Embodiments herein describe using a tower damping system to reduce oscillations in a wind turbine. To do so, the dampening system may use a metric that is decoupled from the activation strategy in order to control the blade pitch and avoid or mitigate feedback loops. In one embodiment, the dampening system measures a force on the turbine that is correlated to a fatigue loading on the tower. Furthermore, the turbine may perform a calculation to decouple the force from the activation strategy. That is, the turbine determines the value of the force as if the damping system was not activated or present. In addition, the dampening system uses the current wind speed and a wind distribution to generate a pitch reference value. The dampening system may use both the pitch reference value and the fatigue loading on the tower to reduce the tower oscillations.