This is a post written by my friend Shea Emma Fett on her personal blog on February 1, 2015. She has given me permission to repost some of her essays here as guest posts.
This past month, I read Controlling People by Patricia Evans. It was an incredibly useful book to me, and I wanted to write a brief summary of the key themes in case it is useful to anyone else.
First, the book does not provide a framework for all controlling behavior. There are people who engage in abuse and manipulation as a pure act of dominance. The book does not talk about this. What the book does cover, very well, are those dynamics that so many of us find ourselves in, where a partner’s abuse lives side by side with a conviction of love. Where a partner’s abusive behavior seems to be prompted by an inner pain that, no matter how much you try to change and adjust, they continually insist is caused by you.
The central theme of the book is that of a backwards connection.
“A backwards connection begins with an assumption or definition of the other that ends all possibility of a relationship, at least in that interaction… A backwards connection is just a small step away from where control of the other is the (often unconscious) objective.”
A backwards connection happens when you decide who someone is and then attempt to connect with that image. The examples she uses are very basic, and it demonstrates how often we are just one step away from a control connection, and the justification of abuse.
For instance, imagine a mother is buying ice cream for her child. “I want vanilla,” the child says. “No you don’t,” the mother says “you like chocolate, you want chocolate.” “No… ,” the child says, “I like vanilla. I want vanilla.” And so on. The truth is, the mother likes chocolate, and she is trying to connect with her daughter, but instead she is connecting with a pretend person. The more pressure she places, the more she corners her daughter, the closer she gets to trying to disintegrate her daughter and replace her with the pretend person.
Evans uses the example of a teddy bear that becomes an imaginary friend. Teddy knows everything you are thinking, gives you everything you need, never complains. But one day Teddy shows a sign of separateness, and you feel attacked, violated, and alone.
When you try to connect to Teddy, instead of to a real person, you establish a control connection. The control connection substitutes for connection to self.
When someone is connecting backwards, Evans says it is like they are under a spell. They do not understand that what they are doing makes no sense. You cannot know what another person is feeling. You cannot know what is inside of them. And yet someone who is under the spell is so sure, it can be easy to doubt yourself if you are the object of this connection.
“If Pretenders don’t get out from under the influence of the spell, they launch even greater assaults, especially if their definition of the other is not accepted, that is, they can’t make ‘Teddy,’ their pretend person, appear. In this way Pretenders exert increasingly oppressive behavior. In relationships, while they may believe that they are only getting closer (bringing Teddy to life, so to speak), they are, in fact, aligning with the forces of oppression.”
To take a simple example, we often do not know the difference between “I am hurt,” and “you hurt me.” The extent to which you insist that you can know the other person’s experience and the extent to which you feel justified in enforcing that, is the extent to which you have the capacity for abuse.
The truth is, we have to mind read to a certain extent in order to make choices about our lives. If you are intentionally hurting me, you may not be a good person to have around. I think we have to create basic models of the motivations of the people around us to be able to function. The danger is in your attachment to these models. Sometimes we build these models to try to judge our relative safety with a person. And sometimes we build these models to try to connect with them. But at the end of the day, you cannot know someone else’s inner experience. When you think you do, you are under the spell. When you feel victimized by someone’s separateness from what you imagine them to be, you are under the spell, and you are behaving in a way that does not make sense. It is important to be aware of the very real danger of this kind of mind reading.
On a personal level, this book was incredibly helpful to me. Because underlying so much of my self doubt has been this idea that they were so sure. Not just one person, but several. How could so many people be so sure that they understood who I was? Surely I must continue to consider that they may have been right! But I see now that their insistence that they knew my motivations and my feelings didn’t make any sense, and it gives me the space to say “No. I like vanilla. I’ve always liked vanilla.” Evans actually covers this a little bit when she talks about groups. She talks about bonding together against someone.
“Bonding together against others is, like all Control Connections, a backwards connection. The bond is based upon an agreement, sometimes unspoken, to act or to be against an authentic person or persons in order to sustain an illusion.”
I understand now that at times I bonded together against someone in the group, and at times they bonded together against me. But it was never a real connection. And the reality we created together never made sense. And it feels really good to put that burden down.
I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to better understand control in their lives and in their communities.
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