Are ACE survivors controlling ?
Is there a difference between having to control everything and being a controlling person . Now I would argue that there is lots of reasons why they are different and that matters a lot, if like me you have suffered childhood trauma . I feel the difference boils down to one thing… trust.
In my mind , I might be wrong ( not trying to control the narrative , if you see what I mean?), but control freaks have difficulty trusting others , they also have this feeling that they are , well better than the rest of us . They feel like they are doing us all favour by controlling everything , after all they can’t trust you to get it right.
Im in Charge get it !
Some might confuse this with being a good leader or teacher but a good version of both those won’t want to micromanage and will listen to others . A control freak will just want to have a say in everything , you won’t find them delegating . It might be true that some control freaks do want to control the environment around them to shield themselves from a reoccurrence of a past hurtful episode , so it’s a sort of coping mechanism. It’s also true to say they may have borderline personality disorders or tech a narcissistic personality . These people might constantly criticise and judge others and they will probably try to change you , even though they won’t be admitting when they get things wrong. I think we can all probably say we have met people like that and we feel better when we are not around them.
ACE survivors are nice people , art we ?
If you’re wondering, the picture above was the only controller thing I could think of ……sad really
Now an opposite to the not very nice personality outlined above , ACE survivors like to control their environment for an entirely different reason , that’s fear. By fear I mean also powerless , not like the control freak , we don’t feel better than anyone else , we had periods in our lives where we had no control and look what happened to us . Much better to control everything and be safe , we might , in fact we probably will have, anxious avoidance behaviour and by being in control we can avoid what worries us. We have no intention of controlling others , we love and trust people if we let them in , although we do avoid general intimate relationships. We are fearful of lots of things and we need to create a safe space , a predictable environment . We unfortunately are not risk takers , you probably won’t find one sky diving or even doing lots of new things. We are in the most part lovely people who are sensitive , probably over sensitive to other peoples feelings . We might not be great huggers to people we don’t know and probably have rigid boundaries. We might have a great sense of humour though , adversity can make great comedians and we like to make others happy .
So we are not control freaks then , just nice people trying to make predictable things happen in a non predictable world .
I do hope you are all , keeping well , please reach out if your like minded , I won’t hug you though!
Anyway , have a great day , see you soon .
