by Ava Marie Somers, MACP, CCC
A LONG-FORM ESSAY
Imagine two energies circling.
Discovering. Admiring. Connecting.
Meeting every difference with wonder.
Oh, you move like that? You think like that? How?
A marveling. Not competing. Not comparing. Different, and beautiful. And okay.
There is a vine called wisteria. In spring, it becomes something almost impossible to look away from, long cascades of violet, draped like something out of a dream, wrapped gently around a trellis, a fence, an old tree. People plant it on purpose. People photograph it. People fall in love standing underneath it.
What most people don’t know is that the same vine, given enough time, can slowly deform the very thing it’s climbing. Not by force. Not all at once. By wrapping, patiently, a little more each season, until what’s left isn’t the tree’s shape anymore. It’s the vine’s. The tree grows the way the vine needs it to grow, not the way it would have grown on its own.
None of it, the wrapping, the patience, the beauty, ever looked like a threat.
I didn’t have language for that kind of shaping, beautiful on the outside, quietly reforming on the inside, until a friend of mine handed me two words, years ago, almost in passing.
The Problem With How We Usually Spot Control
Most of us have been taught to look for control, but only along one track. We know how to recognize the loud kind. The raised voice. The demand. The person who dominates the conversation, makes the decisions, or leaves little room for anyone else’s perspective. That kind of control is real, and when we encounter it, most of us can name it almost immediately.
But there is another kind that rarely announces itself. It doesn’t arrive with force. It arrives with warmth. It isn’t abrasive. Often, it’s deeply thoughtful. Caring. Wise. Competent. Sometimes even admired. Like the wisteria vine, it is genuinely beautiful. And because it is beautiful, we almost never think to ask whether it might also be quietly shaping everything it touches.
I wonder if part of the problem is that we’ve confused control with intensity. We imagine control as something that overpowers another person. Something obvious enough that everyone in the room can see it. But quiet control works differently. It doesn’t usually remove another person’s freedom. It slowly begins to influence the space in which that freedom is exercised.
Over time, people start explaining themselves a little more. Looking for reassurance a little more often. Waiting for another opinion before trusting their own. Adjusting, not because they’ve been forced to, but because something about the relationship gently pulls them in that direction. The shift is so gradual that it rarely feels like a shift at all.
Sometimes the controlling person speaks often. Sometimes they barely speak at all. Silence, after all, isn’t the opposite of control. Sometimes it’s simply another shape it can take.
This is why quiet control is so difficult to recognize. Not because it is especially clever, but because it doesn’t fit the picture most of us carry in our minds. We’ve been taught to notice coercion. We haven’t been taught to notice influence.
And perhaps the more unsettling question is not whether we’ve encountered this kind of control in others. Perhaps it’s whether we’ve ever participated in it ourselves. If control can wear kindness, wisdom, competence, or even love, then none of us are exempt from asking the question.
Not, Who around me is quietly controlling?
But first, Could there be places where I am quietly shaping others toward myself without ever realizing it?
I don’t ask that question lightly. I ask it because I have had to ask it of myself.
What Quiet Control Actually Looks Liked
Quiet control is the steady, ongoing shaping of another person’s choices, perceptions, or sense of self, done so gently, so kindly, that it rarely feels like shaping at all.
It has a loud cousin, and that one is easy to recognize. Overt control raises its voice. It demands, forbids, insists. It leaves little doubt that someone is trying to dominate another person’s will.
Quiet control takes nothing by force.
Instead, it offers concern. It offers care. It offers guidance. It says, “I only want what’s best for you,” and often means it sincerely. It doesn’t usually ask for obedience. It invites trust. It invites dependence. It quietly begins shaping the environment in which another person’s choices are made.
The difference isn’t always in what it feels like to receive.
It’s in what it slowly costs.
Over time, you may find yourself checking with them before trusting your own judgment. Explaining yourself more than you used to. Feeling subtly responsible for their comfort, their approval, or their disappointment. Not because anyone demanded it, but because the relationship has gradually taught you to orient yourself around them.
There is a word for something similar when it is done deliberately and knowingly. In some contexts, we call it grooming, the intentional shaping of another person’s thoughts, choices, or dependence over time for one’s own purposes.
But that is not what I’m describing here.
What makes quiet control so difficult to recognize is that it is often unconscious. The person shaping you may have no awareness that they are doing it. They may have no memory of deciding to behave this way, no hidden agenda, no intention to manipulate. They may simply be relating to others in the only way they have ever learned. The shaping is real, even when the intention is not.
Perhaps that is why the image of the wisteria holds up under closer study.
Botanists call one part of what it does girdling. As the vine wraps around the trunk, the tree continues to grow, but the vine does not loosen. It tightens. The tree responds in a way that is almost heartbreaking. Rather than fighting the vine, it forms new tissue around it, gradually enclosing the very thing restricting the flow of water and nutrients through its trunk.
The tree isn’t resisting.
It’s adapting.
It accommodates the vine. It absorbs it into its own shape. And over time, what once seemed like a harmless companion quietly begins determining how the tree itself can grow.
Perhaps that’s why quiet control is so difficult to detect.
It doesn’t usually arrive looking like domination.
More often, it arrives looking like devotion.
What Quiet Control Looks Like Across Relationships
Quiet control doesn’t belong to one kind of relationship.
It appears between partners. Between parents and children. Between friends. Between mentors and those they mentor. Between coworkers. Even between people who genuinely love one another.
The pattern is remarkably consistent.
Someone shares an experience, a decision, or a way of seeing the world.
What comes back rarely sounds like a command.
More often, it sounds thoughtful.
”That sounds wonderful…but…”
”Have you consider…”
”It’s not that I don’t trust you. I just don’t trust people.”
”I’m only saying this because I care about you.”
None of these responses is controlling on its own.
In healthy relationships, concern, wisdom, and constructive feedback are gifts. They help us see what we might have missed. They invite us to think more deeply. They help us grow.
The question isn’t whether another perspective is offered.
The question is what quietly happens to yours.
Before anyone has become genuinely curious about your experience, what drew you there, why this mattered to you, how you arrived at your conclusion, a different frame has already entered the conversation.
Their caution becomes the frame they are offering you to see the situation through.
Their worldview quietly becomes the lens through which your experience is interpreted, and then gently handed back to you, as though you, too, should now understand it that way.
Sometimes that perspective is wise.
Sometimes it’s even right.
That isn’t the point.
The question is whether another person’s way of seeing is allowed to exist alongside yours, or whether the conversation feels incomplete until you have adopted theirs.
Constructive feedback has an important place. It helps us grow.
But constructive feedback also knows when it has finished speaking.
Quiet control struggles to stop speaking.
The explanation becomes another explanation.
Another example.
Another reason.
Another story.
The goal slowly shifts from offering a perspective to securing agreement.
Not by force.
By persistence.
By the quiet inability to leave another person’s perspective exactly where it is.
That is why quiet control is so difficult to recognize.
It often feels like a really good conversation.
Until you notice how you feel when it ends.
Exhausted.
As though something in you has been slowly worn down.
You can’t always explain why.
You just know that sharing that space, that conversation, has left you carrying a weight you weren’t carrying before.
Imagine what it must feel like to be the tree, wrapped by the wisteria vine season after season.
Exhausted.
Overwhelmed.
Not suddenly.
Just… slowly.
A Few Discernment Cues Worth Noticing
No list like this can ever be complete.
Quiet control adapts. It takes the shape of the relationship, the personality, and the moment. It will always find expressions no article could fully anticipate.
So before you read any further, I’d invite you to resist a very human temptation.
It is remarkably easy to read a piece like this and quietly begin assigning faces to every paragraph.
“Oh… I know someone like that.”
Maybe you do.
But before this becomes an exercise in recognizing someone else, let it become an invitation to examine yourself.
Where, if anywhere, might these patterns quietly live in me?
That is a much more difficult question.
It is also the one most likely to change us.
It struggles to let a moment remain unresolved.
Some conversations simply end with two people seeing the world differently.
Quiet control has a hard time leaving them there.
The conversation circles back.
A few hours later.
The next morning.
A week from now.
Not because something new has emerged, but because something inside still longs for the same conclusion.
It borrows authority it doesn’t have.
What begins as one person’s perspective gradually becomes reinforced by something larger.
“Scripture says…”
“Everyone knows…”
“Any good therapist would tell you…”
“Even so-and-so would agree…”
Sometimes those authorities are entirely legitimate.
The question isn’t whether they’re credible.
The question is whether they’re being gathered in the hope that, eventually, you’ll see things the way they do, or perhaps because leaving two different conclusions standing side by side quietly unsettles something within them.
It uses shame as its quiet enforcement.
Rarely through accusation.
More often through disappointment.
Through subtle reminders.
Through bringing an older version of you quietly back into the room.
A mistake you’ve already owned.
A failure you’ve already grieved.
A pattern you’ve worked hard to leave behind.
Not to wound you openly.
Simply to make standing your ground feel increasingly difficult.
George Simon has written extensively about how shame, in its many forms, is especially effective with conscientious people, those who instinctively search themselves for fault long before they think to question the dynamics unfolding around them.
This isn’t the whole list, and it was never meant to be.
If you’ve felt something here that isn’t named above, I’d genuinely like to know what it was.
What’s Underneath It
There are probably as many roads into control as there are people who practice it.
No single explanation could account for all of them. But research gives us a few places worth looking.
One of them is attachment.
When our earliest experiences of closeness teach us that relationships are uncertain, unpredictable, or easily lost, another person’s freedom can carry more weight than it appears to. Their choices are not simply their choices. Their distance can feel like rejection. Their disagreement can feel like disconnection. Their unpredictability can stir something much older than the moment itself.
Research on controlling behaviour in intimate relationships has found connections between insecure attachment, difficulty regulating emotion, and greater controlling behaviour.
That matters because it shifts the question slightly.
What if some control is not primarily about wanting power over another person?
What if sometimes it is an attempt to manage what another person’s freedom stirs up inside us?
Fear. Uncertainty. Vulnerability. The possibility of loss.
If I cannot settle what is happening inside me, I may begin trying to settle what is happening outside of me.
I may need you to reassure me.
To agree with me.
To choose differently.
To come closer.
Or perhaps to stay far enough away that I don’t have to feel too exposed.
From the inside, none of this necessarily feels like control.
It may feel like safety-keeping.
There is another idea that helps us understand this. Family systems psychiatrist Murray Bowen called it differentiation of self: our capacity to remain connected to another person without losing the distinction between where I end and they begin.
When that distinction becomes difficult to hold, your decision can begin to feel strangely like my decision.
Your risk becomes my risk.
Your mistake becomes something I need to prevent.
Your different conclusion becomes something I need to resolve.
And suddenly, allowing you to remain fully yourself can feel far more threatening than either of us realizes.
Shame may live underneath some of this too, although its relationship with controlling behaviour is more complicated than we sometimes assume.
For some people, shame becomes woven deeply into the way relationships are experienced. John Bradshaw wrote extensively about shame-based ways of relating, about what can happen when shame is not simply something we feel, but something we absorb into how we understand ourselves and others.
And perhaps this is part of what makes quiet control so difficult to recognize from the inside.
If I experience your autonomy as threat, my steering may feel like protection.
If your disagreement activates something painful in me, my persistence may feel like caring enough not to give up.
If I have spent a lifetime confusing closeness with sameness, I may genuinely believe that trying to bring you toward my way of seeing is what love does.
None of this excuses the cost.
The tree is still being shaped.
But understanding the roots asks something different of us than simply condemning the vine.
It asks us to become curious about what happens inside us when someone we love remains entirely, unmistakably themselves.
Can I tolerate your uncertainty?
Your disagreement?
Your disappointment in me?
Your decision to do what I would never do?
Can I remain connected to you without requiring your choices to settle something inside me?
Because perhaps the question underneath quiet control is not only whether we love another person.
Perhaps it is whether we can bear to love them without needing them to become more like us.
What’s Underneath the People Who Aren’t
If control often comes from what someone can’t tolerate, its opposite may simply be what someone can.
Not indifference. Not passivity. Not a person who has stopped caring how things turn out.
Something else.
A settledness that doesn’t depend on your choices resolving in any particular direction.
People who make room for another person’s autonomy still worry. They still disagree. They still watch people they love make choices they would never make themselves. They can be disappointed, frightened, frustrated, even convinced that someone is wrong.
The difference may be in what they do next.
They can feel the discomfort of another person’s freedom without immediately needing that person to relieve it.
They can say, I don’t understand your decision, without turning that into, so I need you to change it.
They can offer wisdom and let it remain an offering.
They can speak from conviction without requiring agreement as proof that the conversation mattered.
Bowen’s language is useful again here, from the other side of the same idea. A well-differentiated person can stay closely connected to someone they love while still holding a clear sense of where they end and the other person begins.
Your decision doesn’t have to become their decision.
Your risk doesn’t have to become their risk.
They can want good things for you, even feel afraid for you, without needing your choice to go a certain way in order to feel safe themselves.
That’s not the same as not caring.
If anything, it may be a deeper kind of care, one that doesn’t need managing to prove itself.
For some people, that internal steadiness may have been built early. They experienced relationships in which they could be separate and still be loved. Someone tolerated their disagreement without withdrawing, survived their disappointment without punishing them for it, let them make a choice that turned out to be wrong without using it as proof that they could no longer be trusted.
Those experiences can become a kind of internal floor.
Something steady enough that another person’s uncertainty doesn’t have to become their own.
But not everyone inherits that floor.
Some of us have to build it.
Through therapy. Through relationships that finally model something different. Through becoming aware of our own attachment patterns. Through the slow practice of noticing the urge to steer, and learning that we don’t have to follow it.
And perhaps, most of all, through curiosity.
Oh, you see it that way?
Tell me more.
How did you arrive there?
Curiosity allows another person’s inner world to remain genuinely other.
That doesn’t mean approving of everything. It doesn’t mean abandoning discernment, withholding concern, or pretending all choices are equally wise.
It means I don’t have to enter your inner world and rearrange the furniture simply because I would have placed it differently.
There is something deeply regulated about that kind of love.
Something differentiated.
Something spacious enough to hold two truths at once:
I can believe deeply in what I believe.
And I can let you belong to yourself.
Maybe that is what those two energies at the beginning were doing.
Circling.
Discovering.
Admiring.
Not because they had nothing to challenge in one another, but because neither needed difference to disappear before connection could remain.
Oh, you move like that?
You think like that?
How?
A marveling.
Different.
And okay.
Perhaps that is the clearest distinction available:
Not the absence of investment, but the presence of enough internal steadiness that love doesn’t require agreement to survive.
What It Is Not
By this point, it would be easy to make the category too large.
If quiet control can look like concern, advice, wisdom, persistence, or strong conviction, then almost anything could begin to look suspicious.
That isn’t what I’m suggesting.
Disagreement is not control.
Neither is having a strong opinion.
Giving advice is not control. Offering perspective is not control. Telling someone you think they’re making a mistake is not control.
Neither is setting a boundary.
A boundary says, This is what I will do, what I can participate in, what I need in order to remain in this relationship.
Control says, This is what you need to do so that I can be okay.
They can sound remarkably similar from the outside. The difference is often where the responsibility lands.
Nor is every attempt to influence another person controlling.
We influence one another constantly. That is part of relationship. We tell stories, share wisdom, challenge each other, teach, persuade, warn, encourage, and sometimes plead. There are moments when persistence is loving and necessary, particularly where safety, vulnerability, or responsibility are involved.
The question isn’t whether I have influenced you.
The question is whether I can tolerate the possibility that I won’t.
Can I say what I believe clearly and let you decide what to do with it?
Can I disagree with your decision without making the relationship itself the price of that disagreement?
Can I remain connected when my wisdom isn’t taken?
Can I let no be no, even when I believe your yes would have been better for you?
And perhaps this is where the distinction becomes simplest.
Quiet control is not caring deeply about what another person chooses.
It is not conviction.
It is not concern.
It is not influence.
It is what begins to happen when my internal steadiness becomes dependent on your movement toward me.
The Alternative in Practice
So what does the alternative actually look like?
Often, it is surprisingly ordinary.
It sounds like:
”I see I see this differently. Do you want to hear what I think?”
”I’m worried about this, but I know it’s your decision.”
”I’ve said what I needed to say. You don’t have to agree with me”
”Help me understand what you’re seeing that I might not be seeing.”
And sometimes:
”I don’t think this is a good idea. And I love you.”
There is still honesty here. Still conviction. Still concern. What disappears is the quiet requirement that the other person move. You offer what is yours and leave room for what is theirs.
That may mean noticing the moment when concern begins turning into persuasion. The second explanation. The better example. The article you suddenly want to send. The respected person whose opinion might finally make your point convincing. The conversation you are tempted to reopen tomorrow because something in you still doesn’t feel settled.
And instead of immediately following that urge outward, you turn inward. What is happening in me right now? What am I afraid will happen if they don’t change their mind? Can I take care of what this is stirring in me without asking them to become different so that I can feel better?
Sometimes the most loving thing we can do is say the thing clearly once. And then stop. Not because we don’t care. Because we do. Because love that respects another person’s autonomy eventually has to trust them with the uncomfortable privilege of being a person. A person who may misunderstand. Who may choose differently. Who may make a mistake. Who may even prove us right. And who still gets to belong to themselves.
The alternative to quiet control is not silence. It is not detachment. It is not pretending we have no influence on one another. It is learning how to bring our whole selves into relationship without requiring someone else to become more like us in order for the relationship to remain safe.
Perhaps that is what curiosity makes possible.
Not: How do I get you to see this the way I do?
But: Who are you, here, in this moment, and can I stay long enough to find out?
I know what this costs, because I’ve paid it.
When my oldest son turned eighteen, his friends were taking him out drinking for the first time.
I did not like this plan. At all. Every part of me wanted him to make a different choice. Instead, I sat down at my computer and wrote him a letter.
I told him I knew he was going. I told him I wouldn’t provide the money for it, not as punishment, but because it wasn’t something I was willing to fund. He had his own money now, and what he chose to do with it belonged to him. I told him plainly that I didn’t agree with his decision.
And then I did something much harder than telling him not to go. I helped him prepare to go safely. Don’t drink on an empty stomach. Don’t share drinks. Pay attention to how much you’ve had. Basic harm-reduction guidance for a young man going out drinking for the first time.
The message underneath all of it was simple: I love you. I don’t agree with this. And since you are choosing it, here is how I hope you’ll take care of yourself while you do it.
That was it. It was hard to write.
And then something happened that has stayed with me. He texted me throughout the night. Okay Mom, just had drink number one. There he was, doing the very thing I wished he weren’t doing, and still reaching toward me.
I was irritated. Worried. Awake. Wishing I could undo the whole evening. But I didn’t reopen the argument. I didn’t call with one more reason. I didn’t go looking for one more piece of evidence that might finally change his mind.
I had said what I believed. And then I let him have the night that was his to have.
He was free to make a choice I didn’t agree with. I was free to remain deeply unhappy about it. And neither of those things required us to disconnect from each other.
That’s the cost of this, honestly. Respecting another person’s autonomy doesn’t stop you from feeling what their choices stir up in you. It asks you to learn what to do with those feelings without making the other person responsible for resolving them.
Sometimes love sounds like I disagree. Sometimes it sounds like please be careful. And sometimes it is the extraordinarily difficult work of allowing both sentences to stand.
A Brief Self-Check
Perhaps the question isn’t, Am I a controlling person?
That question may be too large, and perhaps too easy to defend against.
A more useful question might be:
What happens in me when someone I love won’t move?
Am I offering my perspective, or trying to secure agreement?
Am I still curious, or am I waiting for them to arrive at my conclusion?
Can I remain connected to them while they remain unconvinced by me?
Can I say what I believe and let it rest?
If they choose differently, is some part of me waiting for the outcome to prove that I was right?
And if things do go badly, can I allow the consequence itself to teach whatever it is going to teach without inserting myself as the lesson?
Can I enter their pain without my rightness entering the room with me?
Reflective Close
I think often now about the difference between wisteria wrapped around a tree, and two energies circling each other.
Both reach. Both lean in close enough to be changed by what they find there.
But one wraps without ever asking.
The other stays near. Marveling. Letting what’s different remain exactly that, and letting itself be changed by it, when it chooses to be.
Maybe you’ll read this and recognize the wisteria in someone close to you. Maybe you’ll recognize it in yourself. Both are worth sitting with, gently, the way you’d sit with anything still tender.
The wisteria isn’t a category of person. It’s a way of behaving. Something that can live right alongside everything genuinely beautiful in someone.
Someone can be wise, and still quietly control.
Generous, and still struggle to let someone choose differently without punishing them for it.
Loving, and still need agreement more than they need difference.
The wisteria in you. The wisteria in me. Not proof that either of us is the bad person. Just something worth recognizing, and worth choosing to put down.
The question is smaller, and harder: did I arrive here by my own choosing, or did I wake up one season and find I’d quietly become someone I never chose to be?
And can I admit that I tend to control, that sometimes I quietly shape our closeness around what I can tolerate, instead of leaving room for us to discover what it might become together?
If I look at someone I love, and something in me softens toward the way they see the world, if I find myself changed, drawn toward something beautiful in how they think, how they move through this life, let that be real. Let it be shaping, the deepest kind. The same person. The same beauty. The same quiet influence.
And still, entirely mine to have chosen.
Because I could have walked away.
And didn’t.
I am still standing on my own roots.
Still reaching toward something, on purpose.
And perhaps you are too.
Neither of us unchanged. Neither of us deciding alone what the other will become.
Oh, you move like that? You think like that? How?
Oh, you move like that? You think like that? How?
Still a marveling.
Still a choosing.