Can the Undead Be Anal-Retentive?
Under the skin, the two major subtypes of Obsessive-Compulsive vampires are similar enough that the same general strategies work for both of them. Perfectionists and Puritans are obsessed with control. They’re most draining when they try to reduce their own anxieties by managing your life. Perfectionists attempt to control your actions, what you do, and especially how you do it; Puritans try to control your soul.
At first, these vampires don’t appear in the least dangerous. They’re intelligent, responsible, and hardworking, if a bit uptight. They seem mild-mannered, surely not the sort of people who would lose their tempers or make a scene. They draw you in with their competence and reliability. You may even look up to them. Only later, when you make a mistake, or try to get them to do something your way or, perish the thought, give you a little praise, do you come to realize how vicious Obsessive-Compulsives can be.
Perfectionists and Puritans drain you by withholding approval, giving in its place petty criticisms and unsolicited comments about the error of your ways. No matter how hard you work, how good you are, or how carefully you try to follow the rules, it won’t be enough. The first time you make a mistake, Obsessive-Compulsives will imply that you are lazy, immoral, or, at the very least, careless. They don’t lose their tempers. Their words seem to come from a place of rectitude and moral authority, but they sting like fire and carry the scent of brimstone. Obsessive-Compulsives are not above using the powers of hell to achieve what they consider to be heavenly goals.
Though they never admit it, Perfectionists and Puritans are angry much of the time. They carry around a good deal of free-floating resentment that they can easily attach to anyone who doesn’t follow the same rules about work and morality that they do, which is virtually everyone. Obsessive-Compulsives always feel overwhelmed, underappreciated, and disappointed at the laxity of others. They’re famous for sighing, shaking their heads, and muttering under their breath as they work themselves up for their next lecture. To hear them tell it, no one even tries to help them.
Inside, Obsessive-Compulsives want to rebel just as much as other people want to rebel against them. They never leave the straight and narrow path, however, because their own cruel consciences keep prodding them along and holding their feet to the fire. The pain they cause for you is nothing compared with what they inflict on themselves.
To make matters worse, Obsessive-Compulsives are unaware of their anger, their urge to rebel, or any other untoward thoughts they may be having. Unlike Histrionics, whose bad thoughts just disappear, Obsessive-Compulsives have organized minds, in which everything unacceptable is buried under stacks of rule books and piles of work.
Perfectionists and Puritans are angry because they’re good people who are somehow stuck in a bad world.
Beware of confusion! Obsessive-Compulsives purposely fog their minds with minutiae to obscure the objectives of their own actions. If you don’t watch out, they’ll do the same to you. They create an alternate reality in which even the simplest tasks are fraught with hundreds of confusing and esoteric details that must be kept under tight control lest everything fall apart. What they’re really trying to keep under control are their own aggressive impulses.
As we have seen throughout our study of emotional vampires, unacceptable impulses forced out of awareness always come back in a darker and more dangerous form. Obsessive-Compulsives could be the poster children for this process. The last thing these children of the night would consider doing consciously is taking hostile action in their own self-interest. Their aggressive impulses are relegated to their unconscious mind, where they’re pursued with a vengeance. They seem to be the only ones who can’t see their hidden agendas.
Perfectionists and Puritans try to hypnotize you into believing that their anger is praiseworthy, since it is in the service of goodness and light. Don’t be fooled; behind all the moralizing and responsibility, under the piles of rules, and beneath the rationalizations, Obsessive-Compulsives are bullies. As long as you remember that, they can’t sneak up out of the fog and bite you.
To deal effectively with Obsessive-Compulsives, you have to know what they’re doing even when they don’t. This statement, like everything else relating to these complex and confusing vampires, has meanings on several different levels. To keep the levels straight, let’s consider the notions of product and process.
Product is what you’re trying to do. Process is how you do it. The two are separate—a point you need to remember, because Obsessive-Compulsives won’t.
Think of all actions as having a product or goal. At work, the products, in addition to what gets sold, include improving quality, reducing costs, writing marketing plans, and making specific decisions. At home, the products may be getting the dishes washed, keeping the house clean enough for unexpected company, and raising moral and responsible children.
Obsessive-Compulsives habitually confuse process with product. To them, how something is done can become more important than whether it gets done at all. It always helps to use well-constructed questions to keep these anal-retentive vampires focused on the product rather than getting lost in the forests of process, which in their view surround everything. Questions like, “What’s our overall goal here?” and, “What would you like me to do?” are extremely useful in dealing with Obsessive-Compulsives.
Product-clarifying questions can help you keep tasks in focus. Obsessive-Compulsives tend to think that there is only one way to achieve any goal. The more clearly the end point is defined, the more likely these vampires are to allow a number of ways of getting there. If you are unfortunate enough to work for an Obsessive-Compulsive boss, you’ll make your life more bearable by contracting to produce specific deliverables on specific dates. When the boss starts checking to see how you’re going about your task, you can gently point out that the product will be on the boss’s desk by the due date. If the boss quibbles about process (and any Obsessive-Compulsive will), you can go back to the original contract and say that what you’re supposed to do is in it, but how is not. Does this mean the boss is changing the terms of the agreement? By taking this approach, you make the how a subject for negotiation rather than a foregone, but unstated, conclusion.
Needless to say, this strategy will work only if you put out deliverables that are on time and up to previously agreed-upon specifications.
By the way, the technique of asking questions to clarify the product works almost as well on Obsessive-Compulsives who only think they’re your boss.
At home, if you can get Obsessive-Compulsives to specify in advance who is in charge of producing what and when, they’re a little less likely to quibble about process. Unlike other vampires, Obsessive-Compulsives have a strong sense of fairness. Their own internal logic dictates that if there are rules, they have to play by them. Your best bet is to do everything you can to get the rules on the books before the game starts.
For this reason, the on duty strategy described in Chapter 6, on Daredevils, works well, but in almost the opposite direction. You’ll remember that the strategy has two parts: specifying who is responsible for what task and when, and the requirement that the person on duty is completely in charge of how the task is to be done. This second part is what will protect you from Obsessive-Compulsives.
For Obsessive-Compulsives, product is a moving target. When you ask, “What do you want me to do?” their list grows longer and longer the more they think about it. In their minds, as soon as a product is specified, it begins to turn back into process. You can actually see it happening. Before your eyes, overall goals morph into smaller and smaller tasks of ever-decreasing relevance.
At that point, you need to ask your second question: “What’s the top priority?” For Obsessive-Compulsives, being in control is always the main goal. The easiest way for them to maintain control is by making products and priorities vague, and keeping all discussion fixed endlessly on process. By asking what specifically they want you to do, and in what order they want it done, you may be able to gain some control over your own destiny.
This brings us to a consideration of your hidden goals. If your top priority is demonstrating to these vampires that they can’t tell you what to do, you are apt to make more than your share of mistakes. Unfortunately, Obsessive-Compulsives are often right. If you want to deal with them effectively, you have to put aside your own inner teenager, with its proclivities toward rebellion for its own sake, and learn from them when they know more than you do. We will discuss your inner teenager in more detail later in this chapter.
The other goal you may be trying to achieve in your interactions with Obsessive-Compulsives is winning their approval. Give it up. Before Obsessive-Compulsives can give a compliment, they have to figure out all the possible ways you might have messed up, and then make sure you didn’t do any of them. By the time they’ve assembled enough information to justify praise, you’ll probably have forgotten what it was that you did in the first place.
If there are Obsessive-Compulsives in your life, you have to learn to evaluate your own performance and praise yourself for your achievements. They never praise you, even when they love you.
Perfectionism is a vice that masquerades as a virtue. For people who only want everything to be right, Perfectionists can cause an incredible number of things to go wrong.
Sunday at 6:32 p.m., Keith startles the cat by jumping up and shouting, “Yes!” far more loudly than he’d intended. Finished at last! Vampire Rebecca and the kids have been at her mom’s for a long weekend, and he’s spent the entire time taking care of a whole to-do list of little jobs that have been piling up for months. He’s also managed to clean the house from top to bottom. Rebecca always says she wants him to take some initiative about chores, and this time he has. As Keith drives to the airport to meet her 7:30 plane, he thinks about how pleased she’ll be.
At 8:47 p.m., Keith pulls into the driveway with his family. He’s anticipating the surprised expression on Rebecca’s face when she sees the house. Before he even turns off the ignition, Rebecca looks at the curb and shakes her head. “Tomorrow is garbage day. Will you put the cans and recycling out while I get something for the boys to eat? They’re starving.”
“Sure,” Keith says. “Damn it,” he thinks. “She would have to notice the one thing I forgot.”
As soon as he has carried the suitcases into the entryway, Keith hurries into the kitchen to take out the garbage.
Rebecca is leaning over the sink, scraping at a plate with her fingernail. “Keith,” she says, “I’ve asked you to rinse the dishes off before you put them in the dishwasher. Once the food gets caked on, you know it’s almost impossible to get off.”
Instead of saying anything, Keith shuffles into the family room and turns on the TV.
Perfectionists, bless their neurotic little hearts, don’t have a clue about what a pain they are to everybody around them. It’s not that they don’t care what the people close to them feel; it’s just that they get so distracted by little details in the process of living that they miss the overall product. If Keith also loses sight of the big picture, he will make the situation worse for himself, and for Rebecca.
Keith needs to realize that Rebecca’s withholding of praise, no matter how much it hurts his feelings, isn’t in itself an attack. It’s an oversight that he can correct if he stays focused on the product he wants to achieve. If he blows up, withdraws, or refrains from helping around the house in the future, Rebecca will attack because there will be good reason to dump some of her free-floating resentment onto him.
To understand how Keith can avoid further disaster, we have to go back to the beginning and see how he got into this unfortunate situation.
For his hard work, Keith expected a spontaneous expression of delight from Rebecca. This is unrealistic, to say the least. Perfectionists never do anything spontaneously, except perhaps notice mistakes. To Obsessive-Compulsives, the notion of a pleasant surprise is an oxymoron. Spontaneity means a loss of control, which is usually too threatening to consider. If Keith thinks back, he’ll probably remember that most of his attempts to surprise Rebecca have not come to good ends.
Keith should also realize that to a Perfectionist, few jobs are done well enough to warrant unsolicited praise. He can get Rebecca to acknowledge his efforts and his intent to please her, but he will have to ask for what he wants directly. Instead of sulking in the family room—a response that Rebecca will interpret, correctly, as typical male withdrawal—Keith needs to tell her that she hurt his feelings by her lack of attention to his labors. She will understand this because she’s felt the same way most of her life. They can both agree that it hurts to be overworked and underappreciated, and that they ought to do something so neither of them has to go through this sort of thing again. The stage is set for a deal.
Keith can offer to take care of more jobs around the house if Rebecca will agree to specify the product—washed dishes, a vacuumed rug, a mowed lawn, or whatever—and let him be in charge of the process.
I’m not naive enough to believe that Rebecca can stick to this agreement, but the important thing for Keith is to establish it as a rule on the books. Perfectionists usually play by the rules, whether they like them or not. By clarifying product and process, Keith can turn a difficult and painful situation with a Perfectionist into a template for further productive discussion. As a solution, it beats TV.
If you have to live or work with a Perfectionist, here are some ideas that may lead to productive discussions instead of heated arguments and cold shoulders.
Saying, “You always tell me what I do wrong, never what I do right,” won’t get you anywhere, even if it’s true. Instead, ask, “What did you like about what I did?” Consider three criticisms or less to be an A+.
Don’t try to make your point indirectly by rebelling, withdrawing, “accidentally” making mistakes, or griping to friends, family, and coworkers. Passive-aggressive behavior just makes Perfectionists feel more justified in their anger. There’s no point in throwing gas on the fire.
Perfectionists may say that their perfectionism is a problem, but they don’t really believe it. Secretly, they’re very proud of how hard they work and what they accomplish. Also, if you’re pointing the finger at their faults, they’ll feel justified in attacking yours. Their overriding fault is being too good. Do you really want to compete with that?
This is the ideal to strive for, rather than a real goal. Not meddling in the process is the one thing Perfectionists can’t do perfectly. Nevertheless, the more clearly you can specify in advance the product you’re responsible for, the easier your job will be.
With Perfectionists, tasks have a way of mounting up. You always have the right to ask which should be done first. Exercise it. It will help you, and it will encourage Perfectionists to maintain perspective. The primary task of management is to set priorities for those managed. Always make sure that the people who try to manage you are doing their job.
You can be sure that, however hard they are on you, Perfectionists are twice as hard on themselves. Face it, they’re better than we are. They have to be.
Puritans try to perfect the world using their favorite tools—criticism, punishment, and censorship. They see evil everywhere, except in their own actions. If there’s a Puritan in your life, you know that it’s far easier to be a saint than it is to live with one.
Mirror, Mirror on the wall, who’s the greenest of us all?
That would be Martha. She’s also the neighborhood expert on fitness, nutrition, housecleaning, and parenting. There’s no question that she knows her stuff. Everyone respects her and goes to her for advice, but sometimes being her friend is like being audited by the IRS.
Yesterday, outside the school, Kinesha asked Martha to stop by for coffee. Martha had invited her over a couple of times, and Kinesha had been putting off reciprocating.
Since the moment she asked, Kinesha has been working her butt off, getting ready. She keeps asking herself, “Why am I doing this?” but she keeps working on into the night.
The next day, the house is clean, the recycling bins are lined up neatly in the kitchen, and the freshly ground, organic, fair-traded coffee is hot, with Public Radio mugs next to the pot. Just as Martha arrives, Kinesha takes a loaf of whole-grain zucchini bread out of the oven.
“What’s that heavenly smell?” Martha asks.
Kinesha smiles. “Just some zucchini bread. I got the recipe from Splendid Table.” She goes on to recite the ingredients, knowing that Martha is very particular about what she eats.
Kinesha serves the bread with cinnamon-tofu spread and pours the coffee.
The visit is going great. Kinesha actually begins to relax as they talk about their favorite cardio workouts and volunteering for voter registration.
Suddenly, the boys burst in from outside, wearing their Star Wars helmets and swinging light sabers. When they see Martha, they stop to say hello politely, then run off to their room.
“They’re really getting big,” Martha says. Then she frowns. “Kinesha, as smart as you are, I’m really surprised you let them play with weapons.”
Kinesha feels hurt, like a failure as a parent. At the same time, she has an urge to take one of those light sabers and shove it someplace where the sun don’t shine.
Why is Kinesha so upset?
If you think the answer is perfectly obvious, and it has the B word in it, you’re probably listening to the little devil on your shoulder, the one with dreadlocks, tattoos, and piercings.
Being an adolescent is so traumatic that most people never fully get over it. Most of us have a leftover teenager inside us who reacts just the way we did in middle school, when we had no idea who we were, but were absolutely certain who we were not.
The task of adolescence is to separate our identity from that of the parents who have loved us, cared for us, and controlled us all our lives. We accomplish this by getting irrationally angry at parental figures who try to tell us what to do and who to be. The anger is followed by guilt and confusion, which leads to even more erratic behavior.
If you let them, Obsessive-Compulsives can trigger flashbacks to adolescence. With a critical word, they can make you feel like lashing out, running to your room, slamming the door, then crying because nobody approves of you.
You can prevent your inner teenager from taking over by reminding yourself that you are a grown-up now, and you do not have to act on your immediate emotional response. There are other ways to solve problems.
In the moment, Kinesha pulls it together and decides not to lash out at Martha. For all her faults, she is a good friend, trustworthy and generous. Still, holding back on her anger makes Kinesha feel like a wimp.
The rest of the visit is tepid as the half-empty mugs of coffee sitting unnoticed on the table.
Martha finally leaves. After a good cry, Kinesha calls her friend Mindy to ask for advice.
“You’ve been friends with Martha for years. How do you do it?”
“She can be judgmental,” Mindy says. “We had a few kerfuffles over the years, and finally agreed to disagree.
“Maybe that would work for you. If she’s hurting your feelings, you can’t just sit there fuming. You have to say something.”
Mindy’s advice is excellent. Since she sought it out, Kinesha can accept it as coming from a peer rather than a parent.
So now, Kinesha has to say something, but what?
Here are a few suggestions for her, and for you if an Obsessive-Compulsive ever brings you face-to-face with your own inner teenager:
When you’re upset, it is generally not a good idea to go with the first thing that pops into your head. Like Kinesha, you may decide not to say anything when you’re in the situation, but to bring it up later when you’ve had a chance to think.
Think about what you want to have happen as a result of your comment. Kinesha wants Martha to mind her own business when it comes to parenting, but she doesn’t want to say so in a way that will end the relationship.
Trying to get Obsessive-Compulsives to apologize is a waste of time. Their biggest fear is of being wrong. So if you accuse them, instead of an apology, you will get an explanation of why they were right, or at least innocent. They never mean to hurt you. In their opinion, it’s the truth that hurts you, not them. If you press for an apology, the very best you’ll get is, “I’m sorry you feel that way.”
Obsessive-Compulsives are not heartless. It does matter to them that they hurt your feelings, but it matters more to establish that they did not do it on purpose.
Let’s review. When Obsessive-Compulsives insult you, you need to tell them how you feel and what you want without accusing them of doing anything wrong. This is not an impossible task, but it must be done carefully, in two separate steps. The first is establishing that they hurt you, but it was unintentional. The wording for this should be precise: “When you said [fill in the words], I felt [fill in the emotion]. Was that what you intended?”
The answer to this question will always be no, followed by an explanation of what the Obsessive-Compulsive actually intended, which is most often to be helpful by informing you of the error of your ways. Do not dispute this; merely reiterate that you were hurt. This puts the Obsessive-Compulsive into a slightly one-down position, which you can exploit by telling her what you want her to do in the future if she sees you doing something wrong—namely, don’t comment and respect your right to make your own mistakes. Let’s see how Kinesha does it:
“Martha, when you commented on my boys playing with light sabers, it hurt my feelings. Is that what you intended?”
“No, I didn’t mean to criticize you. I just wanted to let you know about how violent games lead to violent behavior. There’s a lot of research—”
“I’m sure there is, and I may be totally wrong, but my feelings were still hurt. In the future, unless I ask you, please don’t comment on how I raise my kids, and I won’t comment about how you raise yours.”
Kinesha could have pointed out that when Martha’s boys come over, they make a beeline for the light sabers and toy guns. Censorship always makes whatever is censored more attractive. One of the reasons that Puritans like Martha can be so mean is that nobody seems to heed their wise advice, even though they’re going to hell in a handbasket. It never occurs to them that you can’t get people to do the right thing by hitting them over the head with how wrong they are.
If, like Kinesha, you override your inner teenager and follow the steps outlined here, Obsessive-Compulsives will probably not make any immediate comment, but they will be more likely to do what you ask in the future.
Don’t be surprised if at some point later on when they see you doing something they disapprove of, you hear their inner teenager making snotty comments like, “I’m not supposed to say anything about how you raise your kids, but …”
Ignore it; it’s just a tantrum. Be the adult. Say nothing and realize that you’ve won.
Convince Obsessive-Compulsives that you’re not really one of the bad guys.
It’s easy to recognize Perfectionists. They’ll walk right up to you and identify themselves. Then they’ll probably tell you what’s wrong with whatever you’re doing. Puritans are also easy to spot; they seldom go for long periods of time without getting offended at something. Both of these vampire types try to control whatever situation they’re in, down to the tiniest details. Especially the tiniest details. Obsessive-Compulsives contain their anxieties about bigger issues through overconcern with the small. If you let them, they’ll manage their own anxieties by delegating them to you.
It’s easy to play right into their hands. If you go along with their demands, they’ll just pile on more. If you rebel or get angry at their pettiness, they’ll try to put you under even tighter control, because it’s clear that you’re the one with the problem.
Your goal should be negotiation, not recrimination. Every task has an end product—whatever it is that needs to be done. A task also has a process—the actual behaviors through which the end product is achieved. Negotiate to deliver a very specific product at a very specific time. If you hand over the goods, there is less motivation to quibble about how you got them. Not that Obsessive-Compulsives won’t try. Treat attempts to control the process as requests to change the end product, which means reopening the whole negotiation. If the end product isn’t affected, why change the process? Needless to say, you have to have some history of delivering the goods for a strategy like this to work.
Bottom line: if you do what you say you’ll do when you say you’ll do it, these overcontrolling vampires will go and drain somebody less reliable.
Obsessive-Compulsives tend to structure their lives to minimize failure rather than to maximize success. As a result, they will be quick to tell you what’s wrong with any new idea. Don’t let them be your only source of information on what’s possible. They are the ones who told Leonardo da Vinci that his flying machine would never get off the ground.
If you work with Obsessive-Compulsives, you can make them less draining and more focused by getting clarification of goals and priorities from above—the higher above, the better. Take advantage of the fact that the Obsessive-Compulsive code of conduct often precludes arguing with authority figures.
At home, you’ll never win an argument with an Obsessive-Compulsive on the strength of your ideas alone. For Perfectionists, the documented opinion of an eminent expert might open up the discussion. For Puritans, a few biblical quotes may help. They tend to forget the ones about mercy and forgiveness.
Look at the big picture, paying attention to details as they fit into the overall pattern. Know what you want, and realize that there’s always more than one way to get it. Have a sense of humor about yourself. Most important, use punishment only as a last resort.
Obsessive-Compulsives want you to pay attention to how hard they work, how much they do, and how well they do it. Don’t be distracted by the quantity or even the quality of their work. Pay attention to how relevant what they do is to achieving the overall goal.
There are some words you can ignore, sermons. Perfectionists run on about the terrible problems that will result if you don’t do everything exactly as they say. Puritans tell you that if you don’t believe exactly as they do, you’ll burn in a lake of fire. Both vampire types secretly enjoy inflicting pain because they’ve hypnotized themselves into believing it’s for your own good.
These vampires are not heartless. Sometimes you can break the spell by telling them that they’re unintentionally hurting your feelings. If you try to convince them that they’re hurting you on purpose, believe me, you’ll fry.
Forget trying to talk Obsessive-Compulsives out of being controlling. Even seasoned therapists have trouble with that. (Between you and me, at least part of the difficulty lies in the fact that it’s always hardest to cure people who have the same neuroses that you do.)
Never expect Obsessive-Compulsives to see anything selfish or purposely hurtful in their own actions. They are experts both in self-deception and in the letter of the law. If certain actions have made it past an Obsessive-Compulsive’s internal censors, it means they’ve been thoroughly rationalized and are, in the vampire’s mind at least, completely legal, moral, and altruistic.
As we’ve seen already, the battles you’re most likely to win involve having Perfectionists and Puritans specify products and priorities and negotiating some latitude in how to achieve them.
Always understand that Obsessive-Compulsives are sincerely trying to be good people and do a good job. The problem is that they’re pretty naive about how human beings operate. They let their beliefs about how things should be blind them to the way things really are. Consequently, these vampires are sometimes dead wrong about what process leads to what product.
You may be able to help them make better choices by explaining the contingencies that are actually operating. Gently remind them that rewards go for results rather than for good intentions. Tell them that it’s human nature to want to see what you’re not supposed to see and do what you’re not supposed to do. Deferentially suggest that the more you criticize people for messing up, the angrier you make them—and the more incentive you give them to mess up even more as a way of getting back at you.
Finally, respect the fact that Obsessive-Compulsives structure their lives to minimize losses rather than to maximize gains. In order for these vampires to risk doing anything differently, the benefits have to be very clear and very large.
Perfectionists and Puritans are never wrong. If you criticize these vampires, they’re likely to respond with a list of incidents in which you did something worse—complete with time, date, and witnesses.
One of their favorite defenses is explaining how whatever they did was the result of your miscommunication about what you wanted. They will, of course, twist your words unmercifully. Unless you have a tape recording, don’t bother trying to explain what you actually said.
When Obsessive-Compulsives criticize you, don’t try to use their own strategies on them. They’re better at them than you are. Instead, ask questions that invite them to focus on the product that they are trying to create. “Why are you telling me this?” is a good beginning, followed by “What would you like me to do?”
In any difficult situation involving an Obsessive-Compulsive, it’s always more effective to ask questions than to make statements that can be disputed. If you let vampires start questioning you, it will turn into a cross-examination followed by a swift conviction.
Obsessive-Compulsive tantrums are nothing if not subtle. These vampires express their feelings of overwork and underappreciation with sighs and disdainful snorts at the less industrious. They’ll swear it’s just a sinus problem. Don’t waste your time trying to get them to take responsibility for nonverbal editorial comments. You’ll need all your energy for their major tantrums, which usually take the form of long and exhausting guilt trips.
Always remember that although their words may sting like scorpions, they’re still only words. In the end, the only weapons these vampires have are verbal attacks on your perception of yourself as a moral and effective person. If you know who you are, they can’t hurt you. If you need their approval to maintain your self-esteem, you’re dead.
It’s better to know your own limitations. Perfectionists and Puritans always have something to teach you about the areas in which you don’t measure up. Their lessons are hard, but valuable. Obsessive-Compulsives are the world’s toughest audience. If you can convince them, you’re probably right. If you feel the need to hide something from them, it’s probably wrong. They can help you be a better person, but you alone have to decide how good you want to be.