Pros: Brings an underpublicized problem to the forefront
Cons: Language is too New Age in spots for my taste
The Bottom Line: CONTROLLING PEOPLE is a bit New Age in spots for my taste, but should be read by those who don't know quite what's wrong in their relationships.
Kidnykid's Full Review: Patricia Evans - Controlling People: How to Recogn...
Patricia Evans hit the jackpot again by writing CONTROLLING PEOPLE. For those who have no idea who she is, she is something of an expert in aspects of domestic abuse other than spousal assault and battery. She has written two other books, THE VERBALLY ABUSIVE RELATIONSHIP and VERBAL ABUSE SURVIVORS SPEAK OUT, both of which I've reviewed on Epinions.com. The focus of her book CONTROLLING PEOPLE is the control emotional abusers exert over their victims.
Often, we do not realize we are being abused in this fashion. In this form of abuse, as in almost no other, the abuser is deliberately choosing to act one way in private and another way in public, more often than not.
As Evans points out in CONTROLLING PEOPLE, those who do the controlling almost universally have their own projection of how they feel you are (or should be), and interact with that projection instead of with you whenever you are in the room. One of the analogies that she draws to explain the phenomenon is the analogy of the teddy bear; she calls those being abused Teddy in spots to recognize that to the abuser, the victim is little more than a Teddy bear to be engaged in pretend conversation whenever it's convenient for the abuser to socialize. When the abuser is finished, his victim's humanity is so unrecognized that the abuser feels he can conveniently put his victim on the shelf precisely because he really thinks she is a Teddy bear, there for his comfort and convenience.
Think of the way a child plays with a Teddy bear. He or she will pick that bear up, socialize with it in a singsong voice, and even pretend to speak for it. When it is no longer convenient to play with the Teddy bear - say, the child owning the Teddy bear has to go to school or the pediatrician, or becomes distracted by a playmate offering a better play opportunity - the owner of the Teddy bear will leave the bear alone without a second thought. This is precisely the way in which a controller sees those he controls: as if they were Teddy bears he can pick up with and interact with at will, then drop like a hot potato whenever he becomes distracted by something else. (Or, for that matter, whenever he has a prior obligation in the outside world.) Furthermore, he can shut this behavior pattern on and off seemingly instantaneously, so that others haven't any idea that he is controlling someone else.
In fact, Evans rightly points out that this ability to fool others presents a significant obstacle when controllers wake up and smell the coffee, and try to heal. She reports that self-confessed controllers - those willing to admit that they did this and trying to stop controlling others - often meet up with disbelief, and with people who stymie every attempt on their part to stop controlling others. Those who stymie a controller's attempts to heal do not realize that they are doing so, precisely because they were manipulated into seeing this perfect persona presented by a controller.
The only real complaint I have is that I wish Evans had stuck to the use of plain English in her descriptions of controlling behavior. The language she uses in spots is indeed very New Age, and therefore very hard to understand by the average person. It is precisely this average person who needs the material in this book the most; we are all controlled by someone else virtually on a daily basis, and we all need strategies in place to stop being controlled. Readers of this review would truly be amazed to find out how many in their immediate environment are controllers, and how subtly they practice the art of control.
The topic of being controlled in abusive ways by others is so important, however, that I want CONTROLLING PEOPLE to achieve bestseller status. Get this book and read it from cover to cover. Read it several times. Make the time to read it. You won't be sorry, but the controlling and bossy people in your life will - that you finally are on to their game.
In Controlling People, bestselling author Patricia Evans tackles the controlling personality, and reveals how and why people try to run other people's...More at Barnes & Noble.com
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