Control in Marriage and Close Relationships
Control in a marriage almost never announces itself. Nobody says they’re controlling their spouse. What they say is that somebody has to keep this family running. Frankly, that’s usually accurate….
-
-
Control and Trust in Parenting
Parenting is the only job I know of where doing it well means becoming less necessary every year. Every other role rewards indispensability. This one requires you to deliberately engineer…
-
Peace Comes When You Stop Carrying What Isn’t Yours
I wrote a post last month about sorting out what’s yours and what isn’t. This one’s about what happens after the sorting. That’s the part nobody tells you and it’s…
-
Replacing Control With Boundaries
There is a difference between what a “control” is and what a “boundary” is. A control is a rule you make for somebody else. A boundary is a rule you…
-
Control in Relationships: When Helping Turns Into Managing
Helping is good. I want to start there, because this post is going to make some of you uncomfortable and I don’t want it misread as an argument for indifference….
-
When Someone Else’s Choices Disrupt Your Life
Somebody made a decision and now you’re living in it. He left. She relapsed. Your business partner did something reckless. Maybe your parents sold the place. Your kid dropped out….
-
You Can’t Control Other People, Even When You Love Them
You can’t control other people. Even when you love them. Especially when you love them, actually, because love is the thing that makes us think we should be able to….
-
What You Can Control (And What You Can’t)
There’s a version of this list on every therapy office wall in America. I have mixed feelings about it, because the tidy version leaves out everything that makes it hard….
-
Control vs Responsibility
This is the distinction I draw on paper more than any other, and once people see it they start seeing it everywhere. Responsibility is about your actions. Control is about…
-
Releasing What Was Never Yours to Carry
There’s a certain kind of tired that sleep doesn’t fix. You get eight hours and wake up heavy. You take the vacation and come back the same. You keep thinking…
-
The Beauty of Becoming Less Busy, Less Loud, Less Burdened
In July you can’t see thirty feet into those woods behind my place. By the first week of November you can see all the way to the fence line, and…
-
Leaves Fall to Protect the Tree
I learned something a few years back that rearranged how I talk about boundaries, and it came from a forestry page I was reading for no good reason at eleven…
-
Boundaries Without Guilt: Why a Screen Door Is Still a Door
I had a client tell me once that she felt like a hallway. Everybody walked through her to get somewhere else. However, nobody stopped to see what was on the…
-
Building a Life That Doesn’t Require Survival Mode
Here is a pattern I see all the time, and it breaks my heart a little every time I see it. Somebody does real healing work. Therapy, tools, tears, the…
-
Fawn Mode: When You Lose Yourself to Keep the Peace
I asked her what she wanted, and I meant it as a small question. What do you want to see change in your marriage, your week, your life? She laughed…
-
The Trauma of Loving Somebody Through Addiction
You can read a driveway like scripture when you love an addict. Which way the tires crunch the gravel, how long the truck sits before the door opens, what the…
-
Emotional Abuse and Domestic Violence: The Wounds Nobody Can See
“He never hit me. So why do I feel like this?” She asked me that with her hands twisted in her lap, apologizing for taking up an appointment somebody with…
-
Betrayal Trauma: When the Wound Came From Somebody You Loved
A wreck never claimed to love you. The tornado did not sit across the supper table for eleven years. Whatever else those storms take, they do not take your history…
-
Forgiving Someone You Still Have to See
Most forgiveness advice has a quiet assumption baked into it, and once you spot it, you can’t unsee it. It assumes you can leave. Block the number, move the membership,…
-
Forgiveness That Protects You
We’ve reached the last stretch of this series, and I want to open it with a picture from every Southern porch I’ve ever loved. The screen door. A screen door…