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The first decade of our children’s lives creates a director-subject relationship between us and our kids. They come into this world helpless. We find them food, we change their diapers, we hold their hand crossing the street. We teach them that we are to be looked up to, and teach ourselves that they are dependent on us.
The belief then is that we know best. Maintaining that director role, even after they are able to think for themselves, comes at a number of costs. First, it stunts the child’s ability to think and act for themselves. If you are the holder of knowledge then they are the always ignorant. I have seen plenty of clients who anxiously second guess themselves in large part because they never got the idea that they can do things themselves. Secondly, it causes great harm to the parent-child relationship, one that lasts well into adulthood. If the parent maintains the director role, then it is impossible for even the high achieving adult child to ever feel fully worthy in their eyes. The director parent is sticking to the director script, continually failing to just say “you are doing great, trusting yourself is working.” This comes up a lot when adults are choosing their romantic partners. A parent is always going to have thoughts about their adult child’s choice in this area, and everyone knows that. So there is an internal, often unconscious motive to choose someone they would approve of. How a parent voices their views here can affect things ranging from their adult child’s decisions, their relationship with you, to even their self-esteem. A bad way to do this is to say some version of “the guy you picked is a loser, you gotta pick leave him.” You might as well be saying “you are a dumb child and you never will be an adult.” By doing this, you as a parent close off trust with your adult child, and make the relationship about them impressing you. Much better is to make the shift from director to advisor. Ideally this shift begins around puberty years. A time when you nudge your kids with advice, but don’t seek to control the outcome. The ‘let them get their bruises and learn from them’ kind of parenting. This may require telling them you trust in their judgment, even when you are uncertain if you do. What you gain from this is credibility and respect. The child, then the adult child (we really need a better name than adult child), learns that you are someone they can safely come to to consult with. That you have wisdom, but that they don’t have to act a certain way to keep your approval and love. Taking the romantic partner choice example, the advisor parent can certainly point out what they perceive may be red flags. But the language is important here. ‘They perceive’ and ‘may be’. In this the advisor parent makes clear that they (the parent) don’t have all the knowledge. That their vision is skewed by their own biases, their own history, and their lack of complete information. From there the advice becomes something the adult child can consider without pressure to outright accept or reject. The advisor parent can offer their cautions, and allow the adult child to try out different actions in the real world. All the while safe in the knowledge that they can return again and again to their advisor parent without fear of loss of love and acceptance.
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Another anonymous emailer says: “I have a couple of friends that I go out to drink with sometimes. I noticed that when we are quite a few drinks in we will start telling each other how much we love each other. That never happens when we're sober. Why is that? Do they really mean it?”
Thanks Anon. My thinking on this is it has to do with vulnerability. Alcohol, for better or worse, reduces activity in the brain’s prefrontal cortex. That's our command center, the area we use to make our judgement calls. It also dampens the cortex's friend in the back of the head, the amygdala. That's our brain part responsible for keeping on the lookout for threats. The more we drink, the lower our inhibition. It sounds that, like most people, you and your friends have trained those parts of the brain to play it safe when it comes to outpourings of emotion. The rougher our childhoods (say if we endured abuse, trauma, or bullying), the more conservative that part of the brain will have adapted to be. You and your friends clearly love each other. That's fantastic. And I don't think it's disingenuous. I think we are scared to show these emotions when we are in our ‘right mind’ because there is a risk attached to them. If I say I love you and you don't say it back, I will be devastated. So people won't take the risk of saying such things when sober. Instead we will drop hints and be indirect about it. But I say be bold. If you have a feeling a friend loves you, and you them, tell them so. Best case scenario it's a thing that you can be open about. If not, at least you can weed them out of your life. Write me here! More questions, let's dive in.
How would you define a toxic parenting trait/behaviors? Why do certain parenting traits leave children feeling hurt, confused, or even traumatized? We can do harm, we can have a neutral effect, and we can be of benefit to our children. Toxic parenting traits/behaviors are actions we regularly take that harm our children. When these actions or ways of being make a child feel they are unsafe, unstable, and need to act in an inauthentic way to avoid pain, maladaptations are sure to follow. These maladaptations are skewed ways of viewing the world that the child then takes into adulthood. That sets them up to fail. What are some traits/behaviors that parents should avoid? First, telling a child they need to "get over" their pain, or telling them they shouldn't be upset because "it could be worse." This teaches a child that their experience isn't of value, that others can't be trusted with their emotions, and that they need to go it alone in life. Second, guilt trips. A guilt trip is a way of telling a child that they need to behave differently in order to gain your approval. The child takes on the message that they are a bad kid, and that only in doing things for other people can they be good again. This creates a people pleaser. What should parents do if they identify some of these traits or behaviors in themselves? How can they work on avoiding them, while also being compassionate toward themselves and their children? A parent who is able to identify these traits in themselves has already done the more difficult third of the battle. Next you should work to identify the reasons you act in that toxic way and question its effect. From there it is a matter of working to catch yourself when you are about to act that way. Working with a therapist can help, hint hint. If you mess up, it's ok to apologize to your child, and it’s ok to forgive yourself too. - Questions you want answered? Feed me here. Our first lie comes when we are little kids. At an early age we have perfect credibility with our parents. Say we want an extra piece of candy after being told no. In the past we took the candy, owned up to it when pressed, and got in trouble. This getting in trouble really hurt, so we were given an incentive not to get in trouble again. The harsher the punishment, the greater the pain. The greater the pain, the larger the incentive.
For a time we just obey the rules to avoid the pain and keep our parents' love. But one time we try something new, we try saying no we didn’t take the candy, even though we know we did. And it works. Our credibility pays off, they believe us, and we get to have the candy and avoid trouble. We have learned something new. But of course it doesn’t last long. The first lie was such a booming success that we tried lying again and again. Our parents catch on quick, and the abused credibility tanks. This isn’t the end of it though. The first memory we have is of the success of the lie. And even if our credibility is low, we still do sometimes slip one past other people. We don’t usually stop lying, but we get better at it. The benefit of avoiding the short term pain of getting in trouble makes the risk worth pursuing. It is all about that short term thinking. In the medium and long term we damage relationships with lies. The pain still comes, but because it isn’t immediate, it doesn’t necessarily feel connected to the lying. The blame for the pain of the relationship damage can be fobbed off on other causes. It’s the other person’s fault. Or job stress. Or the kids. Or whatever. So there isn’t an incentive to avoid any particular lie. People pleasers can be especially prone to lying. If we grew up with the conflicting desires both to feel safe and to sometimes get our way, lying would naturally become more alluring. The solution here may be to do the counterintuitive thing and get comfortable with short term pain. Being upfront about your actions, taking the immediate pain of the other person’s reaction, and holding in your mind a more long term perspective. This would involve remembering that rebuilding credibility is a process, one that will involve short term pain. Work through the original causes of lying. Get in trouble and find that unlike when you were a kid you can absorb the pain of it without being crushed. Anonymous in Rochester, New York asks: “I read your piece on people pleasing and really related to the parts on how our childhood sets us up as adults. Now that the damage has been done I find that I still struggle to hold boundaries with my needy parents. I have my own life to live but at the same time feel responsible to them. It is making me feel resentful. What can I do?”
First of all, congratulations on coming to the realization that this is an issue. Most people never do. Our tendency is to continue year in and year out to go through the motions and never really explore the feelings that are rising up. So having the guts to confront it and find its origin is an achievement. Childhood adaptation work is challenging because it first requires us to discern differences. The norm is to not question things because we don’t know that our childhood could have been different. It’s like asking a fish to describe water. How could it do so when there is nothing to contrast it to? They don’t know what air is. Talking over your childhood in therapy or exploring the experiences of childhood with friends can be jarring at first. Our background is all we have ever known, so some cognitive dissonance is sure to result. I call cognitive dissonance the wrecking ball because it swings back and forth in our head, banging against our skull. These newly unraveling feelings can, say, cause us to have negative thoughts about our parents. There is a temptation then to label them as bad but --bang-- You love them and remember all the times they were good to you but --bang-- You are resentful that they constantly ask you for more than you would like to give but --bang-- They did all these good things for you as a kid (and they don’t hesitate to remind you) so you’re the bad person but Bang. Back and forth the ball swings. This makes boundaries difficult. One day you feel staunchly that you need to cut them out of your life, that you have put your time in with them. You may then tell them so. While the wrecking ball is firmly on that side you can stick to that hard boundary, but then some time passes. In that time they wear you down with guilt trips and pressure. You may miss them. Plus you are used to it being the other way. The wrecking ball comes loose, bangs to the other side, and the boundary is lost. The answer is to see how things are more complicated than either side of your head is seeing it. We humans want clarity at all times and feel great anxiety when we don’t have it. So label your parents good or label them bad, as long as there is a label, is what we think. The truth is your parents, like you, are a complicated mix of good, bad, and everything else. The truth is many things are true, even when they are in conflict. My suggestion is work on accepting the cognitive dissonance. The swing won’t be calmed by holding desperately to one or the other conclusion. It will be calmed by accepting that the whole picture is complicated. Now we take that fresh, accepted, complex picture and consider what action to take. A boundary that is based on complexity is a more stable one. You will feel less emotional swing and will have an easier time sticking to it. Your parents may still push, poke, and manipulate to try and get you back into the old ways. But you will be in a more stable position and less likely to be moved far from your position. How they react is beyond your control. This is another important thing to accept. But hopefully they will see the rationality in all of it and come around. - Want your questions answered? Toss them in the box here. I often meet with clients who have been thrust into middle management. It is a compliment to them of course: they are so good at their work that their higher ups now want them to do something completely different. But too often we are being taught how to be managers by people who were not taught how to be managers, who were in turn taught how to be managers by people who were not taught how to be managers. Being promoted to our level of incompetence means being taken out of the thing we do well and placed into a thing we initially do not. This is especially hard for people pleasers. We now have bosses above and employees below. We have people on either side with their own motives and expectations. One group is demanding results and the other group is trying to resist demands. It is a squeeze. With this change of position comes a needed change in philosophy. People pleasing is short-term focused thinking. It is taking action to remove the threat of immediate pain. Keep people pleasing and they won't hurt you with their guilt trips and disappointed faces. This doesn't work in management. A manager, a leader, needs vision that sees beyond the short-term moment. Our ideas on how things should run may not be immediately apparent to our employees, and even to our bosses. But if we bend to the feelings of the moment in order to not rock the boat, then everyone loses in the long run. People pleasing not only hurts you, it hurts the ones you are seeking to please. As we have discussed previously, the way out of people pleasing is setting boundaries. A helpful tool that is all about boundaries is the Eisenhower Matrix. Invented by the 34th president, this tool helps you categorize tasks. Each task can be placed into one of four categories depending on its urgency and its importance.  In the above image, the things in the green box (urgent, important) get done right now by you and your team. The things in the red box (neither urgent nor important) are distractions to be abandoned.
Where people pleasers struggle is in the orange and blue boxes. People will bring you tasks that they claim are urgent. The instinct then is to set aside work so that person is not disappointed in you. This will often come at the expense of things in the blue category that are important but not urgent. This is how a people pleaser will find themselves not doing their own self-care or even the long term strategic planning that will benefit everyone. It is in the orange category where delegation is important. The new middle management role requires getting others to do work to benefit the organization, not just taking it on yourself. And it requires setting time and sticking to the important things in the blue category. When you set boundaries and stick to them, people win. If you are a people pleaser in Rochester, New York State, Colordao, Utah, and now South Carolina, I would be happy to talk with you about this! I am so excited to now be licensed to serve clients in the Rocky Mountain states of Colorado and Utah. All services are done remotely using Psychology Today's HIPPA approved secure video platform. I am looking forward to talking with you in Provo, Fort Collins, Denver, Colorado Springs, Salt Lake City, Aurora, and even Telluride! Here is my contact page and here is a picture of a rock:  “I believe that death anxiety is the mother of all religions, the mainspring of human creativity, and the ultimate therapeutic issue. Almost every session, at its deepest level, addresses death anxiety.” - Irv Yalom, ‘Staring at the Sun’ Yes, every session is at deepest about death anxiety. Our DNA is screaming up at us at all times, “stay alive, stay alive, keep your family alive, stay alive.” Of course it would hijack your brain to serve its sole purpose. I am not one to confuse correlation with causation, but I can’t help but notice a connection: rates among Americans, young adults in particular, who do not believe in an after-life are on the rise, and so are rates of crippling anxiety. An ever greater amount of people are concluding that Nothingness is what follows death. This is a thought that prevents people from falling asleep again when unknown forces jerk them awake at 3 am. My argument is that this is a snake eating its tail problem. That the anxiety creates the belief in Nothingness, which furthers the anxiety, which furthers the terror of the Nothingness. This makes sense when we understand anxiety. Anxiety is the fear of open-endedness. The fear of possibility. It’s a very stupid but well-intentioned part of the brain trying to protect us. Imagine you are sitting in an ordinary room in an ordinary house. Some thought rises up inside you that says “there is someone else in the room.” If we are using logic alone we tell ourselves that is absurd and go back to our activity. But we are not. So we glance around to reassure ourselves there is no one else. We take an action, so we can reach a conclusion. Anxiety soothed. With death we do not have such an option. We do not know what lies beyond. We want to know, but we are reasonably sure we cannot just die and come back to find out. Our anxiety will not be satisfied with that. It puts us in the bind of needing to draw a conclusion on the inconcludable. Whether the decline of religion in the West is good or bad is a separate debate. But surely we can agree that it has led to a decline in belief in the afterlife. Misguided or well-guided, religion gave an answer to this awful question. Into this void steps Nothingness. Nothingness, lights-out darkness, is solid. It is a conclusion you can hang your hat on. It removes the unknowness that anxiety hates. We can say to ourselves ‘that’s settled.’ Except it is not, because now you have to live your life with Nothingness looming over you. Your DNA wants only to exist but your conclusion is telling you existence is futile. The out here is embracing the mystery. Those who swear by Nothingness will say it is a scientific conclusion. But it cannot be theory if it cannot be measured. If there are no measurements, then there is no way of knowing what alternatives are plausible. Which means they are equally plausible. Which means anything is possible. We do not get to know what lies beyond. We do not know for sure it is Nothingness that lies beyond, but we know for sure a Mystery does. Nothingness is awful, but mysteries can be fun. Do not let anxiety run your life. Do not let it force conclusions. Especially unsupported ones that do you no good. Embrace the uncertainty. In the end it is the only thing we’ve got.  The two mysteries - Rene Magritte (1966) No amount of achievement will create a time machine that goes back to tell 10-year old you “it’s ok that you got a B-, you should still be proud.”
We get trapped in this hamster wheel of thinking that if I just ace this next thing, I will have proven that I am valuable and worthy. We think taking the next step will allow us to rest, but taking the next step only spins the wheel more. Someone outside and above us telling us we did well and they are proud of us seems to scratch the itch. It gives us, for the moment, the satisfaction of approval that 10-year old you wanted. Then the moment passes, life continues on, and we go back to the blueprint of how to do life. And that blueprint says achieve more so you can get that itch scratched again. Only you can solve this. Only you can choose to stop spinning the wheel. Only you can “enough, look at what I have accomplished, I am proud.” Many men today feel like they’re falling behind, unable to meet traditional definitions of success. They see that others have succeeded, both before them and today, and conclude one thing: This is my failure.
In our culture, men are expected to be providers and achievers. You’ve “made it” if you can pay your bills and land promotions. The social status of another person is what we use as a shortcut to judge who he is. And so we assume others do the same about us. When a man feels he hasn’t reached the level he should, he works harder. He will bring work home with him, physically or mentally. Anxiety over unmet expectations builds, making it harder to get things done and often leading to burnout. The looming fear of getting fired - the ultimate blow to manhood - becomes a constant source of stress. These pressures are made worse by how work is set up. The primary goal of any employer is to get the most output for the least amount of input. So they put workers on a treadmill and gradually increase the speed. If they see you can run at 4 MPH without faltering, they increase it to 5. From 5 to 6. If at 6.5 MPH you struggle to keep up, then they now know what your max speed is. Some employers may demand 7 MPH, and the job market is such that if you can’t do it, they will find someone who will. But either way the preference is that you alone do it. Paying you $60,000 to do a ton of work leads to more profit than paying two people $50,000 to do it. So if we know work is naturally set up to always have us on the verge of breaking, why do we feel so terrible when we do? Times are changing, but much of it is still to do with a pressure to “man up.” Our grandfathers overcame the fascists without complaint, so the story goes. Being able to work through pain is the highest cultural virtue. And that mindset is exploited by those who want things from you. If you are not able to cut it, then it is ‘your’ failure. Buy an expensive watch and you can convince people you have succeeded. If they are convinced, maybe you can convince yourself. Buy the biggest TV and you have the most impressive way to distract from the nagging pain in the back of your mind. Go into debt. The same people who promote the idea that you must be strong, independent, and constantly working are more than willing to lend you money—at interest rates they control. In therapy I see again and again that the symptom is not the real problem. Men come in all the time with vague feelings of anxiety and inadequacy. They tend to want “tools” to get rid of the anxiety, so they can get back in the race. But anxiety is not an ailment, it is a beacon. It is a red flag. It is an alarm going off that says “here, over here, this is what needs attention!” Just addressing how not to feel anxious is putting a band-aid on a lopped off finger stub. We need to talk about how you got here in the first place. How we all keep getting here. And we need to question in what way we would like to participate in the culture that is exploiting you and grinding you down. I often will ask “what does being a man mean to you?” I find that the answers are not usually ones that we have independently come up with. Rather they are usually just a re-frame of what we have been told being a man means. Which to me means we are living someone else’s life instead of our own. |
AuthorPhilip Monte Verde LMSW 
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