventually we have to make a choice. We can try to understand grief intellectually, but grief asks to be felt.
Learning to Listen to the Body
Control often begins in the body before it becomes a conscious thought. We feel tension in the chest, a tightening in the stomach, shallow breathing, a racing mind, or an urgent need to check, fix, explain, call, research, plan, or intervene. Then our mind creates a story around the sensation and tells us why action is necessary.
Learning to pause creates another possibility. Notice what is happening in your body and ask, “What am I afraid will happen if I do nothing right now?” You can feel the anxiety without immediately obeying it. The goal is not to ignore genuine danger, but to learn the difference between responding to what is actually happening and reacting to everything the mind imagines might happen.
How to Let Go of Control
Letting go of control does not mean becoming passive, careless, or indifferent. It means learning to distinguish grounded choice from the desperate belief that we must control the outcome in order to be okay.
- Get curious. When you feel the urge to manage a situation, pause and ask, “What am I actually afraid will happen?” Then go deeper and ask the questions listed above.
- Separate what is yours from what is not yours. Your choices, words, boundaries, and behavior belong to you. Another person’s feelings, decisions, timing, and reactions belong to them. Caring about someone does not give you the right or the responsibility for their emotional life. Don’t enable.
- Practice tolerating small amounts of uncertainty. If you want to check something again, wait. If you want to send another message because someone has not responded, give it some time. You are teaching yourself that uncertainty can be uncomfortable without being dangerous.
- Notice when you are trying to control another person. Ask what you are really seeking from them. Do you need reassurance? Do you need them to understand you? Are you trying to prevent them from leaving? Sometimes, what we try to obtain externally is something we need to begin developing within ourselves.
- Use self-nurturing instead of self-criticism. When anxiety appears, speak to yourself as you would to a child: “I’m here with you. We’ve got this. You’re safe. I love you.” You remind yourself that you will remain present when life becomes difficult.
- Allow some questions to remain unanswered. Some relationships need time. Some decisions become clear only after we live with them. Some feelings need to move through us before we understand them. Providing space allows for change and healing.
- Develop self-trust. Control says, “I have to make sure this turns out the way I want.” Trust says, “I cannot guarantee the outcome, but I trust myself to meet what comes.” That does not eliminate uncertainty; it changes your relationship to it.
Finding Freedom Beyond Control
Fear narrows our attention until all we can see is the threat and our need to eliminate it. Curiosity opens the field again. It allows us to look beneath the fear and discover that the thing we were desperately trying to control may not have been the true source of our suffering.
Sometimes we were trying to control another person’s behavior when what we really needed was to face our fear of abandonment. Sometimes we were trying to control the future when what we really needed was to realize that we’ve survived uncertainty. Sometimes we control our feelings when what we need is to allow ourselves to feel them.
The downside is that control narrows life, while trust expands our capacity to live with life as it is. We cannot know everything. We cannot prevent every loss. We cannot make other people love us, understand us, choose us, or remain who we want them to be. We cannot think our way into certainty about a future that has not happened.
What we can do is become more present. We can listen to the body, become curious about our fear, and ask what a situation means to us rather than simply trying to change it. We can take responsibility for our own lives without assuming responsibility for everyone else’s. We can make choices without demanding guarantees.
Freedom comes when we realize that we do not have to know what happens next. We only have to meet what is here. This is what letting go of control really means—not caring less about what happens, but no longer requiring certainty before allowing ourselves to be fully alive.
© 2026 Darlene Lancer