In the Therapy Room: The Invisible Weight of Control Disguised as Love

💔 A Case Study in Invisible Control

It was a Tuesday afternoon in late October when Sage walked into my office with the particular slouch of someone carrying an invisible weight—the kind that successful people wear like an expensive suit that no longer fits. His eyes told the real story: exhausted. Not from working late, but from working hard at being someone he wasn’t.

Within five minutes, he was describing his partner’s Instagram pre-approval requirement. The way he presented it sounded reasonable—a fair compromise between two people in love. “We were trying to rebuild trust,” he said. “She needed security. I got it.”

But his jaw tightened. His fingers fidgeted. His voice had that particular flatness of someone reciting a script they no longer believed.

Here’s what nobody wants to admit: we’ve become spectacularly skilled at rationalizing arrangements that make us smaller. We call it compromise. We call it love. What we don’t call it—what we dance around carefully—is what it actually is: the slow calcification of control, dressed up in the language of reassurance.

⏰ When Temporary Becomes Permanent

Sage’s partner didn’t wake up one morning deciding to police his social media. What happened is infinitely more human and insidious: a moment of vulnerability (his past fantasies, his acknowledged attraction to other women) got encoded into a permanent rule. The temporary guardrail became the prison fence.

When his partner first heard about his fantasies, that information didn’t arrive as a neutral fact. It arrived wrapped in her own anxiety and fears about what it meant for their relationship. Her body registered threat. Her nervous system started running a script: If he’s thinking about other women, he might want them. If he wants them, he might follow them online. If he follows them, he’s betraying me.

The pre-approval rule was supposed to interrupt that script. Instead, it became the script.

When I asked Sage how long this arrangement would last, he didn’t have an answer. Neither did his girlfriend. That right there is the canary in the coal mine. When neither partner can articulate an exit condition, when a temporary measure becomes permanent infrastructure, you’ve stopped solving a problem. You’ve started managing fear.

🔒 The Architecture of Invisible Control

His partner’s emotional frame—her interpretive lens for understanding his behavior—has become locked into a particular shape. Every innocuous follow, every harmless interaction gets filtered through the lens of threat. Not because she’s malicious, but because her nervous system has been trained to read surveillance as evidence of love.

Sage, meanwhile, has organized his entire digital existence around placating this frame. He’s become hyperaware of which women he follows, which accounts he likes, which comments he leaves. His behavior has compressed into an ever-narrowing bandwidth of acceptability. He’s trading autonomy for peace—which sounds fair until you realize he’s also trading his sense of self.

The cruelest part? His girlfriend probably experiences this as love. The pre-approval rule doesn’t feel like control to her—it feels like he’s finally chosen her, finally proven she matters more than his wandering eye. When he complies, she gets reassurance. When he gets frustrated, she reads it as evidence he’s not committed enough, which justifies tightening the rules further.

This is what happens when relational needs—the hunger for availability and responsiveness—get decoupled from identity needs. She needs to feel special. Those are legitimate emotional requirements. But she’s trying to source them from a rule instead of from his actual presence and choice. And that’s a leak that no amount of pre-approval will ever patch.

What neither articulated—what Sage was too frustrated to say and his girlfriend was too defended to hear—is that sustainable trust doesn’t live in rules. It lives in the freedom to make autonomous choices and the mutual decision to show up anyway.

💬 The Conversation We Had to Have

By our third session, Sage had stopped defending the arrangement as reasonable. “I feel like I’m living under supervision,” he said. Then, quieter: “And the worst part is I don’t even know when I stopped being angry about it.”

That transition from anger to resignation is where autonomy dies. Not with a bang, but with a slow, grinding acceptance.

We started something simple: I asked him to notice what his emotional system was actually telling him. Not what he thought he should feel, but what his body was encoding beneath the surface. The resentment. The feeling of being untrusted despite his efforts. The resignation that comes from living inside someone else’s anxiety.

He’d learned to suppress legitimate anger about his limited autonomy to manage his partner’s anxiety about abandonment. He’d become a container for her insecurity—which is another way of saying he’d made her emotional regulation his responsibility.

“Here’s what I know about your situation,” I told him, “and what you already know but haven’t quite let yourself say: you cannot love someone into trusting you. You can comply with every rule, and it still won’t work, because the problem was never your behavior. The problem is her need for control disguised as a need for safety.”

He started crying.

“But what do I do?” he asked.

That’s the question nobody wants to answer because the answer requires something harder than compliance. It requires having the conversation his girlfriend has been refusing to have—the one where you acknowledge what’s actually happening and whether both people want to build something different.

🔄 What Actually Needs to Shift

The pre-approval rule isn’t the problem. It’s the symptom. His girlfriend is running from abandonment anxiety—she needs reassurance that he’s not going anywhere. Sage is suffocating under control and losing his sense of self.

Here are the questions that matter:

What was his relationship with autonomy before this arrangement? How did he make decisions independently?
When did he stop telling his girlfriend “no” and start assuming compliance was the path to peace?
What would happen if he set a boundary? Not an angry boundary, but a clear, loving boundary about what he needs to stay in the relationship?
Is she capable of having the vulnerability conversation that would actually rebuild trust, or is she committed to the script that surveillance equals safety?

The last one is crucial, because you cannot unilaterally solve a relationship problem. Sage can understand his own patterns, his own compliance, his own loss of agency. But if his girlfriend isn’t willing to interrogate why she needs pre-approval, why reassurance never feels like enough, why his autonomy feels like a threat—then they’re just reorganizing the furniture in the same small room.

✨ The Real Shift

What changed for Sage wasn’t that he found a clever solution. It was that he stopped pretending the arrangement made sense. He stopped defending it. He stopped performing compliance as love. And then he had a conversation with his girlfriend that was uncomfortable, terrifying, and honest in a way their relationship hadn’t been in months.

I can’t tell you where that conversation landed them—that belongs to them. But watching someone reclaim the right to make their own decisions, even when it’s scary and risks the relationship, is why I still show up for this work.

— Lola Adams, reminding you that we often mistake compliance for commitment, and call control “love” when we’re too afraid to name what we’re actually doing.