One of our first fears is of abandonment. Thus we learn early how to get the A’s: attention, affection, approval. We figure out what to do and whom to become to get our needs met. The problem is not that we do these things—it’s that we keep doing them. We think we must in order to be loved.
It’s very dangerous to put your whole life into someone else’s hands. You are the only one you’re going to have for a lifetime. All other relationships will end. So how can you be the best loving, unconditional, no-nonsense caregiver to yourself?
In childhood, we receive all sorts of messages—spoken and unspoken—that shape our beliefs about how we matter and what we’re worth. And we can carry these messages into adulthood.
For example, Brian’s father abandoned the family when Brian was ten, and he became the man of the house, taking care of his mother, doing everything in his power to make life easier for her, to soothe her pain—and to make sure she wouldn’t leave, too. He brought this caretaker identity into adulthood and kept choosing relationships with needy women. He resented them for the constant sacrifice they demanded, and yet he had difficulty setting healthy boundaries. He thought that to be loved, he had to be needed.
Another patient, Matthew, was born to a mother who had not chosen to become pregnant with him. She felt burdened by motherhood and entered into it with no sense of anticipation or enthusiasm. When parents are stressed or disappointed or unfulfilled, their children pick up the tab, carrying the burden into their own lives. As an adult, Matthew still held a terrible fear of abandonment that manifested in rage. He was cruel to his girlfriends, and would go on rants in public, yelling at people, once even throwing a dog across a parking lot. He was so afraid of being left that he turned the fear into a self-fulfilling prophecy, behaving in such a way that people had no choice but to step away from him. Then he could say, “I knew it all along.” He became who he dreaded in an attempt to control his fear of abandonment.
Even if we didn’t experience a discernible event or trauma that forced us to fight to be loved or seen, most of us can remember times we protected others or performed for them in order to secure their approval. We may have come to believe that we’re loved for our achievements, or for the role we fill in the family, or because we take care of others.
Unfortunately, many families, in trying to motivate children to do well for themselves, create a culture of achievement in which the child’s “being” gets entwined with her “doing”; she’s taught she matters not for who she is, but for how she performs and behaves. Children are under such intense pressure to get good grades, be high-performing athletes or musicians, ace college entrance tests, earn a degree at a select college or university that will lead to a high-paying job in a competitive field. But if a good report card or good manners earn love, that’s not love at all. It’s manipulation. When so much emphasis is placed on achievement, children don’t get to experience unconditional love—that they’re loved no matter what, that they’re free to be themselves, that it’s permissible to make mistakes, that we’re all in a process of learning and becoming, and that learning can be exciting and joyful.
My grandson Jordan is a photographer, and he was recently hired to take portraits at an acting studio in Los Angeles. A director who just days earlier had won two Oscars was visiting the acting class that day. Someone asked him where he had decided to display his trophies, and he surprised everyone by admitting he’d tucked them away in a drawer. “I don’t want my kids to come home from school every day,” he said, “and see my Oscars and think, What am I possibly going to do to compare?” I laughed when Jordan told me this, because he is also the son of an extraordinarily successful man. His father, Marianne’s husband, Rob, won a Nobel Prize in economics. And Rob also keeps his prize in a drawer, tossed in next to the wine opener!
There’s no need to hide our success from our children. But this director and my precious Rob have a lovely way of acknowledging that their awards and accomplishments are not who they are. They don’t confuse who they are with what they do. When we conflate achievement with worth, success as well as disappointment can become a burden on our children.
Marianne told me a sweet story that’s a good reminder of a very different legacy we can choose to pass on. My oldest great-grandson—her grandson Silas—came to stay with Marianne and Rob in New York one weekend. He said, “Granny, I heard that Papa won a big, important award.” He asked to see it. Marianne pulled it out of the drawer and Silas stared at it for a long time, running his finger over his grandfather’s name etched into the gold plaque: Robert Fry Engle, III. Finally, he said, “My middle name is Frye. Why does it say Fry?” Marianne said, “Well, who do you think you’re named after?” Silas was delighted to discover that part of his name came from his grandfather. Later, a family friend came over for dinner and Silas proudly asked, “Have you seen my prize?” He ran to the drawer and pulled it out. “See?” he said. “My name’s on it. Papa and I have a prize!”
It’s not good to live with success looming over you, feeling burdened by the need to reach a certain height to be worthy of love. And yet the strengths and skills of our ancestors are also a part of us. It’s our legacy. It’s our prize, too. We honor our children when we can create a culture not of self-aggrandizement or self-effacement, of overachievement or underachievement—but a culture of the joy of achievement. The joy of working hard. Of nurturing our gifts. Not because we have to. Because we’re free to. Because we’re blessed with the gift of life.
My daughter Audrey and her son David have taught me so much about nurturing gifts rather than fulfilling expectations. David is an incredibly bright and creative person. As soon as he could read, he had a photographic memory for sports stats. I’ll never forget watching The Wizard of Oz with him when he was two and he deduced that the woman riding her bicycle in the storm was the Wicked Witch. But while he excelled in extracurricular activities in high school—playing soccer, writing songs, performing with the choir, starting the school’s first comedy club—and scored very high on standardized tests, his grades were a problem. Audrey and her husband, Dale, were often called into the counselor’s office because David was in danger of failing classes. His senior year, when he was accepted at two small private colleges, he reluctantly told his parents that he didn’t feel ready to go.
Education has always been a strong value in our family—in part because Béla and I missed opportunities when our lives were interrupted by war. But Audrey didn’t guilt David or lay down the law. She listened. And when she learned about a new music academy opening in Austin, where they live, she told David that if he could get in, he could take a gap year to focus on music, and then figure out his college plans. He jumped on the opportunity, recorded a demo of original songs, and earned a spot at the music school.
Taking time to focus on something he loved and was good at—and feeling supported by his parents in doing things at his own speed, in his own way—gave David the focus and motivation to later pursue a career path he cared about. When he did go to college—on a choir scholarship—he knew what he wanted to do, and he genuinely wanted to be there. He was making a choice that served him, not just doing what he had to do to fulfill someone else’s expectation. Now he has a journalism degree and a job he loves as a sportswriter. And music continues to be an important and joyful part of his life. I’m moved and impressed by Audrey and Dale’s parenting, and by David’s capacity to know and express his truth.
Too often we’re boxed in by expectations, by the sense that we have a specific role or function to fulfill. Often in families, children are given a label: the responsible child, the jokester, the rebel. When we give children a name, they play the game. And when there’s a “best” in the family—a high achiever or good girl or good boy—there’s usually a “best worst.” As one of my patients put it, “My brother was very disruptive as a child. The way I got attention was being cooperative and being good.” But a label is not an identity. It’s a mask—or a prison. My patient said it beautifully: “You can only be the good girl for so long. Bubbling under the surface, my real personality was trying to get out and my environment wasn’t encouraging of that.” Our childhoods end when we begin to live in someone else’s image of who we are.
Instead of limiting ourselves to one role or version of ourselves, it’s good to recognize that each of us has an entire family inside. There’s the childish part, the one who wants everything now and fast and easy. There’s the childlike part—the curious free spirit, adept at following whims, instincts, and desires without judgment or fear or shame. There’s the teenager who likes to flirt and risk and test boundaries. There’s the rational adult who thinks things through, makes plans, sets goals, figures out how to reach them. And there are the two parents: the caring parent and the scaring parent. The one who is kind and loving and nurturing, and the one who comes in with voice raised and finger wagging, who says, “You should, you must, you have to.” We need our entire inner family to be whole. And when we’re free, this family works in balance, as a team, everyone welcome, no one absent or silenced or ruling the roost.
My inner free spirit helped me survive Auschwitz, but without my responsible adult on board, she can make a lot of messes, as my granddaughter Rachel—Audrey’s beautiful daughter—can attest. Since she was young, Rachel has loved to cook, and it warmed my heart when she asked if I’d teach her some Hungarian recipes. I decided to show her how to make one of my favorite dishes: chicken paprikash. It was a special kind of heaven to be in the kitchen with Rachel, the smell of onions sautéing in butter (a lot of butter!) and chicken fat. But soon I noticed her father, Dale, at my elbow, wiping up the spatters of schmaltz and dustings of spice that flew from my spoon. Even patient, down-to-earth Rachel was growing exasperated. “Stop!” she finally said, grabbing my arm before I threw a bunch of garlic and paprika into the pot. “If I’m going to learn the recipe, I have to measure and write down how much you’re putting in.”
I didn’t want to slow down. I love to cook by instinct, to let go of measuring and planning and just go by heart. But that wasn’t giving Rachel the foundation she needed. To effectively pass down my strength and skills, I couldn’t rely on my inner free spirit alone. I needed my inner rational adult and caring parent in the room to round out the team.
Now, Rachel makes the best chicken paprikash and szekely goulash, and when I made a nut roll the other day, I had to call her to tell me whether to add a half or full cup of water to the dough. She didn’t have to look at the recipe. “It’s a half cup!” she said.
It can be especially challenging to balance our inner family when we think our very survival depends on filling a specific role. After decades of maintaining an unhealthy pattern with her sisters and parents, Iris is trying to break out of the confining role she grew accustomed to filling in her family.
Her father served in WWII and was discharged from the army after a tank he’d worked on exploded with men on board. He became a psychiatric nurse, but began drinking heavily and suffering from depression, paranoia, and schizophrenia, so much so that by the time Iris, the youngest of four children, was born, he regularly spent large stretches of time in the hospital. She remembers him as a gentle, sensitive, brilliant man. She loved to sit in his lap after her bath and have him comb the tangles out of her wet hair. Or she would pretend to fall asleep on the couch in the evenings so he’d carry her up to bed. It felt good to be in his arms. When she was twelve, he had a massive heart attack. By the time the ambulance arrived, his heart had been stopped for twelve minutes. The medical team managed to revive him, but he was severely brain damaged and became a permanent resident at the same hospital where he’d once worked. He died when she was eighteen.
At a young age, Iris learned to fill the caregiver role in her family. In one of her earliest memories, her parents had been in a heavy discussion. She could sense the tension and slipped into the room, hoping to lighten the mood. Her father scooped her up and held her. “You’re my favorite,” he said. “You don’t cause any trouble.”
This message was reinforced by Iris’s mother and sisters. She earned the A’s in her family by being the responsible one, the person others could depend on. Her mother, a hardworking, nonjudgmental person always sensitive to the hurt or shame or embarrassment underlying others’ behavior, remained steadfastly loyal to Iris’s father throughout his worst years, but had a nervous breakdown when Iris was a teenager. Years later, when she herself was ailing, she told Iris, “I feel I’m in the middle of a stormy sea, and you’re my rock.”
Much of Iris and her mother’s relationship centered around their mutual concern for Iris’s sisters, who’d endured rough and chaotic lives, suffering among them the traumas of sexual abuse and domestic violence, as well as struggles with addiction and suicidal depression. Iris and her sisters are now in their fifties, and she continues to grapple with complex feelings that stem in large part from her caretaking role in the family.
“I live with a huge feeling of responsibility in my heart,” she told me. “I was called ‘the lucky one.’ I didn’t experience abuse. My father was away in the mental hospital when I was very little and he was at his most crazy. I’ve never wanted to take my own life. I’m happily married to a kind man and have three wonderful children, now adults. I feel guilty at times about the good things that have come my way. I feel heartbreak for my sisters. I feel selfish for not doing more for them. And I’m exhausted at times—maybe from trying to maintain security, or live life as the girl who didn’t cause any trouble because everyone else’s problems were so much bigger. I daydream about winning the lotto and buying them each a house, setting them up financially for the rest of their lives. Then I might feel freer of this guilt I carry.”
Iris is a beautiful woman, with blond curly hair and full lips. She seemed preoccupied, her blue eyes darting as she spoke—the agitation that comes from a life of trying to earn the A’s. Iris had imprisoned herself in her perception of her role and identity: to make things better for others, to lighten the load, to not cause a fuss or have big problems, to be the capable, dependable, responsible one. She had also become a prisoner of guilt—survivor’s guilt for her journey being easier than her mother’s and sisters’. How could I guide Iris out of a life of patterning herself as the responsible “good girl” and wishing she could fix others?
“You can’t do anything for your sisters,” I told her, “until you start loving yourself.”
“I don’t know how,” she said. “This year I’ve had hardly any contact with them. And I’m relieved, which feels terrible. I worry about them. Are they okay? Could I do more? And I could do more. That’s the truth. And yet, when I do more, it becomes toxic and all-consuming. So I’m in a mess. I don’t know how to move on.
“I’m lost about how to re-form any connection,” she said. “And I’m torn, because while I do want to reconnect with them, when I’m really honest with myself, it’s so much easier when we’re not in touch. And that feels awful.”
There were two things I hoped she could let go of: guilt and worry. “Guilt is in the past,” I told her. “Worry is in the future. The only thing you can change is right here in the present. And it’s not up to you to decide what to do for your sisters. The only one you can love and accept is you. The question isn’t how can you love your sisters enough. It’s how you can love yourself enough.”
She nodded, but I saw hesitation in her eyes, something held back in her smile, as though the very thought of loving herself was uncomfortable—or at least unfamiliar.
“Honey, when you concentrate on what more you can do for your sisters, it isn’t healthy. It’s not healthy for you. And it’s not healthy for them. You cripple them. You make them depend on you. You deprive them of being responsible grown-ups.”
I suggested that maybe they weren’t the ones with the need. Maybe she was. Sometimes we have the need to be needed. We don’t feel we’re functioning well if we’re not rescuing people. But when you depend on being needed, you’re likely to marry an alcoholic. They’re irresponsible, you’re responsible. You re-create that pattern.
I told Iris, “This is a good time for you to marry you. Otherwise, you’re going to make a bad situation worse, not better.”
She was quiet, her expression disoriented. “That’s so hard,” she said. “I still feel guilty.”
When they were children, her eldest sister was very angry and frightening. At the time, no one knew she had experienced sexual abuse. Iris would come home from school and lock herself in her bedroom to avoid her sister’s volatility. She and the other sisters would beg their parents, “Can’t you get rid of her? Can’t you control her?” One day the eldest sister had an enormous fight with their father and pushed him through a screen door. That was when their parents sent her to a girls’ home—and from there, her life became ever rockier.
“I might have been the reason my parents chose to send her away,” Iris said.
“If you want to have a loving relationship with your sisters,” I said, “it can’t be based on needing each other. It’s because you want each other. So, you can choose. Do you want to have guilt, or do you want to have love?”
To choose love is to become kind and good and loving for you. To stop rehashing the past. To stop apologizing for not being there to save everyone. It means saying, “I did the best I could.”
“But it feels like part of my whole life journey is to somehow find a solution to what happened to the three of us,” Iris said. “As the only person in my family who didn’t have a major struggle, I was the only one who could keep it together back then. And now I feel disloyal when I’m not helping them.”
One of the first questions I ask patients is, “When did your childhood end?” When did you start protecting or taking care of someone else? When did you stop being yourself, and start filling a role?
I told Iris, “You may have grown up very fast. You became a little adult, taking care of other people, being the responsible one. And feeling guilty that no matter what you did, nothing was enough.”
She nodded, tears filling her eyes.
“So now you decide: when is enough enough?”
It’s difficult to relinquish our old ways of earning the A’s and discover a new way to build love and connection, one that hinges on interdependence, not dependence; on love, not need.
When I’m trying to help a patient get at his or her early patterning I often ask, “Is there anything you do in excess?” We often use substances and behaviors to medicate our wounds: food, sugar, alcohol, shopping, gambling, sex. We can even do healthy things in excess. We can become addicted to work or exercise or restrictive diets. But when we’re hungry for affection, attention, and approval—for the things we didn’t get when we were young—nothing is ever going to be enough to fill the need. You’re going to the wrong place to fill the void. It’s like going to the hardware store to buy a banana. The thing you’re looking for isn’t there. And yet, many of us keep going to the wrong store.
Sometimes we get addicted to needing. Sometimes we get addicted to being needed.
Lucia is a nurse, and she told me she thinks it’s in her genetic code to focus on others, to ask, “What do you need? How can I help?” It took decades of marriage to a demanding man, stepping in to raise his children, including a daughter with disabilities, years of being told “Do this! Do that!” before she started to ask, “What about me? Who am I in this situation?”
Now she’s learning to be more assertive, to stop disconnecting from her own preferences and desires. Sometimes it garners a rocky response from others. The first time she set a boundary with her husband, refusing to get up from the couch to fix him a snack, he yelled, “I ordered you!”
She took a deep, stabilizing breath, and said, “I don’t take orders. If you speak to me that way again, I’ll leave the room.”
She’s learning to recognize that the clinching feeling at the top of her gut when she starts to say yes to a request is a signal to stop and ask herself, “Is this what I want to do? Will I be resentful if I do this?”
It’s good to be self-ish: to practice self-love and self-care.
When Lindsey and Jordan were young, Marianne and Rob made a commitment to give each other solo nights away from the family scene. On Marianne’s night out, Rob agreed to be home with the kids, and vice versa. One week a famous economist was going to be visiting from London, and Rob wanted to hear him speak. But the event was on Marianne’s night out; she’d already purchased tickets to see a play with a friend, and he’d already made a commitment to be home with the kids. When he told Marianne he couldn’t find a babysitter on such short notice, she could have called her friend to reschedule, and contacted the theater to try to exchange their tickets for another night. We can always make the choice to accommodate, to be flexible. The problem is that many of us rush to fix and adjust out of habit. We take too much responsibility for others’ problems, training them to rely on us instead of on themselves, and paving our own way toward resentment down the road. Marianne gave Rob a kiss on the cheek and said, “Gosh, hon, it sounds like you have a dilemma. I hope you can figure it out.” In the end, he brought the children with him to the lecture and they played under the auditorium chairs in their pajamas.
Sometimes life requires us to go with the flow, sometimes it’s the right thing to prioritize others’ needs, to modify our plans. And of course, we want to do everything in our power to support our loved ones, to be sensitive to their needs and desires, to engage in teamwork and interdependence. But generosity isn’t generous if we chronically give at the expense of ourselves, if our giving makes us a martyr or fuels our resentment. Love means that we practice self-love, that we strive to be generous and compassionate toward others—and to ourselves.
I often say that love is a four-letter word spelled T-I-M-E. Time. While our inner resources are limitless, our time and energy are limited. They run out. If you work or are in school; if you have children, a relationship, friends; if you volunteer, exercise, or belong to a book club, support group, or house of worship; if you’re caring for an aging parent or someone with medical or special needs—how do you structure your time so you don’t neglect yourself? When do you rest and replenish? How do you create a balance between working, loving, and playing?
Sometimes the hardest way to show up for ourselves is to ask for help. For a few years I’ve been dating a gentle man and a gentleman, Gene, my wonderful swing dance partner. When he had to be in the hospital for a few weeks, I visited every day, and he was happy to let me baby him a little—hold his hand, spoon-feed him meals. It’s wonderful when someone gives you the gift of giving. I was sitting with him one afternoon and noticed he was shivering. He admitted he’d been quite cold, but for Gene, kindness is number one, and he was so worried about coming across as demanding that he’d decided not to ask for a warmer blanket. In trying not to be a burden on anyone else, he neglected himself.
I used to do that, too. In our early immigrant days, Béla and I lived with Marianne in a tiny maid’s apartment at the back of a house in Park Heights, Baltimore. We had arrived in the country penniless—we had to borrow the ten dollars to get off the boat—and struggled to feed our family. In tough circumstances, I held it as a point of pride to put food on Béla and Marianne’s plates first—to serve myself only if there was enough to go around. It’s true that generosity and compassion are vital to foster. But selflessness doesn’t serve anyone—it leaves everyone deprived.
And being self-reliant doesn’t mean you refuse care and love from others.
Audrey was home for a visit during her college years at the University of Texas, Austin, a hotbed of activism and progressive politics. She opened my bedroom door on a Saturday morning and was horrified to find me in bed in my designer nightgown, Béla feeding me bites of fresh papaya.
“Mother!” she cried. I was disgusting to her in that moment—froufrou, dependent. I’d offended her sensibilities of what it means to be a woman of strength.
What she didn’t see was the choice I’d made, to honor and embrace my husband’s delight in caring for me. He lived for Saturdays when he’d get up early and drive across the border to the produce market in Juarez and search for the ripest red papayas that I loved. It brought him joy. And it brought me joy, too, to share in the sensory ritual, to receive what he longed to give.
When you’re free, you take responsibility for being who you really are. You recognize the coping mechanisms or behavior patterns you’ve adopted in the past to get your needs met. You reconnect with the parts of yourself you had to give up, and reclaim the whole person you weren’t allowed to be. You break the habit of abandoning yourself.
Remember: you have something no one else will ever have. You have you. For a lifetime.
That’s why I talk to myself all the time. I say, “Edie, you’re one of a kind. You’re beautiful. May you be more and more Edie every day.”
I am no longer in the habit of denying myself, emotionally or physically. I’m proud to be a high-maintenance woman! My wellness regimen includes acupuncture and massage. I do regular beauty treatments that aren’t necessary but feel good. I have facials. I get my hair painted—not just dyed one color, but three, from dark to light. I go to the department store makeup counter and experiment with new ways of doing my eyes. If I hadn’t learned to develop inner self-regard, no amount of pampering on the outside could change the way I feel about myself. But now that I hold myself in high esteem, now that I love myself, I know that taking care of myself on the inside can include taking care of myself on the outside, too—treating myself to nice things without suffering guilt, letting my appearance be an avenue for self-expression. And I’ve learned to accept a compliment. When someone says, “I like your scarf,” I say, “Thank you. I like it, too.”
I’ll never forget the day I took teenage Marianne clothes shopping and she tried on an outfit I’d picked out for her and said, “Mom, it’s not me.” Her comment startled me. I worried I had raised her to be picky or even ungrateful. But then I realized what a gift it is to have children who know their own minds, who know what is “me” and what is “not me.”
Honey, find you and keep filling it up with more you. You don’t have to work to be loved. You just have to be you. May you be more and more you every day.