You have a word for yourself. Controlling, or needy, or a pushover, or cold. You may have had it for years. Someone gave it to you in an argument, or you chose it yourself after a bad week. You say it lightly at parties and mean it at night. I don't want to be controlling anymore.
Calling it a flaw also tends to make it harder to change.
01
What it looks like
A flaw is a statement about what you are. A strategy is a description of what you do.
I am controlling and checking things three times before you can leave them alone may refer to the same evenings. Only the second one can be looked at.
02
What it protects
Strategies exist to protect something.
The person called a pushover may be keeping a room calm, under Peace, where the fear is that someone's disappointment means you did something wrong. The person called controlling may be heading off what could go wrong, under Ahead, where the fear is that if you stop managing, something goes wrong again. Or it may be something else in either case. The name-calling doesn't know.
What the two share is that the behavior made sense as protection.
03
What it buys and what it costs to see it this way
It buys accuracy. A flaw has no explanation. A strategy has a reason, and the reason can be looked for.
It also buys room to move. A person ashamed of a habit tends to hide it, and a hidden habit doesn't get looked at.
It costs an excuse, if you were using one. That's just how I am stops being available. And none of this erases what the strategy may have cost other people. Understanding why you do something is not the same as it having been fine for them.
04
How to tell what you are looking at
The same test applies as anywhere in this library. A behavior can't tell you which rule is under it, and it may be under none. Some of what gets called a flaw is a preference, or a mood, or a bad month.
When you want to know what a strategy is protecting, subtraction is the method: candidates are offered, questions are asked, and the ones that don't fit are removed. If nothing is left standing, there is not enough to tell yet, and that is a result.
Why a rule may have made sense when it began is on Why Your Rule Made Sense Once.