"Connection over Control"

Most of us learned early how to read a room. When affection felt like a moving target and criticism came faster than comfort, we did what kids do: we adapted. Alice Miller called every child’s first wish “to be regarded and respected as the person they really are.” When that wish is ignored, the child tucks real feelings out of sight so love, any love, doesn’t disappear. Donald Winnicott named the mask that forms a “false self.” Heinz Kohut later saw that mask harden into adult narcissism, a suit of armor around a hurting core.

Photo creation by B. Littleton

Dr. Gabor Maté reminds us none of this starts as a character flaw; it’s an injury to the nervous system. Trauma, he says, is “what happens inside you.” If the wound keeps whispering, an empty place opens up, and some people try to fill it with applause, influence, or money. On paper they shine. Up close they control, punish, and surround themselves with others chasing the same quick hits of power. Life becomes a vehicle to plow across systems that unify people, and instead demand obedience in ways that speaks to the childhood wound in others. Instead of thinking freely, the survival compensation patterns of freeze, fight, flee, fawn, or fib surface, and the system recycles itself into wider circles of toxic behavior and tethered fears. 

America’s story feeds that pattern. Well into the 1970s schools still used corporal punishment, and domestic violence didn’t earn legal language until survivors demanded it. By the 1980s, “Greed is good” jumped from movie screen to mission statement. When hardness gets tagged as hustle, it seeps into boardrooms, family dinners, and eventually national politics.

History shows the extreme. Adolf Hitler grew up under a violent father and a heavy silence. The boy who learned domination at home scaled it to a continent, boosted by a pharmacy of stimulants when his charisma sputtered. That is an outsized warning, but it underscores a simple truth: unattended wounds can turn personal pain into public harm.

Carl Jung said every era carries its own pathology. Ours is flashing like a warning light: sky‑high burnout, widening wealth gaps, and public debates where cruelty and bullying passes for strength. When emotional abuse becomes normal in the home or the office, we should not be shocked to see it strut across Capitol Hill, and swarm major cities in California. 

So what now? First, we name the pattern without shame. As Brené Brown puts it, we can’t wrestle with a story we refuse to tell. Second, we hold ourselves, and others, accountable for impact, even while remembering many hurtful behaviors began as survival skills. Third, we build systems that prize empathy over image: workplaces where feedback is honest and respectful, schools that teach emotional literacy alongside algebra, and policies that treat dignity as non‑negotiable.

Hope here isn’t soft; it’s disciplined. It means listening when the child inside, or the child in the crowd, points out the Emperor’s invisible clothes. It means choosing connection over control in daily, ordinary moments. Do that often enough, and we quit polishing the armor and start healing the wound.

written by Brenda Littleton
Tin Flea Press 2025

Photo creation by B. Littleton 
Tin Flea Press 2023