A recent problem page in a newspaper I read had the following issue sent in by a reader:

“My partner and I live together and share a strong relationship in many ways but we have a major problem over what he feels is my excessive need for independence and I feel his excessive need to control my every step. He emails and telephones me several times a day at work and if I am not at my desk demands to know where I have been, who with and why. He feels he is entitled to be informed about anyone I meet outside the office and often finds reasons to pick me up from any meetings with friends or even from business meetings. He denies that he is trying to keep tabs on me so my attempts to find a solution to this have had little result. How can I tackle this issue more constructively?”

Four readers replied to this question and, unusually for this feature, they all gave pretty much exactly the same advice: “Leave him”. As a psychotherapist I would agree with that advice but I can also see it’s most unlikely that she would actually be able to take it.

The reason is repetition. Very often with my psychotherapy patients I see people who suffer from the compulsion to repetition. Many people have a need to repeat situations from early life even if those situations were unsatisfactory, frustrating, unpleasant or even abusive. In this case the writer may be repeating a feeling of powerlessness which she had as a child if her parents were overly controlling and abusive. She may be looking for a father figure if her father was intrusive and controlling in this way. She will look for someone else who is similar to her father. It makes her unhappy but if she needs a father that is the only sort of parental relationship which she has and that’s the only model we can follow. She may still in some unconscious way be wanting to be a child and if that was her experience as a child that’s what she would try to repeat.

So what is the prognosis? If I have just said that she won’t be able to take this advice in fact there is no need to despair. Through psychotherapy we can understand these mechanisms and in understanding them we can overcome them and achieve the sort of happy, fulfilling lives we want.

Copyright 2006 Sara Dryburgh
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