Relationships
The Six Strategies of Pathologically Controlling Partners
Discover what drives partners to rely on threats, bribery, and broken promises.
Posted July 4, 2025 Reviewed by Davia Sills
Key points
- For some people in relationships, control is seen as essential to reassure them of a partner's love.
- These controlling tendencies often stem from childhood experiences and replay old, dysfunctional patterns.
- Understanding the drivers of controlling behavior can help partners not blame themselves and escape the cycle.
Many patients have come to me hopelessly engulfed in a relationship that is draining their life force and diminishing their sense of self. They are involved with intensely controlling partners who alternate between total rejection and love-bombing to seduce them back, always promising each time to never hurt them again. If those strategies don’t work over time, they often resort to desperate pleas to regain their favor or threatening self-harm if they do not. Anything to maintain the control they must have.
When these individuals finally realize that their partner’s dysfunctional pattern will not stop, they know they must end the relationship, but fear retaliation from their partner if they do. Sometimes, they are still captured by their attachment to the qualities of their partner that they are not ready to give up. They recognize the reality of their conflicted immobilization but don’t know how to get out.
Fortunately, there is a way out for those who have been entrapped in these kinds of relationships. The goal is not to try to understand what lures them to partners of this kind, but more importantly, to understand why their controlling partners behave the way they do and to realize that it has little to do with them.
Once observing from a less personal and more objective perspective, it can become easier for them to pursue a successful plan to disconnect because they see how they have just been pawns in their partner’s personal emotional chess game. In some cases, it does not result in the difficulties they anticipated. But in others, there can be threats of retaliation. It may require bringing outside help from friends, family, and professionals to manage the fallout and to control more threatening outcomes.
Pathologically controlling partners rarely come into therapy for their own edification. But some do. If they find that they are no longer able to secure partners they deem valuable enough to interact with, or can no longer offer what once made them able to successfully maintain their pattern, they become deeply insecure. That is when they typically seek professional guidance.
The Six Most Common Reasons Pathologically Controlling Partners Act the Way They Do
It is from my direct interactions with many patients who have survived these relationships, along with those I have treated who are the perpetrators, that I have come to understand what drives them to behave the way they do.
1. Fear of Intimacy
The pendulum swings of controlling partners are not random. They are direct responses to how close they have allowed themselves to be in an intimate interaction. That dependency is their greatest nightmare because of their craving for connection and simultaneous terror of being entrapped, vulnerable, or abandoned if their partner chooses to leave.
Many times, my patients have witnessed this pattern but thought they were the problem. When they see the situation more clearly, they can see why their partner escalates attacks and flees. After an extended period of physical or emotional closeness, they will escalate their attacks and lack of trust in their partner, pulling out all of the stops. They are simultaneously driven to rapidly escape the intensity of the connection due to the terror it evokes.
2. Alternate Boundary Violation and Exile
Intensely controlling partners are suffering. They want both to blend and to escape. When needing to become intimate, they will walk through any boundaries their partner attempts to set to stop them. They’ll use charm, anger, threats, and needs to coerce their partners into making them their only priority in those moments in a frantic attempt to intensely connect. Their desperation often overwhelms their partners, who often just give in to stop the pushing.
Then, with clockwork regularity, they disconnect and erect unassailable brick boundaries to shut their partners out, often without explanation or a barrage of attacks if pushed to reconnect.
3. Repetition of Childhood Experiences
The common narrative of the perpetrators I have treated has been being on the other end of a similar parent who alternated between needing love bombing or attention from their child, and then dismissal when they felt filled up or otherwise preoccupied. They describe themselves as anxious children, needing more sustained support and nurturing that they could count on, often blamed for being “too needy” when they reached out.
On some occasions, they were exiled from their parents’ lives because of the same pattern they witnessed but had no power to prevent. They tell me that they expect relationships to be hard and unfulfilling if they do not control them.
4. Control Is the Only Assurance of Love
As children, pathologically controlling partners often had to resort to extreme measures to get what they needed. They often felt like a “difficult” child: pleading, needy, prone to tantrums, fearing separation, devoted to one friend at a time, who would often abandon them for the same reasons. Ultimately, when their strategies worked, they would feel reinforced to do the same, and helpless when they did not.
5. The Need for Retribution
By the time these suffering souls reach adulthood, they are deeply insecure and feel victimized by the many they have loved who have rebuked them. Those multiple losses produce a need to get back at them and any others who fall prey to their patterns. They begin many new relationships with a thinly veiled anticipation of rejection and a readiness to resort to anger and blame. The percentage of love bombing to angry disconnect demonstrates the level of that underlying anger and need for payback.
6. Personality Disorders
I’ve seen a few cases where the perpetrator has had a relatively normal childhood, where they felt cared for and attended to, and yet became a pathologically controlling partner. They may need and demand to be the center of attention and adoration, and not allow their partners to put anything or anyone ahead of them. They were catered to as children and continue to expect the same kind of treatment in their adult relationships. They truly see themselves as better than most people and have irrational expectations of others.
If they have been lucky enough to inherit the characteristics that their social circles value, they may have an endless array of choices to enable them to continue perpetuating their patterns.
