You Can’t Control Your Partner, But You’re Not Powerless

This episode speaks directly to one of the most exhausting parts of being in a relationship: realizing you can’t control your partner and wondering what that means for you.

For a lot of people, that realization feels defeating. Like your hands are tied. Like you’re stuck waiting or reacting or hoping things improve.

This week I talk about why not being able to control your partner does not mean you are powerless. In fact, your real influence in a relationship has very little to do with managing or controlling other people and how you manage yourself, which is the real flex. I also mention:

• the regret of managing others instead of living authentically
• what you can control versus what you can only influence
• common control tactics that backfire in relationships
• regulation over reactivity to build safety and trust
• the three-step power move: pause, name, choose
• my real-life gym moment from this morning
• aligning responses with values and intentions

Go to https://monicatanner.com/call and let's see if you're a good fit for one of my remaining time slots.

Transcript

Welcome And Season Focus

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello and welcome to the Secrets of Happily Ever After podcast. I'm your host, Monica Tanner, and I am really excited about our topic today. It's one of those things that changes everything. When you really, really, really understand this principle, it's so empowering. So before we get started, I just want to A, thank everybody for the emails that have been coming in. Thank you for your feedback on the first episode. Thank you for sharing with me your intentions and how you're gonna show up this year. I am really excited about getting really specific about what we can each do to really step up our relationships. My goal for this year is to really think about how we can end our lives with no regrets. I just want to announce that I have a couple spots still open for couples or individuals who want to work on their marriage relationship and intimacy or their attachment issues. I've opened up two evenings a week, if that works better for you. So if you're really interested in improving your relationships this year, go to monicatanner.com slash call and let's see if you're a good fit for one of those time slots. All right, let's get into today's content. Last week we talked about the inspiration for this season being the regrets that people typically share at the end of their life. One of the most common regrets that people feel is that they spend too much time trying to manage other people instead of living their life authentically. Now, this statement comes from the wisdom that we gain, but most of us don't realize the amount of time, energy, and attention we're spending on trying to control the people around us. Our spouses, our kids, our neighbors, our political leaders. It's this sneaky little sense that we can somehow control other people through manipulation, passive aggressiveness, guilt-inducing tactics. We love having control. It makes us feel safe. But the reality is that we have very little control over anything except for ourselves. We can control our thoughts, our actions, our responses, what we put into our bodies, our habits, the choices we make. We have a lot of control over those things, but we can't control the people or the circumstances around us. Now that's not to say we can't influence them for good. So we're not powerless, but we give away our power every time we think we can control the actions of somebody else. These impulses, they don't make us controlling. They make us human because it's human nature to think that we would be happier or we would feel a certain way if the people around us would just cooperate better or would just do what we think that they should do. We all walk around with these handbooks for how other people should treat us or behave or show up in certain situations. And one of the hardest lessons to learn is that no matter what we do, we can't take away other people's agency. We can't make them do anything they don't want to do. So what the research has found is the people that feel the most peace at the end of their lives aren't the ones who controlled all the things around them. They're the ones who lived most authentically and in integrity with their own beliefs and values. So today I want to help you reclaim that kind of power and control. The kind of power and control that lives in our intentional responses and not in our reactions. So if I could give this episode a really long title, it would be You Can't Control Your Partner, You Can't Control Your Kids, You Can't Control Your Dog or the Weather or the Stock Market, but you are not powerless. What you can control is actually really, really powerful. So oftentimes when I say, especially when I'm working with a couple, that you can't control your partner, a lot of times people will feel defeated or resigned or stuck. Like, okay, well, if I can't make my partner change this thing or do this thing differently, then I guess I'm just gonna be unhappy. Or I guess I'm just not gonna get what I want, or whatever that sounds like in your head, right? Not being able to control somebody doesn't mean that you don't have influence over them. I think this is the most easy to see when we think about our children. We can't actually control our children. We can't make them do anything, but in the way we teach them, the way we model things for them, the example that we set has a lot of influence over how they live their lives. But we can't force them to do anything, right? So here is an example of some of those sneaky kind of control tactics. Sometimes we think we can control somebody else if we can prove to them that we're right. Sometimes we try to withhold affection, like if you don't do this thing, then I'm going to withhold love or admiration or gratitude or something like that. Sometimes we get really emotional, like emotionally manipulative. This is like a really big female thing. Like I remember when I first got married, and I thought if I cried, then my husband would know I was really serious about it. And he would just give me what I wanted. And that never worked, and it was so deflating. My husband doesn't do tears very well. And so now I've learned that crying is okay, but the tears that I shed are for me. They're not gonna change the outcome or get anybody to do something, right? Tears are a good way to cleanse emotion from myself. Another way that we often try to control others is by shutting down, giving the silent treatment, being passive-aggressive, walking around the house, slamming dishes, doing one of those I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine type situations. Sometimes in our relationships, we collude that way, meaning like we create this dynamic that as long as our partner's doing something for us, we will continue to do this thing for them. That gives us the illusion of control, but it doesn't actually work. So here's the real flex. This is where your real power comes from. It's in how you regulate your nervous system. When you get dysregulated and out of sorts and you want to use your losing strategy, like you want to be controlling, or you want to prove you're right, or you want to bombard your partner with a whole bunch of emotions or withdraw. How do we regulate ourselves in those situations? The real flex is how you respond to not getting what you want instead of reacting or getting defensive. And it's also deciding what you will allow and what you won't, and you do that through boundaries. We're going to talk about that next week. So a reaction is fast, automatic, and meant to protect versus a response, which is slower, intentional, and grounded in what you can control, which is how you show up. And that links to what we talked about last week. What is your intention? What intention did you set for how you're going to show up better this year in your relationships? A response takes that into account. So the skills that we're gonna work on this week with intention are simple but not easy. So the first skill I want to talk about is the power of the pause. This means we put some separation between our trigger and our response to the trigger. That means we take a breath before we respond to whatever's happening in front of us, whatever our partner or our kids or our dog is doing. We want to take a breath before we react or respond. I like to say that this is a big pregnant pause, that in this breath that we take, we consider that the person standing in front of us is somebody that we love and that we live with and that we want things to be better with. And that's what you're gonna think about when you take that breath. The second big power move is to name the emotion that we're feeling. Like, ooh, that was really painful. Maybe our partner says something that we didn't like, or they do something that really triggers us. You want to take a breath first, and then silently you want to think, that's scary. I don't feel safe when my partner does that. Or, ooh, that really hurts my feelings. Here's a good example. That happened this morning. My 17-year-old daughter at the gym looked over at me while I was doing something on my phone, and she said, Mom, are you incapable of working out without looking at your phone? And as you can tell in the way I am even telling this story, that triggered me. What I wanted to say back was, are you incapable of going five minutes without criticizing something that I do? And I may or may not have said that, but that was a reaction. She said something kind of nasty to me, and I wanted to say something really nasty right back. But was that the right thing to do? No. The right thing would have been to take a breath, to name that, ooh, that kind of stings. Why? Because there's a little bit of truth in it, and I don't like it that my 17-year-old is pointing this out about me. And then the third power move is to choose. It is to be intentional about how we respond. So that snap back that I made at her, that was not intentional. That was a defense mechanism. That was my losing strategy to retaliate. You say something mean and nasty to me, I'm gonna say something mean and nasty to you. But what I should have done is take a breath, name my emotion, that was hurtful, and then make a choice. The choice is to say, yeah, you're right. Let me put my phone down and get back to my workout. That's how I wish I had responded. But just recognizing that, like I said, we're not gonna get it right every time. It's not about perfection. It's just about us striving to do things better. It's not controlling her. It's not saying you will never say anything hurtful to me ever again. It's about choosing how I want to show up when she says something hurtful to me. So, what I want you to practice this week is that three-step power move. Number one, pause, take a breath. Number two, name the emotion silently. And number three, choose with intention how you're going to respond. Let me know how this goes for you this week. Send me an email, hit me up on social. I want to know how are you showing up with intention when you cannot control the people around you? Because I guarantee that example that you're setting of responding with intention is quite possibly the most influential and important thing that you can use to teach the people around you how to treat you. Next week, we're gonna talk about how to set really, really healthy boundaries, which is another big flex. So good luck, everyone. I will see you same time, same place next week. And until then, happy marriaging.