The below is an excerpt from an article from Roger Melton, M.A., L.M.F.T., CEAP (Retired) which appears on OBGYN.net:

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Part 1: Control

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Unlike men that can honestly struggle with their own uncertainties and confusions about a relationship, and recognize the part they play in creating problems and conflicts, there are other kinds of men that see love as a game and you as their pawn. In this cruelly covert contest, cunning is their watchword, deception is their fix, and control is their high.

Just as addicts are unrelenting in pursuit of making the next score, these kind of men are unyielding in their hunt for women that they can deceive and manipulate. Unlike emotionally sound men and women, who respect others as much as they do themselves, controlling-men respect no one. To them, people are things. And things can be used.

These “Controllers” use words as deceptive tools. Applying charm’s anesthetic to deaden the pain, they perform emotional-heart-surgery with crude precision. And young women can make the most vulnerable targets for a Controller’s manipulative scalpel.

While the harm most of these men inflict is emotional and psychological, there are those among them with a more dangerous twist, who feed off their victims’ souls the way a leech drains the blood of its prey: drop by drop. These are the captivating vampires, whose devious masks conceal every woman’s worst nightmare-the terrifying face of a future batterer or stalker.

To these violent men, control is like oxygen. Every sign of submission from others is like the breath of life, falsely confirming their delusion that only brute force affirms their worth. Failing to dominate a woman triggers loose a choking fear in these men, which they cannot face. That hidden fear is the truth that threatens their common delusion of godlike invincibility and exposes them as frightened little men, terrified of everyone and everything, including their own guilt. But guilt, for them, is intolerable.

They twist responsibility for their cruel actions away from themselves and lay it onto their victims. Their domineering maneuvers are magically excused in their minds. They project their own selfish, manipulative and deceptive defects of character onto the very people they harm, while persistently and vigorously proclaiming themselves as blameless.

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Control, itself, is not inherently negative. Everyone wants some form of it. It would be sheer folly to want none in a relationship, especially if you have experienced previous betrayal. But there is a critical difference between healthy and unhealthy control.

A healthy desire for control originates in a need to protect-either someone else or your self. Until a toddler learns the limits of safety and danger in the home, its only source of protection is its parents’ limit-setting controls. Movement control is harm control. Love is the motive. Protection is the goal.

Unhealthy control originates in a desire to dominate another, either through words or actions designed to both charm and harm-to captivate while simultaneously damaging the emotionally captured. It is this pairing of charm with harm that is the hallmark of Controller manipulations.

MORE of Part 1 HERE…
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ALSO SEE Part 2: The Malice Artists:

Preaching sugar while practicing poison, Controllers are experts at concealing their true natures. Hiding bad intentions beneath polished appearances, they have perfected the art of “looking good.” Subtle and devious in the way he conceals his manipulative nature, he may look like a rose, but ends up feeling like poison ivy.

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Every controlling-type man wants power, but he must feel it to know he has it. Inflicting control, and witnessing someone being controlled, is how he succeeds at sensing power. Loss of control equals powerlessness. And powerlessness, to a Controller, feels like death.

What Donald G. Dutton’s research team at the University of British Columbia and other recent researchers have finally demonstrated is that control-obsessed men can be recognized by certain very unusual personality profiles, known as personality disorders. But before looking at our first Controller profile in the next installment of this article series, it is important to first understand the differences between a normal, non-disordered personality and an abnormally disordered one. It will make Controller recognition easier.

‘Normal’ is not a good term to describe a mentally sound person, because it seems to imply that there must be a set of obvious, precisely definable characteristics that describe sanity. But, that is not easily the case. There is such an astounding range of differences between the vast majority of healthy individuals in the world that it is impossible to pin ‘normal’ down to an exact and narrow set of behaviors, attitudes or mannerisms. Ironically, one of the things that helps in spotting Controllers is the opposite-their behaviors, attitudes and mannerisms can be defined in predictable, narrow sets of characteristics.

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Personality-disordered people can be roughly divided into two groups-blamers and self-blamers-but this series of articles will focus on the blamers: Controllers that psychotherapists have classified as “narcissistic,” “borderline,” “sociopathic” and “sadistic.” Approximately twenty personality disorders have been identified, but these four predominate in the kinds of Controllers who tend to manipulate and deceive women-the kinds of men that have given Romeo an extremely bad name.

MORE of Part 2: The Malice Artists HERE: