Your Inner Voice: Restoring Autonomy in Controlling Relationships Through Self-Talk

I watched as the couple walked into the room. Both were well dressed. His posture was firm; his presence landed immediately. She was slightly hunched, her stare distant. They sat down and, at his instruction, she settled first while he made himself comfortable. Sue looked down as I addressed them, and he answered for both. When I asked why they had requested the appointment, Jack quickly said he needed to fix his wife because she was “all over the place.” Sue protested mildly, but her voice was soft and understated. She was not a strong presence. As Jack’s confidence grew in this setting, he became increasingly demeaning, and Sue slumped further into the chair.

It was around then that I stopped listening to the details and began to intervene in the pattern that was becoming clearer by the minute: he was crushing her, and she had no defence. I kept him talking while gathering more context about their lives. Jack was quite willing to provide background about the relationship and himself. A self-made man of considerable wealth, he had married Sue when he was younger, and they had two children—both girls, currently in junior high school. The immediate problem, he said, began after he had an affair with a work colleague, yet he could not see anything wrong with his actions. Besides, he insisted, “it was over, and why should Sue not wholeheartedly believe him?” Sue offered little defence and maintained her defeated composure throughout the consultation.

Therapists are meant to maintain neutrality in consultations with couples, facilitating the relationship between the individuals. Here, though, it was clear that Sue had lost her agency and was consumed by her partner’s presence. She had, in fact, “lost her voice”.

The question then becomes: “How does one approach a situation like this and empower the diminished partner? How do you shift a power balance that is so clearly unequal?” It was time for a strategic intervention. I asked Jack to step out of the room for three minutes. He was reluctant at first, but with some persuasion he accepted that he could “not see how I could do any harm to him and his relationship in that brief time”. He left the soundproof room. I turned to Sue and asked her to try a small experiment. I told her she had lost her voice and that it would be good to get it back. I said she did not need to contend with her husband for the rest of the session, but rather to drown him out inwardly. In effect, she was to talk to herself and tell herself that the “daisies were yellow”. Sue looked surprised. “Like out loud?” she asked. I said no—inwardly, like to yourself (inner, covert self-talk), but you have to say it, not merely think it. I coached her: “Say the words out loud.” She did. “Now, under your breath.” She complied. Finally: “Say them to yourself as if you were talking to yourself inaudibly.” She understood the exercise. We called Jack back in, and he was visibly agitated. He wanted to know why I had sent him out and suggested I should do the same to Sue “to make things equal.” I deflected and returned to the topic of his affair, asking why he felt it wasn’t wrong. Things became complicated at that point. Jack began to berate Sue for her supposed incompetence and inadequacy—blame-shifting and unwilling to own his actions. Sue began repeating “the daisies are yellow” to herself. Soon she could feel that she was drowning out the force of Jack’s voice. The more she focused on her own words, the less his could reach her emotionally. In that way, she began to undo his verbal power over her and to come out of the trance she had been living in. She sat up straighter and made more eye contact with others in the room. Jack became flustered by the shift, increasingly bewildered by the lack of effect on his wife’s demeanour. He was so used to her responding in a subservient manner that even these small changes were surprising.

As the couple left the session, my parting words to her were: “Practise my instruction often and vary what you say.” Cryptic, but necessary—so that Sue would not be undermined.

A week or so passed, and Sue returned without Jack. He seemed to think he was beyond therapy; besides, “his wife had suddenly changed, and he did not need to be party to that.” Sue reported that, for the first time, she had been going out and doing her own thing. She felt free—no longer bound by Jack. She decided to change her job and, in a short time, found a better teaching post that paid considerably more. She described feeling confident and assertive. By the third session, she returned alone again, and I coached her further in the skills of self-talk, showing her how to engage her emotions when she spoke to herself. I also pointed out that she had been captured by her husband’s voice, and that he had effectively run her as a (narcissistic) extension of himself. The hold he had over her—and the satisfaction he took from controlling her so completely—was over.

Unsolicited, Jack soon moved out, probably as a manoeuvre to regain control by showing how much Sue needed him. This backfired spectacularly. He lost touch with his family, who were quite content to be free of the bully. The story does have a positive conclusion: Jack eventually recognised his need for his wife and, after about two years, returned to this “beautiful woman, who understood him, but was always in charge of her life.” His daughters grew further in the image of their mom, and the family, by all accounts, are happy and content. It may read a bit like a fairy tale, but it is a true account, with names and certain details changed for obvious reasons.

So, what is this story really about? At its core, it argues that autonomy depends on ownership of one’s inner voice—and that when this voice is displaced by a more dominant other, agency erodes. Most people regulate action through thought and imagination, while others act more instinctively, driven by power, fear, anger or desire. Beyond these familiar processes, however, there is a third mechanism: the voice with which a person addresses the self. Thought and visualisation shape emotion, but self-talk is more directive, more deliberate and more stabilising. Unlike wandering thought, it has structure; it gives language to experience and turns reflection into instruction. To own one’s voice is therefore to speak from the core self in words that support, organise and strengthen one’s emotional life. This is one reason guided self-instruction has been shown to help children—including those with ADHD—improve attention, working memory and impulse control. If self-talk can strengthen psychological organisation in childhood, its implications for adult autonomy are substantial.

This developmental point matters because words do more than express reality; they help organise it. A child’s own voice supports attention, focus, memory and impulse control by giving structure to experience. At the same time, the voice of parents and teachers helps shape the child’s view of the world and of the self. The risk is that, if autonomy is not progressively developed, the person may reach adulthood without a sufficiently grounded inner authority—making it easier for another voice to dominate.

This is where things begin to go wrong. Many adults, often without fully recognising it, surrender interpretive authority to others. Affirmation can become dependence; guidance can become control. My contention is that people too readily allow others to define their reality; while underestimating how difficult it can be to recover autonomy once that authority has been ceded.

Adult autonomy is consolidated in early adulthood, when individuals separate psychologically from parental authority and begin to assume authorship of their own lives. In this sense, Erich Fromm’s work on collectivism and individualism remains useful: breaking from the collective can produce freedom, but also loneliness and anxiety. When independence is demanded without a sufficiently developed sense of self, people may become formally autonomous yet internally unanchored. That vulnerability creates a vacuum into which controlling personalities can step, offering certainty, direction and emotional refuge at the cost of agency. What I call the Puppet Master thrives precisely in that space—where the fear of being alone is stronger than the commitment to self-possession.

As the opening case suggests, breaking co-dependency and consolidating adult integration takes courage. In Fromm’s terms, it is a move toward spontaneous action: away from fusion and toward an I–Thou relationship in which neither person needs to dominate or submit. The aim is not separation for its own sake, but mature relationship through love and productive work rather than power.

The Puppet Master is not only an abuser but also a refuge, which is why control can feel safer than freedom. Fromm and Jung help illuminate this dynamic: autonomy requires tolerating the anxiety of freedom so that a person can become a self-regulating agent rather than an extension of a collective or dominant other. Whether in private relationships, institutions or society, the underlying movement is the same—finding one’s own voice and accepting responsibility for one’s own life.

This “control or be controlled” state can be understood as a kind of trance: one voice gradually speaks for another until the person’s own interpretive authority weakens. The comparison with hypnosis is useful not because the two situations are identical, but because both involve heightened suggestibility, reduced critical distance and the temporary transfer of inner authority. In development, external voices help organise the child’s world; in manipulative adult relationships, that same mechanism can be exploited rather than outgrown. Sue’s shift illustrates the reversal: when she reactivated her own inner voice, the trance-like hold weakened.

Fromm similarly treats collectivism as a socially patterned surrender of adult autonomy to a larger authority. Whether this occurs at societal scale or within an intimate relationship, the effect is comparable: the self is absorbed by a structure or person that claims the right to define reality. In practice, such systems often narrow around a dominant voice that seeks compliance rather than reciprocity.

Autonomy, in this framework, is inseparable from having a voice of one’s own. People often trade that freedom for the relief of being guided, especially when aloneness feels intolerable. The Puppet Master offers certainty and filtration of the world, and the cost is a pseudo-self that echoes the dominant other rather than acting from genuine agency.

The process of this power imbalance is summarised as follows:

1. A trance-like imbalance develops when a person’s critical distance weakens, and another’s voice gains interpretive authority over their experience.

2. In abusive or autocratic relationships, repeated external commands can become internalised, so the victim begins to experience the controller’s demands as if they were self-generated.

3. That internalised voice then continues to regulate behaviour even in the controller’s absence, preserving dependency without constant external enforcement.

4. The result is a relational structure in which agency contracts, defiance becomes difficult, and the person remains psychologically organised around the controlling other.

   
   

As the influence of the controlling voice recedes, conscious autonomy expands. Sue’s recovery shows that reclaiming one’s voice can break dependency even when it initially risks loneliness and disorientation. What is striking in this case is that the couple later reunited on different terms: not through manipulation and subservience, but with clearer boundaries and greater autonomy.

The central claim of this essay is simple: recovering one’s own voice is the essential counter to relational control. Autonomy carries a cost—uncertainty, loneliness, the loss of false safety—but without it, people remain vulnerable to domination disguised as care, certainty or love. Healthy attachment does not require the surrender of self; it requires the capacity to remain fully oneself while relating deeply to another. That is why Buber’s I–Thou remains relevant here: a mature relationship depends on two intact selves, not one commanding voice and one echo. The practical implication is clear: the work is to strengthen the inner voice until it can organise thought, emotion and action without borrowing authority from someone else.

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