We frequently define ourselves, largely, by how our early environments define us. Whatever we’re perpetually praised and punished for as children often becomes internalized and generalized. So, if you’re consistently praised for your grades, you may come to consider yourself intelligent. If you’re praised for your ball skills, you may come to consider yourself an athlete. If you’re punished for your grades, you may come to consider yourself stupid. And if you’re punished for your limited
athletic ability, you may come to consider yourself weak. As children, we ask ourselves: What does it take to receive love? And we often come to define ourselves, via the feedback of rewards and punishments (and our interpretations of them), by the afforded doses of affection.
Psychotherapist on X,
Frannyfanny, profoundly wrote, “A professor of mine would say some version of this. ‘Your parents loved you, but did they delight in you?’ Did their face light up when you walked into a room? Could they enjoy your emerging subjectivity, enough that you remember the feeling of being deeply loved, just because?” Here, she was referring to the unconditional form of love, where love exists without much effort. But what about when parents only delight in their children when they perform, entertain, and bring honor to the rest? What happens when delight is conditional and earned?
Many of the patients I’ve seen over the years are socially prescribed
perfectionists, meaning they believe others expect and demand perfection from them. Further, the foundational belief is that true love is conditional, predicated on perfection in some meaningful area(s). So, speaking with them about unconditional love almost always felt like a discussion about the
supernatural, something we may verbally subscribe to in order to sustain a smooth operation but don’t believe deep down, or so many have said. Many of them arrive in treatment not to explore and perhaps challenge their assumptions about what love should be, could be, or even is, but to discover a new way of re-establishing their drives in order to resume their pursuits. Feeling
burned out hardly ever engenders the thought of the prospect of a deeply flawed way of living; it merely means that one’s coping skills are outdated and insufficient. It isn’t that they no longer work because the process was always doomed; it’s that the process, becoming increasingly difficult, requires sturdier tools.
Children growing up with parents struggling with mental illness often take on an outsized role in their families. And one or both parents may become overly dependent on that child to make them happy. Rather than just being happy about being in the presence of their happy child, some parents, who can be defined as other-oriented perfectionists, demand that others live up to their extremely high standards in order to satisfy them. Here, love is distorted as the parent believes they’re molding the child into the best version of themself. So, love becomes coupled with performing, which, in turn, is coupled with chronic comparison. These children tend to grow up asking, “Where am I in comparison?” valuing themselves largely based on this tendency.
To perfectionists,
therapy, then, is just another way to sharpen one’s knife to return to the real world. It’s both a mode of rest and escape, but it doesn’t in any meaningful way resemble that world. One may believe they pay a fee to take a break from having to strive for survival. In my own treatment, I wondered, “Does my therapist like me or is she just doing her job?” “What would happen if I didn’t try hard to make therapy work or make her feel good about her work?” And these were the sort of questions I frequently asked myself in all of my relationships. So, therapy, in reality,
was a microcosm of my broader life.
What helps us challenge our beliefs, more so than much of anything else, is deciding to experiment with new ones. What would happen if I stopped entertaining? For me, what would happen if I stopped writing? Would people still care? In therapy, I discontinued trying so hard to please and, to my surprise, not much changed. I sensed that my therapist was
grateful for my feedback, but didn’t require it. The challenge then became sticking with therapy after I felt I had won her over, sitting with the feeling that I had little to give and that it could be enough. Like the children mentioned by Frannfanny, toward the end of our work, all I had was my presence, and I hoped that it was symbolic enough to matter.
So, therapy, at some point, became stitched into my broader life. Sitting with my therapist, feeling I mattered to her, wasn’t a major, instantaneous revelation; it arrived in little bits. Part of it arrived when I stopped listing my accomplishments (annoying, I get it). Part of it arrived when I stopped praising our work. And part of it arrived when I stopped putting pressure on myself to recognize deeper emotional and behavioral patterns. Maybe it’s this simple: I delighted in her as she delighted in me. Maybe the infant delights in the mother because the mother delights in the infant, and the mother delights in the infant because the infant delights in her.
