How patriarchal conditioning teaches women to mistake control for love, and why the cycle keeps repeating

By Kris Plachy

Years ago, when I was directing a large team, I used to watch young women make choices that baffled me. Smart women. Capable women. Women who could run a meeting or solve a complex problem without breaking a sweat. And then I would watch them hand over their power in the most ordinary, heartbreaking ways. They would tolerate behavior from partners, friends, and colleagues that they would never accept in a business deal. They would abandon their own knowing to keep someone else comfortable.

I used to joke that I was going to hold a class called "How Not to Be a Stupid Girl." I would pull these young women into a room and we would talk about intuition and wisdom and what it actually looks like to make a decision that serves your life instead of diminishing it. Of course, I was also talking to myself. When I was young and dating, I was terrible at what I tolerated. I accepted things no woman should accept because I did not yet know what it felt like to be with someone who honored me.

But here is what I understand now that I did not understand then: those young women were not making "stupid" choices. They were making the only choices that felt available to them inside a system that had been teaching them, since birth, that their worth was measured by how well they served the people around them.

We have all been raised inside patriarchal structures. Every single one of us. And one of the most effective things those structures have done is convince women that deferring their own needs and desires is not just expected, it is virtuous. That putting your partner first, your children first, everyone first, is what makes you a good woman, a good wife, a good mother. This is not a message anyone sat us down and delivered in a lecture. It was absorbed. It seeped into us through the way our mothers lived, the way their mothers lived, through every story and structure and subtle reward system that told us: your job is to make sure everyone else is okay, even at your own expense.

And then I met my husband.

I want to be honest about what happened when I found a man who was genuinely loving, kind, and respectful. My nervous system did not know what to do with him. I did not believe someone like him could be real. Thirty years later, he is still very real. But I want to name the truth of that experience because I think it speaks to something so many women carry: when you have been conditioned to expect less, receiving more feels disorienting. It feels suspect. It feels like something you need to earn or that will eventually be taken away.

That disorientation is not a flaw. It is evidence of how deeply the conditioning runs.

I do not believe anyone should accept a person in their life who is disrespectful, toxic, manipulative, rude, or who consistently prioritizes themselves over the wellbeing of the partnership. That is not a controversial statement. And yet, I encounter it constantly. Women who are running seven figure companies, women who are making decisions that affect hundreds of people, women who are objectively powerful in their professional lives are shrinking in their personal ones. They are tolerating dynamics with partners, children, friends, and even with themselves that slowly erode who they actually are.

This is not because they are weak. This is not because they lack intelligence or self respect. This is because the water they have been swimming in their entire lives has taught them that self sacrifice is the price of belonging. That is the system working exactly as it was designed to work.

This is the work I have given my career to. Not helping women lead better. Leadership, frankly, is the simple part. The real work is helping women be human while they lead. Helping them see the invisible architecture that has shaped their choices. Helping them remember what it feels like to operate as themselves and not as a version of themselves filtered through generations of conditioning that says: your needs come last.

Here is what I have found in decades of doing this work: when I say the words my clients need to hear, they are rarely hearing something new. What they are experiencing is recognition. It is the sensation of a truth they already carry landing in their body like gravity. Like grounding. Like, "Oh, that is right. That is something I know. I forgot."

And the forgetting is not just of this lifetime. It is generational. It is something tethered to our DNA from a time when women knew exactly who they were and how powerful they were and how deserving they were to be surrounded only by people who had genuine reverence for them. That knowing did not disappear. It got buried under centuries of a system that needed women to forget in order to function.

I saw this play out recently in the most vivid way. I was telling a group of women, most of them a little older than I am, that I was planning a trip to Scotland. On my own. I had told my husband I thought I needed to go alone, that there were things I wanted to experience and places I wanted to see, and that something in me felt like this was a journey I needed to take by myself. He was completely supportive. Of course he was. That is who he is.

And every single one of these women said some version of the same thing: "My husband would never let me do that."

My husband would have a fit. He would pout. He would be so mad.

I found myself asking them: Would you be that way with him? Is this mutual, or is this just him not being able to handle you doing something independent? Not being able to handle you creating a memory without him? What is that about?

And here is where I want to be very careful, because I am not interested in blaming these women. What I am interested in is uncovering why this cycle keeps going. Because the control of women is insidious. It does not always look like domination. Sometimes it looks like devotion. Sometimes it looks like a husband who "just loves you so much" that he cannot bear for you to be away. Sometimes it looks like children who have been so accustomed to their mother being endlessly available that any boundary feels like abandonment. And sometimes, most painfully, it looks like women enforcing these expectations on each other.

That is perhaps the most effective trick the patriarchy ever pulled. It does not need men to police women when women will police themselves. Not because women are complicit. Not because they are choosing this knowingly. But because when you have been marinated in a system for long enough, you start to believe its rules are just the way things are. You start to enforce them without even realizing you are doing it. A mother tells her daughter to be more accommodating. A friend raises her eyebrows when you say you are traveling without your husband. A colleague suggests you should be home more. None of them are trying to control you. They are simply repeating what they were taught, passing along the only template they were given for what a woman's life should look like.

So when those women told me their husbands would "never let them" travel alone, I did not hear women who lacked courage. I heard women who had been given a story so early and so often that it had become part of their identity. And here is the hardest part to name: I think many of them, even though they say this dynamic is frustrating, even though they perform exasperation about being "limited" by their husband's desires, they also find a kind of reassurance in it. Not because they are foolish. But because the system taught them that being needed so much that your freedom has to be negotiated is a form of love. Being commanded and demanded upon becomes a proxy for being valued. If he cannot stand for me to leave, it must mean I matter.

Sit with that for a moment.

How is being controlled a sign of love? How does the restriction of your freedom confirm your worth? How does someone else's inability to manage their own emotions become evidence of how important you are?

It does not. It is a story. It is a very old story, passed down through generations by women who did not know they were passing it down, reinforced by structures that benefit from women staying small, and internalized so deeply that it feels like instinct rather than instruction.

The women I work with are not broken. They do not need to be fixed. What they need is to see the system for what it is so they can start making choices from their own knowing rather than from a script that was written for them long before they were born. They are learning what it sounds like to speak from that knowing. They are discovering that the wisdom they thought they lost was never actually gone. It was waiting for them to get quiet enough, brave enough, and supported enough to hear it again.

You do not need permission to go to Scotland. You do not need permission to take up space in your own life. You do not need to perform smallness so that someone else can feel big.

And if you find yourself policing another woman's freedom, even gently, even with love, I would invite you to ask yourself: whose voice is that? Is it yours? Or is it the echo of a system that taught you that a woman alone is a woman doing something wrong?

You already know the answer. You just forgot.

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