You thought things would be all right if the person you live with would change just a little: speak more gently, drink less, keep their promises. You started with the way they spoke. You said just one sentence: “That is not how you talk to people.” For about a week, their tone was better. Then you started asking where they had been. Not accusing, just asking. Then asking again later to see whether the answers matched.
Then you checked their wallet. You had a reason, and it was a good one. Ten seconds while they were in the shower, and everything went back exactly where it was.
Then came the talks: the same conversation, in the same order, ending in the same place, until you could both recite it from memory. When you were worn out, you stopped speaking to them altogether. Three days, sometimes five. You were not punishing anyone. You had run out of things to try.
Now look at what all of this has done. They talk less. Their answers have got shorter and smoother. They keep a little back from you out of habit. Little by little, the person you live with has become more like the person you feared they were when you first began checking up on them: someone who keeps things from you.
From the outside it looks like being sensitive
Anyone watching would call you sensitive: highly strung, making too much of small things.
The word is wrong, and it is worth seeing why. You are not reacting to what is in front of you. You are trying to stop something that has not happened yet. The checking is not a sign that you love them too much, either. It is prevention.
In your mind, the story runs like this: they will drink or lie again, things will go the way they went the last time they did it, and you will not be able to bear it. All the checking, questioning and controlling is an attempt to stop that from happening before there is any real sign that it has begun.
But that story usually did not start with the person in front of you. It comes from somewhere much older, often from childhood. This article is not about where it came from. It is about what your efforts to stop that story from coming true do to the relationship over the years.
Fix one thing and another one moves into view
Say your efforts work. They drink less. They call when they said they would.
You expect to feel better, and you do not. This is what confuses people most. Before long something else catches your eye. They look sullen. They do what you asked, but grudgingly, not like someone who means it.
What they do can set off your fear, but it did not create the older fear underneath. That fear was usually there long before they came into your life. That is why fixing one behavior brings only brief relief. The fear soon settles on another sign — a look on their face, a late reply, a reluctant tone — and the controlling starts again.
Knowing that controlling them does not work is not enough to make you stop
Knowing a method does not work is normally enough to make a person put it down. Not here. People who understand perfectly well that controlling does not help still cannot leave the other person alone. Stopping does not feel like dropping a method that failed. It feels like letting the thing you fear happen.
So the monitoring continues, and the relationship changes. Because letting go feels that dangerous, you stop leaving things to their judgment. Instead of talking things over, you simply decide: where they may go, whom they may contact, what counts as an acceptable explanation. One by one, you take over decisions that were theirs to make. Fear turns a relationship between two adults, each making their own choices, into one where one person supervises the other.
Two people came together because they loved each other, and now one controls the other. Every act of control treats the other person as less than a person: it overrides their judgment, their choices, their say over their own life. Overriding someone like this is violence, even when your voice stays calm. It is oppression, however good your reasons. What builds up is not safety but conflict, and a relationship that began in love turns destructive.
Nobody invents this way of treating someone. Usually it is how you learned to deal with people at home as a child. If a parent was unpredictable, or someone in the family drank, keeping watch and trying to stop trouble before it came may have been the only way to bear life at home. Now you are doing the same thing to the person you live with, as if they were the family you grew up with.
Pressure hands the other person a part to play
Here is the thing I most want to say.
Treat someone as a person who lies and they begin saying less, even when they have nothing to hide, because every detail will be questioned. You interpret the shorter answer as evidence of concealment and ask more questions. To avoid another interrogation, they omit more. Repeated pressure therefore helps create the secrecy you feared.
What happens to them is a little like being handed a part in a play, and the play is that old story in your head. You are not writing their lines. But you have made one set of lines much easier for them to say than any other. Keep treating someone as the one in your story who lies, and in time they really start to play that part.
The British psychoanalyst Joseph Sandler noticed something like this in his work with patients. He saw that therapists sometimes find themselves acting in ways they did not choose, pulled into them by the way a patient treats them. Sandler called this role-responsiveness: slipping into the role the other person casts you in. It does not only happen in therapy.
The American psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden described the same thing from the other side: the side of the person whose fear is doing the pushing. What you fear about the other person does not stay a picture in your head. Through the questions, the silences and the tone, it is pressed into them until they begin to act it out. Ogden called this projective identification: “projective” because you see what you fear as if it were already in them, “identification” because in time they begin to act as if it were true of them. Neither Sandler nor Ogden was describing something anyone does on purpose. It happens between people who mean well.
The evidence is real, and you made it
By the time the change is obvious, the evidence is real: they hide things from you, or go quiet when you walk in. What is difficult to see is the sequence that produced it. Your fear led to pressure, the pressure led to concealment, and the concealment confirmed the fear. Because the last step is something they do, all you see is proof that you were right, not the part you played in getting there.
So from where you stand, it is extremely hard to see that you had a hand in making it. With that much proof lying around the house, anyone in your place would think, “I was right all along.” This does not mean you caused all of it. If they were already lying or drinking before any of this began, or if they threaten or hurt you, that is their responsibility, not yours, and your safety comes first.
You can be shaking inside and still not act on it
I am not going to suggest that you stop feeling the fear. That cannot be done.
Your body reacts first, the moment something reminds you of that old story. The door does not sound quite the way it usually does, and your heart is already racing before you have decided anything. That is how people are made, and it will keep happening, however old you get.
One thing can change. Until now, the moment the fear came, you acted on it: you called, you asked again, you searched. That shaking inside felt like a warning, and a warning meant you had to move. But the shaking does not always mean danger has arrived. Your body reacts in exactly the same way when something merely reminds you of what happened long ago.
So put a pause between the feeling and the action. Ask yourself whether something is actually happening right now, or whether this only reminds you of something from long ago. You can feel the fear without calling, asking or checking their wallet, and wait for your body to settle. If the danger is real and happening now, this does not apply. In that case, the first thing is to get away and keep yourself safe.
Almost everything people try in a relationship means doing more: saying more, trying harder, being warmer, being firmer. The pause asks for the opposite: not doing what you have been doing. I know of nothing harder. It also changes the question you ask. You stop asking “How do I get this person to change?” That question never had an answer. You start asking “What have I been trying so hard to keep from happening?”
References
- Sandler, J. (1976). Countertransference and Role-Responsiveness. International Review of Psycho-Analysis, 3, 43–47. — a person can be recruited into a role by the pressure the other exerts.
- Ogden, T. H. (1979). On Projective Identification. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 60, 357–373. — what is put into the other person, the other person begins to act out.
Related
- Why One Person Gets Under Your Skin
- Life Script: Why You Keep Repeating the Same Ending
- Codependency: Why I Can’t Leave a Relationship
Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board
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