How to Deal with a Controlling Person

by Judith Orloff, M.D.


Judith Orloff, MD is an Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA.  She is the author of the New York Times and international bestseller, Emotional Freedom: Liberate Yourself From Negative Emotions and Transform Your Life (Three Rivers Press, 2011), from which the following is an excerpt. Visit her website: Judith Orloff, M.D.

        As a psychiatrist, I have observed that relationships can be one of the major sources of exhaustion for my patients.  In “Emotional Freedom” I discuss how to deal with different kinds of draining people to avoid getting fatigued, sick, or burned out.  One of these is the control freak.

New Paradigms and the Archetype of the Page

The Page of Pentacles 
explores issues of self-
worth, and how to value
the world around him.

 Introducing, The Page

        The Page, in contrast to the “older” members of the royal court (king, queen, etc.) is the  archetype of the newbie, the upstart, the person just starting out on his journey of life, with many lessons ahead to learn.  Energetic young people holding servant-like positions in Congress are actually still called “pages,” and they do the bidding of the older, elected members.  White House interns choose to be interns at the nation's capitol because they aspire to have political careers one day.  They want to learn what exactly goes on behind the scenes there, the stuff they’re not taught at school.  Such is the fearless thirst for knowledge of the Page. 

States of Mind

          If you observe your thoughts in the course of a day, you'll find that your mind has fluctuated through a series of "states." Sometimes, you're scattered, sometimes focused, sometimes emotional, sometimes lethargic.  This mental fluctuating is not a new phenomenon, and Indian yogis wrote about this tendency of our minds centuries ago.  They categorized these fluctuating states into five general categories, which the article below (excerpted from Crystallotus.com) describes.  The actual text from the original article is displayed in yellow font, and my personal commentary is beneath it.