#201 Why Successful Women Confuse Control with Love

I speak to high-achieving women with super traits every single day, and there is this collective desire to let it all go, to relax, to be led, to surrender.

When you have over-functioned, when you have worked so hard that you have become the crusty wife, the point person, the one everyone calls to fix their problems, it is exhausting. It leads to a special kind of resentment and discontent. Your life looks good on the outside, yet something is missing.

Our super traits get us the career success, the outward achievements, the checked boxes, but internally, something is very off. We crave surrender, to let someone else take the reins, to be led, but we cannot.

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The Kind of Control No One Names

I am talking about the kind of control that does not look like control. It looks like competence. It looks like kindness. It looks like peacekeeping. It looks like being altruistic.

But underneath, it comes from fear. It comes from overdeveloped super traits that starve us of the connection, intimacy, and health that we need. It is death in slow motion, killing us quietly over time.

Underneath all the over-functioning is exhaustion, a quiet panic, a nervous system that learned early on that staying calm, managing, fixing, and worrying about everyone else’s needs might finally make us feel safe.

If responsibility, tolerance, forgiveness, or loyalty are your super traits, this is where they all show up. Responsibility, especially because we feel responsible for everyone else’s feelings and well-being. We fear that if we do not fix things, people will leave.

How Control Becomes Safety

If you grew up around chaos, unpredictable moods, or emotional unavailability, you learned that control equals safety. You knew that love came through other people’s acceptance and validation. You learned that showing feelings could cost love, so you learned to earn it instead.

Being right kept you from being blamed. Fixing kept the family from falling apart. Managing things made sure everyone’s needs were met. You walked on eggshells, and it worked. That is what makes super traits so sneaky.

As adults, we are rewarded for control. We are called organized, mature, loyal, and dependable. But there is a loneliness beneath it all, an underlying anxiety that never stops humming. We do not know how to turn it off, and it keeps us from being present.

The Body’s Reaction to Control

This hypervigilance is why many high-achieving women experience anhedonia, the inability to feel pleasure. The nervous system is stuck in overdrive. Learning to regulate the nervous system and turn pleasure centers back on is the work. It is the healing.

But we cannot do that without understanding power and control. Without that awareness, women with super traits are playing checkers while everyone else is playing chess.

We become so irreplaceable that even when we are tired or snappy, no one wants to leave because we make their lives so easy. But the dynamic is off. The love feels extractive, not nourishing.

Marriage often benefits men more than women unless the man is truly egalitarian and sees his partner as an equal. When that balance is missing, resentment grows, and women with super traits keep over-functioning to hold everything together.

The Hidden Forms of Control

Control does not always look like dominance or decision-making. Sometimes it seems like erasing yourself. Sometimes it looks like caring about others more than yourself.

These are the quiet ways control hides in women with super traits.
Being right. Fixing. Managing logistics and emotions. Policing tone. Withholding affection. Overexplaining. Delegating with strings attached. Performing to appear perfect. Emotionally overregulating and avoiding intimacy to prevent hurt.

These behaviors look like care, but they are control. They are our nervous system’s way of saying. If I can manage everything, I will be safe. Yet they keep us from the intimacy and rest we crave.

Control as a Love Language

For women with super traits, control becomes a love language. It is how we try to create safety. Ask a superwoman to stop doing these things, and she short-circuits.

Control promises safety but never delivers. Even when people stay, it is not always by free will; it is because we have made their lives easier. That is not love, that is management.

Control and safety are opposites. One is performance, the other is presence.

Rebuilding Safety from Within

Healing starts when we learn to regulate the nervous system and rebuild safety from the inside out, when we learn to detach, to let others carry their own weight, to feel safe in our bodies again.

We stop mistaking vigilance for intimacy and peacekeeping for connection. We stop confusing control with love.

We crave surrender but flinch when it is offered because, to our nervous system, surrender once meant danger. Relearning safety and rebuilding connection from a pleasure-centered place is where real power begins.

Control says, I will make you safe so I can relax, but it never keeps that promise. Safety comes when we finally stop performing and start being present.

If you are ready to stop surviving and start living, take the Free Super Trait Quiz to discover the traits that shape your patterns. Then join the Super Trait Society, where we rebuild safety, power, and intimacy from the inside out.

Because control was never safety, it was survival.

And you deserve more than survival.

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