You like to have things under control. Your home has to be organized in a particular way, and so does your schedule. You get stressed out when your days don’t go as planned — your child gets sick and misses daycare, you run into terrible traffic, a client cancels a meeting, your partner doesn’t want to attend the party.
Often it doesn’t take much for you to feel frustrated, frazzled and downright overwhelmed. Any disturbance to the status quo feels unbearable.
Maybe you like to control how others perceive you, so you show a very specific image: You are calm, collected, poised and put together, but on the inside, you’re anything but. Maybe you like to control the people in your life, everything from their schedules to their actions.
Either way, you need to have control. And it’s a need that often feels insatiable.
Where does this relentless craving come from?
Some people need control because they grew up in an environment where they had very little of it. As kids, they were surrounded by chaos or inconsistency, said Tanvi Patel, LPC-S, a psychotherapist specializing in work with high achieving adults and adult survivors of trauma.
Maybe their parents struggled with extreme moods or addiction. Maybe their parents repeated cycles where they were emotionally unavailable and then overly involved and intrusive, she said. Maybe they grew up with many different guardians, she added.
These kinds of situations make it difficult or even impossible to develop healthy attachments—and it’s our attachments with caregivers that dictate how we see ourselves and how we see the world, Patel said.
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