Some Parents Control Because They Fear Being Chosen

Control begins as a test you set for someone who does not know they are being graded. In this scene from Confessions to the Empty Chair, the young narrator stands in Leigh’s kitchen, pulling cold beers from the refrigerator, carrying them back to a table where his friend Doug is already lighting a cigarette—the medium smokers use to feel out new company. The air is loose and warm. There is banter, easy laughter, the small polite interjections of four people liking each other on a first night. Leigh sits down beside her friend Erin. The talk drifts. Good vibes, the narrator notes to himself, as if ticking a box. And that is the tell, because he is not really sitting at that table at all. He is running an experiment on it. During a bathroom break he pulls Doug aside and quietly tells him to work his charm on Leigh—Doug, who is taller, better dressed, handsome in a way the narrator measures against himself and comes up short. Then he fakes a stomach problem to buy Doug time alone with her. His hands keep pouring, his mouth keeps smiling, his body performs a warmth his mind has already left. This is the seed of every controlling love: he cannot simply let Leigh choose him. He cannot bear to sit still and wait to be wanted with nothing in his hand to steer the outcome. So he builds a trap that will give him the answer before the honest question is even risked. There is a dizziness under this that most controlling people never name aloud—the terror of standing before another person with no leverage, no test, no card up the sleeve, and simply asking, plainly, to be loved. It feels like standing at the edge of something with no floor beneath it. He would rather rig the trial than feel that drop. The controlling parent lives in this exact kitchen. He cannot survive the hour when a child might turn away of their own free will, so he quietly removes the freedom, arranges the pieces, steers the night, and calls the whole rigged thing care. The narrator is young here, and casually cruel in the way the young are cruel—without quite feeling the weight of it. But he is honest enough, telling it years later, to name what he did. His beer grows warm in his hand while he watches another man do his testing for him. Some parents keep that same beer warm for a lifetime and never once notice the temperature has changed, never once notice the person across the table has become an experiment instead of a face.

Every controlling grip is a self-fulfilling prophecy dressed as caution. The narrator confesses his design without flinching: he wanted to know whether Leigh, a woman who could have her pick of men, would fall for Doug’s game. Behind that test crouches a conviction he never says out loud but lives inside—that he himself is not enough. Doug is taller. Doug dresses better. The narrator has already measured the room by another man’s brightness and found himself the dimmer bulb, the prop wheeled in to justify his own place on the guest list. So the experiment was never really about Leigh’s steadiness. It was his own fear, given a stage to walk out on. This is the machinery of control at its root. The insecure heart cannot receive love as something freely given, because underneath everything it does not believe it deserves a real choice. So it manufactures the situation that will confirm the sentence already carved into it by old wounds. Notice the trap has no exit. If Leigh had taken the bait and agreed to meet Doug, the narrator would have felt the sour satisfaction of being proven right—see, I knew I was never enough. And when she instead asked whether the narrator would be there too, he trusted it only until the next test he would eventually devise. There is no verdict that ends the trial. That is the real cruelty, and it lands hardest not on Leigh but on him, and on everyone he will try to love this crooked way. Controlling parents run the same fixed trial on their children. They cannot believe the child would stay, obey, or love them freely, so they strip the freedom out of the equation and call whatever remains devotion. But a love with no door out is not love. It is a verdict enforced with a smile. The dread underneath burns almost holy in its intensity: to let another person stay free is to accept you might be left, and the wounded heart would rather build a cage than stand on that open ground. The narrator, telling this long afterward, spares himself nothing. He names it a test. He names Doug a tool he used and used up. He lets Doug call him a bastard, and he agrees without argument. That refusal to look away is the confession the whole chapter turns on. He is finally asking the question the controlling parent never dares ask: what if the thing I fear is not that they will leave me, but that they never truly chose me at all—because I never once gave them the room to?

He fell in love with Leigh and told her nothing. Over the following weeks they spent long stretches of time together, and the ritual that held them was talk—face to face, sometimes until the sun came up, the one honest thing passing between them. In all those hours he never said the three words. Instead he builds a whole private theology to justify the silence: confess your love and the balance tips, and a woman, once she knows a man feels for her, grows bored, then dismissive. So he withholds. He tells himself she will read his love in his actions, that this is stronger, wiser, more manly than uttering some simple phrase. Here is where the searcher’s question finally opens all the way. Why are some parents so controlling? Because control and withholding are the same wound wearing two faces. The one who cannot say the words will always demand the proof. The narrator’s silence is not restraint at all—it is dominance dressed up as strength. By refusing to speak, he keeps Leigh permanently in the position of the one who must guess, must earn, must prove herself against a certainty he will never simply hand her. He runs a quiet economy of debt in which she is always owing and he is always the one holding the ledger. Controlling parents do this to their children with terrible fluency. They rarely say the tender word. They wait to be shown instead, keeping the child hungry for an approval always set one step further down the road. And the child learns the trade—to perform, to test, to withhold in turn—the whole inheritance handed down like a debt that never clears. The narrator admits the root of it. Jane, before all this, built a minefield around those very words, and after Jeannètte his heart and soul were, as he puts it, still in the hospital. Four years he had told no one he loved them. His silence with Leigh is not a clever strategy. It is a scar still leaking, pressed now against a new woman’s skin. And this is the mercy hidden inside the dark of it—God does not stand outside this frightened silence, arms crossed, waiting for the man to repair himself first. God sits down in the kitchen with him at sunrise, present in the very act of the sin, walking beside a heart too scared to open its mouth. The nearness itself is the grace, not any cure. The man is not lifted out of his coldness. He is accompanied down into it, tear by tear, until years later he can finally set it on paper and, at last, see what he was doing to her and to himself.

He believed love belonged in his actions, not his voice. And buried inside that self-serving line sits a real truth—love proves itself in change, not in announcement. The body speaks what the mouth will not. He stayed with Leigh through the whole night. He chose her company over sleep. He kept returning across the table to her face, again and again, until the room went pale with morning. Something in him was turning whether he confessed it or not. But here is the fallout he could not yet feel: withheld words do not stay pure by going unspoken. They spoil. The silence he called strength taught Leigh to doubt, to wait, to wonder whether she was truly wanted or only tolerated for now. His flesh remembered older betrayals and pulled back from the single word that could have set her free. So the very body that showed love also enforced the silence—two orders running at once down the same set of nerves, the hand reaching out while the throat closed. This is the aftermath every controlling home lives inside. The parent may work themselves raw—provide, protect, show up early and stay late—and never once say the word the child is starving to hear. The labor is real. The withholding is just as real. Both stay true at the same time, and the child grows up unable to tell whether all that effort was love or leverage. The narrator, older now, turns the lens hard on himself. Who was Leigh to him, really—a woman he loved, or one more test he could not stop administering across a sunrise table? What did he refuse to see in her patience through all those long talks, in the way she asked first whether he would be there? He does not tie it off. He lets the question sit and ache in the open. And under the whole scene runs the dread he can finally name: the groundless terror of freedom, hers and his own together. To speak love is to jump with no net stretched below. To let her stay free to leave is to keep standing over that open drop night after night. He chose the closed cage of silence over the fall. Most controlling people do exactly that. What breaks in—rare, quiet, unearned—is not a rescue but the recognition itself, the sudden clean sight of what he did and why he did it. That seeing is the only thing that ever loosens the fingers. It does not undo the harm. It cannot un-warm the beer or un-wound Leigh across those tired mornings. It simply names the fear that ran the whole machine, and in the naming, some knot deep in the flesh at last begins to give.

Control is fear that never learned to trust the answer. That is where this chapter of Confessions to the Empty Chair sets the reader down—not with a lesson wrapped in a bow, but with a young man in a warm kitchen at dawn, running experiments on a woman he loves, unable to say so, sure that love must be pried loose rather than received. If you came here asking why some parents grip so hard, the answer is written in his beer-warm hands and his shut mouth. They cannot believe they would be chosen freely, so they remove the freedom and christen the result devotion. They cannot say the tender word, so they demand you prove your love over and over, keeping you forever indebted to an approval they will never simply give away. The wound underneath is old—usually older than the child, usually a minefield some earlier person laid down long before. The narrator’s honesty is what makes this bearable to read. He does not excuse himself. He does not lay it on Leigh, or on Jane, or on the hospital where his heart was still lying flat. He sets the whole rigged trial on the table and lets you look straight at the fear that ran it. And here is the strange comfort the book keeps offering—not that the fear gets fixed, not that control melts sweetly into trust, but that God is found right inside the kitchen where the sin is happening. Present at the sunrise. Seated beside the man too frightened to speak. The grace is the nearness, never the erasure. The dark is not lifted off him; it is inhabited with him, tear by tear, until the day he can finally write it down and see plainly what he did. For anyone raised under a controlling love, or anyone who has caught themselves testing the very people they most want to keep, that is the true invitation. Not to hate the fear. To name it. To learn to read the body’s honest language over the mouth’s easy defenses, and to grieve, without softening it, the love that was shown but never once spoken. The book makes no promise that the cage swings open on its own. It promises only that you will not have to stand over that drop by yourself. His whole confession is the slow labor of learning to say the thing he could not say to Leigh at daybreak—and the reader, turning these pages, feels the sting of every word he swallowed sitting hot in the throat. Follow that sting. It is the way in.