CHAPTER SEVEN
COVERING UP
‘Deep down … I’m bad’
Deep down, I feel bad about myself so I never venture an opinion in case people don’t like my views … I pretend to agree with everyone, no matter what rubbish is coming out of their mouths. There are times when I feel really bad about myself when I start to think things like I’m really, really ugly or badly deformed … I convince myself that other people must be saying horrible things about me … sometimes I’ve gone home early from social occasions because I’d think people were staring at me or thinking nasty things about me … I think that if a man finds me attractive there must be something seriously wrong with him … I think it goes back to my father, he was so hard and violent. He once poured boiling water over my mother. He used to scare me, but I still tried to please him. I was desperate for him to love me, but I don’t think he was capable. My mother was a crushed person: she would sit and smoke cigarettes all day in front of the TV like a vegetable, watching the soapies. I think the only life she had was imaginary. There was no love at all … all my life I’ve tried to fix everything up, to make it better, to smooth things over. I know I thought it was my fault that I couldn’t fix it. I hated myself for that.
Sometimes I feel so low, like I’m literally in the gutter, it gets so bad that I think I can actually taste the dog excrement in the gutter with me … I wear lots of make-up; I don’t like people seeing me without it … Inside, I feel bad and ugly … I don’t want people to see the ugliness deep down.
I never tell her the truth about myself, only the things that won’t upset her … I’m always walking on eggshells, trying not to slip up … it’s hard, and sometimes my temper gets the better of me, I punch the wall and hit and slap myself … I have no skills, I know I’m not good enough for her, and when she leaves me there will be nobody … I’ll be nobody.
When I was 12 years old I was raped by two men who tied me up and gagged me. I thought they were going to kill me … I was petrified … It made me feel terrible about myself, I thought it was my fault … I feel so bad and dirty to this day … Of course, I couldn’t bear to tell anyone, not even my mother, she was always so critical anyway … so I’ve held it inside, all these years … I’ve hidden it, all this time, it’s been 38 years of unbearable shame …
IN MY EXPERIENCE, these sorts of comments usually take a long time to emerge. Most people who have lived through a negative childhood have very little awareness of how bad they feel about themselves at a profound level. They often insist they feel fine about themselves, and it is only after considerable time and work with me that it becomes apparent that the badness and shame are deeply embedded. Children raised in negativity rarely escape the profound feelings of ‘badness’.
These children rarely escape the long-term psychological scarring of their subjective assumptions of ‘badness’. This is because children develop their knowledge of the world in an egocentric manner, so that psychological separation from other people takes years, with full autonomy not usually evident until around the second decade of life (or longer). When children are young, they believe they are the centre of the universe, and it is only after time passes that they realise others are indeed separate, and that events can be attributed to factors outside or separate from themselves. This is simply the standard sequence of events within the developmental process of the human brain.
When children are raised within a conflicted or distressing environment they often believe that they have caused it, because they have difficulty separating themselves from other people and other factors. In this way, the children uncritically take on the belief that they are bad for having caused the disharmony they perceive. It is only a small step for these children to assume that they deserve harshness and punishment for their ‘bad’ behaviour. Since these assumptions are often formed when children are quite young, they are usually deep-seated or core assumptions.
When a child is young, it is very difficult to bear this feeling of ‘badness’, because children need love and approval almost like they need air to breathe. To feel bad and therefore unlovable makes a child feel defeated and powerless. A child’s central need to develop a foundational and solid sense of self cannot proceed under these circumstances. Therefore, children develop strategies to protect themselves from the self-knowledge of ‘badness’ so that their self-development can continue, even if it is diminished and somewhat thwarted. These defences against ‘badness’ are possibly some of the earliest avoidance strategies learned, which is possibly why they are often hard to uncover and hard to shift.
INAPPROPRIATE SELF-DEFENCE TECHNIQUES
The lack of awareness about feeling shame and badness is largely because we tend to protect ourselves from such despairing self-knowledge by using defensive strategies. It is usually only when we run out of such strategies that we see ourselves as exposed and vulnerable. We often defend ourselves by directing blame and anger at others, making the focus an external one, thereby taking the attention away from our own underlying emotional pain. As part of this, we also often make criticisms of others, thereby elevating ourselves relative to the people we are criticising. Sometimes we protect ourselves by being overly nice or even perfectionist in our behaviour so that others will love and approve of us, with the hope that eventually we may be able to love and approve of ourselves. All of these strategies are employed so that we can cover up the feelings of ‘badness’ that are buried deep inside.
The anger-deflect strategy
In my work, I call the behaviour of deflecting anger onto others the ‘anger-deflect strategy’. Let me give an example.
The father of one of my clients (called Jeremy) was having a mid-life crisis. He started to dress more flamboyantly than usual, began drinking more alcohol than usual, and started flirting excessively with women with whom he socialised through his work. After doing these things for a while, the father told Jeremy that he was having an affair with one of the women he had been flirting with, and that his wife (Jeremy’s stepmother) knew nothing about it.
The father then subtly tried to get Jeremy to become compliant in the excitement of the deceit. The father kept telephoning Jeremy, talking about the details of when and where he was meeting the woman, and providing the latest updates on the affair. Jeremy felt morally compromised, and torn between his loyalty to his father and to his stepmother.
We discussed what he could do in this situation. Jeremy decided to respond to his father by telling him not to discuss the matter with him again.
He told his father that he resented him not telling his stepmother about the affair, and that he would like to tell her but that it was not his responsibility to do so. He told his father that it was ‘his’ deceit, and that he needed to take responsibility and fix it up. In the meantime, Jeremy made it clear that he did not condone it, and that he would have no part in perpetuating it.
When Jeremy told his father these things, the father employed the anger-deflect strategy, becoming highly critical of and angry with Jeremy. The father told him that he was ‘no fun’, that he took things ‘too seriously’, that he was ‘boring’, and that he was ‘just jealous’. I have no doubt that at a deep level the father felt ashamed about his behaviour, but his self-protective response was to hit out at his son. In making these hurtful, personal criticisms, the father probably had a sense that he had won. He certainly behaved in a smug, superior manner towards his son. After all, in employing the deflection strategy, the father had achieved two objectives. He had avoided having to reflect on, and take responsibility for his own behaviour, and he had avoided any distressing emotions such as remorse, guilt, disappointment, or sadness that he might have felt if he had examined his own behaviour honestly.
Although the father had achieved his short-term objectives and had managed to stop himself from feeling ‘bad’, and had won the immediate battle with his son, he had lost profoundly by adopting the anger-deflect strategy. The father had denied himself the opportunity to learn and to gain insight about his own ‘bad’ behaviour, and he therefore denied himself the opportunity to expand as a person and to rectify that behaviour.
Behaving badly
It is important to accept that we all behave badly at times. This is simply because we are all in the process of learning, and we generally do not know as much now as we will by next week or next month or next year. As morally responsible people, we need to be able to look back on our past and see what we could have done differently and better if only we had had the knowledge we have now. In doing this, we have to honestly acknowledge our past behaviour—whether it was inadequate, selfish, brutal, morally inept, pathetic, weak, cruel, harsh, or whatever. To reflect on ourselves is helpful: not because we need to beat ourselves around the head with the information, but because it enables us to see how we might better deal with a similar situation when we next encounter it. This mental reflection, involving critiques of our past behaviour, keeps us growing.
However, some counsellors say you should eliminate feelings of ‘badness’. You should search for evidence to ‘prove’ that you are good and that you behaved well in past situations, and you should make ‘positive affirmation’ statements to yourself on a regular basis. I strongly disagree with this position. In my view, we need to reflect in an honest way, acknowledging our shortcomings, so we can improve on them and extend ourselves. Instead of deceiving ourselves with global statements, such as that we are loving or caring beings, we need to realise that, although there are times when we behave in a loving or caring way, there are also times when we behave harshly. We are fallible. Apart from anything else, as intelligent beings, we are unlikely to ever believe global ‘goodness’ statements anyway. Instead, we need an explanation for our ‘bad’ behaviour on particular occasions. We often need to accept that it was the best we could do given our limited opportunities in life at that moment, or that we were employing a survival strategy, even if it was an inadequate one. Being prepared to honestly examine and take responsibility for past behaviour catapults a person towards recovery.
Some people behave worse than others
Often, when you have had a negative childhood, you behave worse than someone who has had an easier time. That is not because you are a worse person, but because the range of life-strategies that has been available to you is necessarily more limited than to a person who has experienced a positive childhood. It is easier to behave better when your life has been better. A negative childhood often leads to strategies that employ excessive levels of avoidance, withdrawal, and aggression; a positive childhood is likely to encourage approach and assertive strategies, with appropriate but not excessive levels of avoidance and withdrawal.
This means that people from a negative childhood have usually found it necessary to adopt strategies that often mess things up, cause conflict, and require more extreme behaviour to get out of. It is easy for someone who has had an easy life to be more adaptive, as the emotional pain they feel is less extreme. It is hard to be adaptive when you feel bruised and damaged and twisted up inside. It is easier to inflict pain on others than to feel intense pain yourself, so adopting the anger-deflect strategy feels necessary. This way, you never have to feel the deep pain in your own heart. You never have to examine yourself as you truly are. You only have to feel the anger you have deflected onto others.
The overly nice strategy
Deflecting critical attention by using anger is not the only strategy available. Sometimes, if you have had negative experiences in childhood you will use what I call the ‘overly nice strategy’ to cope with your deep sense of badness. You will try to avoid your distress by being perfectly ‘nice’ and ‘beautiful’ and ‘kind’ to a fault. You will offer to help in many ways, constantly put yourself out for other people, rarely venture a strong opinion that could create any opposition, and generally accommodate the needs of others—often at a great cost to yourself.
Being so beautiful, perfect, kind, and self-sacrificing does two main things. First, it means that you avoid nearly all conflict with other people. Second, the veneer also helps to keep your deep ‘ugliness’ out of sight, both from others and yourself. Being so nice keeps you feeling safe; it gives you constant proof that you are not so bad. After all, look what you are doing for others: only last week, you wrote three thank-you letters, took an aunt shopping, talked on the phone for hours to a friend who was having a hard time, bought a thoughtful gift, arranged a dinner party. How could you be ‘bad’? The evidence for your benevolence is overwhelming.
But, deep down, you still believe in your own ‘ugliness’. That is why you keep trying to prove otherwise. Also, deep down, you know you are not being real. Sometimes, you feel like being mean and spiteful, and sometimes it slips out, but you can usually manage to push it back in before anyone notices. You ‘sense’ the ‘badness’ is there, rotting away, right in your core. You keep pretending, gathering one-sided evidence of your own benevolence, hoping that eventually this will convince you that it has all been one big mistake, and that you are really lovable and not ‘bad’ after all.
Self-sabotaging strategies
The problem with these protective strategies is that, ultimately, they cause more problems than they solve. The anger-deflect strategy leads to excessive anger with and criticism of others, damaging interpersonal relationships, and often creating unwarranted back-to-back crises when people on the receiving end become offended and upset for having been attacked unfairly. In reality, excessive anger is connected to bolstering a damaged self rather than to anything happening in the present. Damaged people are merely trying to bolster their own damaged self-esteem, and to protect themselves from feeling bad by using another person’s (often unrelated) behaviour as a way to vent their anger.
The trouble with the anger-deflect and overly nice self-protective strategies is that they both prevent you from moving on, and from realistically and honestly examining your own behaviours and emotions. The anger-deflect strategy stops you looking at all. When you use these strategies, your growth stops or becomes stunted.
People who grossly overuse the anger-deflect strategy often describe their emotional repertoire as consisting of anger, more anger, and more and more anger. This severely one-dimensional profile is inadequate to deal with the complex demands placed on an individual in a highly developed society. The excessive anger, on rare occasions, may give way to desperate periods of utter bleakness, when you feel you are in a pit of despair and hopelessness, with no way out. These are the times when your strategies are clearly not sufficient. It does not mean there is no way out; rather, it is an indicator that your life-strategies need changing, and that your repertoire of strategies needs to be expanded.
Equally problematic is the overly nice strategy that collects only ‘good’ evidence about your behaviour. This attempt at self-protection ultimately fails to be truly convincing. It is only through the realistic evaluation of your own behaviour that you are able to emotionally resolve the pain arising from your deficient past behaviour, and come to forgive yourself. Ironically, self-forgiveness is not about going easy on yourself (by avoiding honest self-appraisal). Rather, self-forgiveness depends upon taking responsibility for, and realistically acknowledging your own contribution to, emotionally challenging situations.
There are two other main problems with the overly nice strategy. First, trying to be everything to all people means giving up too much of yourself. There will be times when others will try to exploit your ‘niceness’ because you allow that to happen by not setting limits on their potentially exploitative behaviour. In other words, you don’t set up any fences, so people trample all over you. People do not do this because they are intrinsically exploitative; they do it because there is an unfenced area to explore. When people trample on you too often you don’t get enough of what you need, and so you get annoyed; and, when you get sufficiently annoyed, no matter how ‘nice’ you are trying to be, little bits of resentment slip out one way or another. You notice these little slips, and they provide evidence of the deeply hidden, flawed character that you believe is underneath your ‘nice’ facade.
Second, the problem with behaving in such a ‘nice’ way is that there are no real limits to ‘niceness’. How nice is nice enough? The little slips, the little embarrassing displays of the ‘real’ you, only make it harder to perfect your niceness. But, sadly, we are all irredeemably fallible. Yet, if you are an ‘overly nice’ strategist, you are driven to perfect the imperfectible in order to protect yourself from any negative evaluation of your character or behaviour. You have absolutely no tolerance of ‘bad’ evidence. Indeed, you experience great distress at any little slip of ‘badness’.
This inevitably involves work and more work, self-sacrifice and more self-sacrifice; but, most damaging of all, it leads to rigidity. By rigidity, I mean there is a lack of flexibility in seeing yourself as a fluid and adaptive entity responsive to the daily quirks dealt out by the environment—capable of behaving well, badly, and all shades in between, depending upon the circumstances. You have an intolerance towards seeing yourself in any way other than ‘perfectly’ nice. To retain this strategy, unfortunately, delivers a life-sentence of being one-dimensional and superficial, since anything below the surface is out of bounds. So it is important to change this strategy.
Not only are there problems with being superficial, but attempting to perfect the overly nice strategy will inevitably fail. Your inevitable failure to be absolutely perfect means that, on occasion, the ‘bad’ inadvertently slips out (again!). As with the first problem, this provides glimpses of the ‘deep down badness’ that you believe is your ‘true nature’, which you are convinced you are just concealing from others. Because of your own awareness that you are not being ‘real’ by being so overly nice, you believe you are merely successfully deceiving others. As with the anger-deflect strategy, this prevents you from making any realistic evaluations of your own behaviour. In this case, there is only the ‘perfect’ you concealing the ‘truly bad’ you. This rigid, black-and-white, totalitarian way of thinking has been preserved by means of this protective yet ultimately unhelpful strategy since childhood.
Extreme cases
Even though there are clearly degrees of lack of conscience, it is worth noting that probably the most extreme examples manifest themselves in people commonly known as ‘psychopaths’. These people tend to have experienced the most excessively traumatised childhoods imaginable and, as a result, harbour the most extreme sense of badness about themselves at a profound level. Psychopaths will protect themselves at any cost from honest reflection and awareness of these feelings. Virtually all self-reflection is avoided to the point where such people fail to have any detectable conscience. The strategies commonly used by psychopaths often involve a very extreme form of the anger-deflect strategy, along with an enormous capacity for ‘protective’ self-deceit methods. The extent to which psychopaths are prepared to protect themselves varies, very likely, according to the extent of ‘badness’ they sense about themselves. In its most extreme form, it can result in them being prepared to destroy people who threaten their self-deceit by coming too close.
Psychological aloneness
This brings me to probably the biggest tragedy that comes out of adopting either the anger-deflect or overly nice strategies. The adoption of these strategies makes it very difficult to ever let other people get close. The anger-deflect strategy tends to alienate and offend everyone in sight, especially family members or partners who often receive the biggest payouts of hostility. Keeping other people at bay and on the defensive ensures that anger-deflect strategists are not challenged to examine their own behaviour, because any attempt by another person to achieve reflection would be met by a barrage of deflection-aimed anger and criticisms so that self-protection is maintained. These people are the world’s experts at going on the offensive in almost every situation, even when they appear to be completely cornered.
While both the anger-deflect and the overly nice strategies achieve some self-protection from the knowledge of ‘badness’, there seems to be a difference in their effectiveness and emphasis. The primary aim of the anger-deflect strategy appears to be prevention of oneself from gaining awareness of the ‘badness’, thus making it a self-protective strategy, with lack of closeness to others being more of a secondary consequence of the strategy’s harshness. Often, these people express overt hostility to others, and they can intimidate so effectively and automatically that the threat of closeness does not even become a possibility. For these people, protecting the self has become even more of a priority than receiving love or approval from others. This suggests that people who adopt the anger-deflect strategy may have experienced more severe threats in childhood.
In contrast, the overly nice strategy appears to have as its primary aim the prevention of others from seeing the ‘badness’, so that others will be deceived into loving or approving of the strategist. Since its primary aim is to gain something from others, it is not quite so effective at protecting the self as the anger-deflect strategy, but it probably wins more superficial friends. However, because the overly nice strategy is deceptive, whereby the strategists ‘pull the wool over the eyes of others’, it ultimately depends upon not allowing other people to become too close so they do not see the ‘badness’ or ‘disfigurement’.
The main tragedy is that both strategies lead to psychological aloneness. Many people exist in this lack-of-closeness state for their whole lives, sometimes without intimate relationships at all, or within alienated relationships, where the partners are like strangers going along in parallel without truly honest communication. Alternatively, the connections may be temporary or low-commitment relationships, such as involvements with a person who is already married, or with multiple partners. People using the anger-deflect strategy often choose partners who will buckle and submit to their demands—one of those demands being no genuine closeness or vulnerability. All of these strategies are ways of keeping your distance from others, keeping your ‘badness’ hidden. It is possible to keep on repeating the same sorts of patterns in relationships for a lifetime, never reflecting on them or being aware that it is ‘fear of revealing the badness’ that is driving you. It just feels safer that way.
ANGELA
Angela was born into conflict. Her parents separated, following a violent marriage, when she was about three years old, leaving Angela and her older brother David living with their mother. Life was reasonably settled for a couple of years, with the family gradually healing and rebuilding their lives. However, Angela’s mother was struggling to bring up two children on her own, with insufficient resources from a poorly paid job. By the time Angela was five years old her mother had remarried in an attempt to improve her and the children’s options.
But there was a hidden price. The new husband started to make demands within the relationship, and when his demands were not met he resorted to physical violence. Angela remembers that her mother had injuries most days—black eyes, bruises, scrapes, swellings, and the occasional broken bone. The stepfather always called Angela ‘tank’, and told her that she was ‘fat, stupid, and useless’. He would often pretend to vomit when she came near him. It always seemed to Angela that her stepfather did these things even more when other people (especially her friends) were around. She felt he did it deliberately to humiliate her, and she learned quickly not to invite friends home.
The stepfather also often hit Angela and David, especially whenever they tried to protect their mother from violence. Soon, they gave up trying. The mother kept trying to leave the stepfather, and she and the children were always arriving at the church, in need of refuge. Angela remembers feeling embarrassed by this repeated need for charity, and she could not work out why her mother kept going back to her stepfather.
One day, Angela and her brother David came home from school to find the house quiet. The children were looking for their mother when they found the bathroom door was locked. They called out, but there was no answer. Angela recalled feeling alarmed, but not knowing why. Both children rushed around to the outside window, and peered in through the broken louvres. They saw their pregnant mother lying in the bathtub filled with blood-stained water. She had a rope around her neck and appeared to be dead. Terrified, both children ran over to a neighbour, who came straight away and forced the bathroom door open. Angela explained how, while she was running, it all felt like slow-motion, like an out-of-body experience. She found herself thinking about how terrible life would be if her mother was dead and she had to keep living with her violent stepfather.
Somehow her mother and the unborn baby survived the bath. The incident was never discussed until years later, when Angela was told by a relative that her stepfather had apparently been threatening to kill the mother and had tied a rope around her neck saying he would hang her. He then told her she had the choice: he would do it or she could do it. Like a lamb to the slaughter, she went into the bathroom, locked the door, ran a bath, cut her arms, and lay down to die.
Although the mother had obviously felt defeated at the time of the bath incident, she seemed to gain some strength following it. Heavy with her third pregnancy, the mother took the children in the middle of the night and escaped for good. Not long afterwards, Angela and David had a baby sister, called Lydia. Years of poverty followed—years of Angela believing the stepfather would find them and kill them all. Angela would think she saw her stepfather everywhere in the street for the next ten years, and she would freeze from fear, stuck to the spot, unable to move or breathe, until she realised it was not really him. Sometimes she would collapse on the ground in terror, wetting herself.
Despite this ‘collapse’ response in the face of what she perceived as overwhelming danger, Angela had another flip-side strategy. Among her peers Angela could be tough and hostile. By her early teens Angela was smoking, bullying, missing classes, having sex with boys. She was ferocious, like a caged, wild animal, furious with the world that her life had been allowed to develop this way.
At this point, Angela suffered another blow. Her mother took up with a new man. Although not physically abusive, Angela’s new stepfather was overly strict, verbally attacking Angela and David for the smallest misdemeanour. The new stepfather did not see the young teenagers’ interests as being aligned with his own; in fact, he saw the children as an opposing force, competing against him for his wife’s affection. Even little Lydia was seen as a threat. The conflict escalated, with the mother often colluding in the unfair treatment of the children.
Since no one had the skills to resolve the continuing hostility and conflict, it became inevitable that David would take the ‘option’ of moving out following one of the nastier conflicts. This was rationalised by the mother as ‘his choice’. It goes without saying that the new stepfather was behaving outrageously badly, and that the mother could have prevented much of the damage by taking decisive action; she did not have to be a passive victim. As the adult, she could have offered protection for her son. By interpreting her son’s behaviour of moving out as a ‘choice’, she never had to acknowledge that she had behaved in an inadequate manner in failing to protect the interests of her children, and she never had to acknowledge that she severely lacked skills in adequately resolving the continuing conflict. Instead, she just decided that her son had ‘made his own bed’, so to speak, when he had no real choice at that age. Without adequate parental protection, he had to move out in order to survive.
Not at all surprisingly—in fact, totally as would be predicted—Angela followed soon after, being forced out of the home prematurely at the tender age of fifteen. No doubt Angela appeared tough enough to handle it. At least, that is what her mother would have told herself, so that she could continue to evade responsibility and never have to look at how her own actions, or lack of actions, were contributing to the family’s misery.
For Angela’s young sister Lydia, the situation was somewhat different. Having escaped the physical abuse of her biological father by her mother leaving in the middle of the night while pregnant, she was less traumatised than the older two children, who had endured high levels of physical and emotional violence. Although Lydia had an inadequate role model in her mother, she was fortunate to have had the first seven years of her life without the presence of a stepfather. When her mother partnered with the new stepfather, Lydia soon found herself alone, without her older siblings.
It was in this situation that Lydia developed and attempted to ‘perfect’ the overly nice strategy as a means of securing love and approval. She tried to make herself lovable in every way. Over time, she became too kind and caring, too softly spoken, too giving, too self-sacrificing, perfectly groomed, perfectly thin, helpful at every opportunity, pliable to every whim from others, yielding to the opinions of others, all at a great cost to herself. She had given up everything in the pursuit of love and approval, and had become one-dimensional and superficial, only able to be ‘nice’. She no longer knew her own preferences; they became fused with other people’s demands. It would take Lydia many years to relearn her own preferences, to reclaim her ‘self’.
Angela’s life had been much harder. In enduring so much violence, Angela had needed to build an impenetrable shield, and that came through the anger-deflect strategy. To Angela, it felt as though her mother had betrayed her, failing to protect her against her verbally abusive new stepfather. Indeed, it seemed to Angela that her mother had been colluding with the new stepfather, never being prepared to stand up for the children against him, even when his accusations were harsh and unfair. The mother, for her part, justified her lack of resistance to the new stepfather by only allowing herself to observe the ‘tough’ side of Angela. The mother told herself that Angela was being belligerent and oppositional to her new partner, that Angela was ‘causing’ the conflict. Her mother never tried to see the underlying vulnerability in Angela. She never took responsibility for Angela needing to adopt the anger-deflect strategy in the first place.
Even though Angela was very clever, the damage done to her by being forced to leave home prematurely was far-reaching. Being on her own meant Angela had to leave school to support herself financially. Her education was effectively trashed. Even though some people do make it financially without a good education, it is important to remember that education (like sport) is one of the main ways that people from negative backgrounds can lever themselves upwards and become socially mobile. Losing this important option made it much more difficult for Angela to achieve financial stability, job satisfaction, and the increased self-esteem that arises from achievement. Indeed, Angela often found herself in dead-end and short-term jobs that ended acrimoniously, further diminishing her self-respect.
By the time Angela had moved out of home, her anger-deflect strategy was well entrenched. Although she was not aware at the time that she was using this strategy, it had been and continued to be positively reinforced. When I met Angela a number of years later, her strategy was polished and sophisticated.
Without any provocation, Angela had learned to intimidate others by excessive eye contact. She would stare too directly, not out of curiosity but by way of glaring at them. She was warning them off. After the initial contact she would not smile enough to put others at ease, which is an important social custom that indicates an initial willingness to engage in interaction.
Angela had an extremely sensitive antenna that detected any view that did not sit comfortably with her own. At the slightest sign of any contrary evaluation from others, Angela would unhesitatingly move onto the offensive. Her ‘first strike’ would be to immediately interrupt and ask a confronting question in a hostile tone of voice, such as ‘What do you mean by that’. Notice I have not included a question mark. That is because Angela’s ‘questions’ were expressed without any elevation in voice pitch at the end of the question— another important social custom that indicates inquiry rather than accusation.
Angela also tended to ask her ‘questions’ through clenched teeth, making minimal facial movements and establishing a mask-like presentation that prevented any exposure of her vulnerability. Angela was terrified of vulnerability, and worked hard to keep softer feelings inaccessible to both herself and others. An inevitable consequence of this ‘protection’ is that it causes an inability to feel compassion either for oneself or for others. This lack of connection to softer emotions enables any bullying to proceed without remorse, and often without a clear memory of it later.
Other times, Angela would make a passively aggressive comment to keep any ‘opposition’ in their place, a little underhand jab aimed to hurt and injure; but by this time most people trying to be friendly would have given up anyway.
When other people did not give up after the early strikes, Angela would escalate the conflict with disproportionate measures, way beyond what was real or reasonable. Comments like ‘I can’t stand you’ or ‘You’re such an arsehole’ would spew forth during quite minor altercations. These comments could rapidly deteriorate into overt and hostile threats, like ‘You don’t know who you’re dealing with’, ‘Don’t cross me’, ‘I’m going to get you’, or ‘You better keep looking over your shoulder for the rest of your life’, which were often extreme in their content. This almost always did the trick; people backed right off. At this point, the ‘warning’ had turned into abuse. Angela never saw herself as abusive, though. She saw herself as the victim she had been when her stepfather beat her or when she found her mother in the bathtub. She was completely unaware that her own behaviour had become frightening and hostile to other people. To Angela, it felt like self-defence.
In fact, Angela put a positive spin on all of this. She told herself that she was just being assertive and forthright in her opinions, and criticised other people for not being direct or honest enough. Other people were ‘stupid’ and inept for their inability to face real life. Angela believed she was being honest with both herself and others. In reality, Angela was lying and deceiving herself, always blaming others, and never taking responsibility for her role in the conflicts she was creating. Angela was mistaking her aggression for assertion. She was mistaking being forthright with being overbearing, being direct with intimidation, and being honest with lacking compassion.
Besides the continuous conflict, the anger-deflect strategy was creating other difficulties for Angela. Since leaving home, she had been going from one alienated relationship to another. Angela saw all of her partners as opponents. Mostly, she chose people she could easily trample upon and control. She usually chose other damaged people who made no demands for real closeness. Even though Angela appeared to dominate her relationships, and appeared in charge and fully independent, this was not really the case.
In reality, Angela needed her partners desperately, and was quite dependent on them staying around. Angela often needed to coerce or bully her partners into meeting her needs. Despite her ‘tough’ external presentation, Angela often felt powerless and incapable of achieving things for herself. She also often formed relationships in order to distract herself from a deep sense of vulnerability about her own ‘badness’. Although she was well practised at her invulnerable anger-deflect strategy, she was experiencing brief periods when her feelings of ‘badness’ broke through. When this happened, Angela felt anxious and afraid. These feelings started breaking through more often when her 28-year-old partner unexpectedly suffered a stroke after taking too much speed, and died several months later. Angela became terrified to be alone with her feelings. She was not used to this, since most of the time in the past she had focused on her anger and hostility as a strategy to keep the feelings of ‘badness’ away, without even knowing she was doing so.
When Angela had these feelings of ‘badness’ she would think that she was profoundly damaged and defective, and she would hate herself for everything in her life. During these periods she was utterly bleak, in a pit of despair. She would see herself as 100 per cent ‘bad’ and deserving of punishment. Sometimes her thoughts would turn to suicide. Her greatest fear was that she would go mad, a thought that reflected her deep fear that there was something intrinsically defective about her mind. She was afraid that her mind would collapse in the same way that her body had collapsed all those years ago when she thought she saw her stepfather in the street.
Angela did not form relationships based on love. They were based upon having someone else to do things for her and distract her from experiencing any vulnerable feelings. To achieve these aims, Angela had to form particular types of relationships: ones where she was totally in control and completely dominated the other person. There could never be any threat of real closeness, because that requires enough vulnerability to enable honest self-examination by both partners This process continues in healthy relationships, with each partner assisting the other to achieve both their own and their mutual goals through a process of deepening insight about their emotional obstacles and ways around them. Angela had learned years ago that she did not want to go anywhere near examining the obstacles that blocked her vulnerability. So that meant no honest self-examination on her part and no strong pressure from any partner to engage in such an activity. It meant a commitment to not changing. It meant a commitment to keeping the old inadequate strategies in place.
But there was an opposing force within Angela that gave a glimmer of hope for her recovery. The force came from her feeling so anxious, despairing, and powerless. These were the ‘bad’ times. Angela couldn’t sleep, panic attacks started, she had terrible fears of going mad as her ‘vulnerability’ was exposed. These fearful forces were increasing as Angela’s aggressive strategies were cracking under the strain. Although these feelings were frightening for Angela, they provided much-needed impetus to help increase her motivation to change.
When her partner died, Angela faced an emotional crisis. She could respond to it in one of two ways: she could choose to try to rebuild and repair her old strategies, or she could try to build new and different ones. The choice was hers. One way would lead her back into her emotional prison, facing a sentence of solitary confinement with unrelenting fury and distress; the other way would offer her insight, closeness, and the capacity to like herself—it would liberate her from her past.
HOW TO CHANGE
Your fixed belief that you are a bad person will continue unabated until you challenge it realistically and honestly. It will continue until you acknowledge and let yourself feel the emotions associated with the times when you behaved poorly. Notice I am referring to the times when you ‘behaved poorly’, not when you ‘showed you were a bad person’. We all behave badly at times, but that does not make us bad people. It just means that we are not perfect, and that we have had obstacles to overcome that have sometimes led us to behave in inadequate ways.
It is important to remember that a realistic and honest evaluation does not involve denial of your own bad behaviour. Indeed, such an evaluation requires being prepared to look at and acknowledge your problematic behaviour. It requires being prepared to feel distress, especially when you find you have not behaved as well as you might now wish you had. It is necessary to feel remorse, regret, sorrow, embarrassment, humiliation, sadness, and disappointment if you want to be a whole, real, and morally intact person. It is the refusal to feel these emotions that maintains the fixed belief in badness.
The so-called ‘negative’ emotions stop us from running rampant. By highlighting our shortfalls, these emotions enable us to progress and develop into humane and civilised people, improving with age and experience. Through awareness of our own mistakes, we are able to develop humility and compassion towards others and ourselves. These emotions activate our conscience.
Angela chose to try to change. At the moment she is trying to liberate herself. She is building new strategies. She is trying to stop using the old anger-deflect strategy and she is trying to acknowledge honestly when she has behaved badly. She is letting herself feel negative emotions that are associated with grief and with taking responsibility for those times when she could have behaved better. Angela needs to admit where she went wrong in the past, so that she can change and behave differently in the future.
But admitting where she went wrong is hard for Angela. She finds it very difficult to let herself feel negative emotion because in the past that has led to her seeing herself as totally bad. Previously, this type of global, morbid thinking has led to intense feelings of despair, when Angela has developed suicidal thoughts.
Evaluate yourself realistically
When people perceive themselves as totally bad there is a chain of thought that says: you are so totally bad that you are ‘irredeemable’. Therefore you ‘might as well give up’; you ‘might as well be dead’. Notice how this rumination strategy allows a person to not change (except by dying). In other words, the dismissal of the entire person as ‘bad’ prevents a person from changing, since nothing short of death will eradicate the whole ‘bad’ being. Within this framework, you might as well not bother to change a minor aspect since the entire person is irredeemably bad. In reality, keeping on making minor changes is what leads to recovery. It is precisely these small changes that accumulate into overall, large-scale change. Nowadays Angela is trying to not let herself off the hook with this kind of global negative thinking. Instead, she is trying to be realistic and accurate in her evaluation of what she accepts is her own problematic behaviour.
Slowly build a close relationship
Angela also needs to change the way she builds relationships. As we have seen, it has been difficult for her to have relationships in which she does not dominate and control her partners. This pattern has been replayed over and over. Irrespective of whether people adopt the anger-deflect or the overly nice strategy in order to keep themselves away from their distressing feelings of ‘badness’, it is not possible for them to develop real closeness with another person until they do things differently.
Angela and I have talked about how she might develop different kinds of relationships in the future. During this process we analysed how Angela habitually started her relationships. It was clear that they often started off on the wrong foot. For example, Angela would sleep with men too soon, when she barely knew them, after having met them at bars or nightclubs. Although she did not always enjoy the alienated sexual encounters and it frequently made her feel more alone, it enabled her to appear tough and in control. Angela found close mutual friendships that involved affection and caring much more threatening. I suggested she learn to take her time in getting to know the other person, so the relationship did not have to become distorted and alienated. There needed to be time to build friendship and trust.
Where to look
I suggested to Angela that, instead of going out to nightclubs, where communication is usually difficult because of the typically loud music and large amounts of alcohol and other drugs that are consumed, she might be better to join a club connected to some activity that she was particularly interested in (or could conceivably become passionate about). This would place her in contact on a regular basis with a large group of people with shared interests. This situation would allow reasonably relaxed talking, because the focus of the conversation would often be on the common activity. With regular contact, people would gradually feel safe enough to broach other subjects, some of which would be more personal.
Choosing a partner
Over time, in this environment Angela might meet a person with whom she felt she had enough in common with to form a relationship. For a long period of time, the emphasis would be upon friendship, not romance or sex. We talked about some of the important attributes she might look for in another person. I suggested that for a relationship to be able to deepen and progress without too many obstacles there would need to be some raw material to work with. I suggested that, rather than choose someone on the basis of whether or not they were ‘good looking’ or ‘wore the right clothes’ or had the ‘right chemistry’ or were ‘cool’, she should instead:
• Look for a roughly equal level of intelligence (both intellectual and emotional)
• Choose a person whose thinking is open-minded and flexible
• Look for compassion, warmth, and kindness
• Find out whether the person has a strong commitment to honesty and in confronting situations, even if confrontation is difficult. Or, to put it another way, don’t choose someone who puts his or her head in the sand when problems arise.
These attributes provide a base upon which most others can be built. Without these attributes a relationship will be much harder to sustain.
Choose an equal intellect
Let me provide some justification for my advice to Angela. The general terms ‘intelligence’ or ‘intellect’ reflect a whole range of underlying mental skills. Although there are some limits to the plasticity of the brain with age, most, if not all, skills of intellect can be learned. In effect, your IQ can improve with sufficient training. Remember, though, that this takes considerable time, so if you can find a partner who already has many of these skills your relationship will be easier.
Roughly equal intelligence would be essential because, if Angela cannot depend upon her partner for good judgement, she will never get real help when she needs it, and she is unlikely to be able to feel respect for him or her. And, without respect, she will not be able to maintain being ‘in love’, which appears to depend upon maintaining mutual respect. A relationship needs to be equal, with the partners involved in equal amounts of ‘taking care’ of each other.
Remember, intelligence does not just involve being bright in an academic sense with such skills as logic, rational argument, general knowledge, and having specific knowledge areas. Intelligence also requires being smart in an emotional sense, using such skills as assertive communication, having an understanding about other people’s motives, having insight into yourself and your own motives, being able to foster co-operation by bringing other people on side and effectively resolving conflict, being articulate about emotions, having good internal control of your own emotions, and being able to mentor other people because you are aware of their needs.
Choose open-mindedness and flexibility
It would also be in Angela’s interests if her partner’s thinking was open-minded and flexible. Open-mindedness makes change possible within the relationship, so that attributes which are lacking can be developed within both people. Both Angela and her partner would need to be able to follow through the logic of a situation, and flexibly question their own behaviours and motives. How else do you get insight, and effect change? Angela needs to be challenged, to be questioned and pushed, and to be made either to justify her behaviours or to change them if she cannot justify them, and vice versa. There is no joy in dominating another person in a relationship; the joy is in breaking out of your own set ways and being liberated to see the world differently.
Choose kindness, warmth, and compassion
It would also help Angela if her partner were kind, warm, and compassionate. By compassionate, I mean able to feel and express empathy towards other people’s feelings and circumstances. This is because, if Angela is going to have an honest relationship, it will be one based on reality. Therefore, each needs to be able to accept the ‘raw’ person, the imperfect human being. This involves being able to accept plenty of errors, faults, misadventures, and deliberate sabotaging during the process of building a relationship. Accepting does not mean condoning such behaviour. However, it does mean understanding that we all behave badly at times. It involves realising, with compassion, how certain behaviours arise, and being prepared to talk about them with the view to changing them when necessary.
Choose a strong commitment to honesty
Her partner would also need a commitment to deep honesty. This is essentially because Angela needs to be told the truth, not lied to, since telling lies undermines trust and respect. Especially if the truth is hard, it needs to be told. When you see that your interests are in line with each other’s there is no need for lies. If there is something important to know, it is helpful to know about it and talk about it. Problems are solved through discussion, not by avoidance. No matter how hard she finds it, Angela does not need protection from the truth; she needs to unrelentingly seek it. A person who is weak and submits to her, telling her only what she wants to hear, will not be suitable. To recover, Angela must have the truth, otherwise she will (often unknowingly) deceive herself and keep on with her old strategies.
Build physical and psychological intimacy
The question remains about how Angela might build a different sort of relationship. These are my suggestions to her. It would help her to find a person with the sorts of attributes described above who could offer her a continuing close friendship, which might develop into a romantic relationship. Angela could then arrange to meet that person during the daytime to pursue activities of mutual interest.
If they got on well, they might continue this friendly but non-physical casual contact for many weeks. As the relationship developed, if they found they were physically attracted to each other they could gradually allow the physical intimacy to increase, but not at a rate faster than the level of psychological closeness. The relationship would probably involve hand-holding, cuddling, and friendly kisses for several months. This is not because of prudish or religious values on my part; it is because it usually takes a long time to feel really close to and to trust another person. If this process is rushed, the physical intimacy will necessarily be of an alienated kind; that is part of the reason that so many people have to take drugs or alcohol in order to have sex.
It would be important for Angela to take such a new relationship slowly, so that she and her friend felt relaxed and comfortable enough to never feel embarrassed. If it felt too fast, one of them would need to slow it down. Angela would need to talk deeply and honestly about her feelings, and why she preferred to take it slowly. Gradually the two of them would develop more and more common interests through talking and participating in them. Because of so much talking, they would feel like a team, a co-operative unit. Angela would perceive that their interests were aligned, and vice versa. Together, they would pursue difficult discussions, and not avoid the conflict involved in talking about hard issues. Together, they would try to reach mutually acceptable solutions.
Probably after at least a year (although there is no set time to this process) Angela would be comfortable and trusting enough to be physically and psychologically intimate with her partner if this were a mutual desire. By this time, trust would be well founded and she would know her partner, in real terms, extremely well. By the same token, Angela’s partner would know her, warts and all, having built a truly solid foundation for a lifelong relationship.
If you are a person of low trust, you probably haven’t built a relationship this way. Such slow progress might seem odd and unrealistic. Nonetheless, my suggestion is to try it. If you take it slowly, gradually building intimacy and trust, by honest discussion and mutual problem-solving that benefits you both, the result will be different from what you have experienced in the past. Awareness of your underlying assumptions and the need for behavioural changes, and a single, strong, continuing relationship, is all that it takes to change enough to recover. Change enables you to liberate yourself from the old self-defeating habits.
It might be time for you to take charge of your life and create a close relationship slowly and deliberately, so you can lay yourself open to another person—challenging the ‘deep down badness’ assumption, and learning that you can be loved, with all your faults. Believe me, when you are feeling bleak and desolate there is no greater comfort than receiving care from another person with whom you feel truly close. It is a tragic fact that many people never change their behaviour enough to enable them to experience this profound level of intimacy.
Learn to acknowledge your past behaviour
It is often the case that people continue using the avoidance strategies of deflecting anger and being overly nice, or switching between these or similar strategies, because they are already feeling low, and they are afraid that by acknowledging their past errors they will feel even worse. But this is a fallacy. The fallacy is based on the lack of distinction between realistic acknowledgement and rumination. When you realistically acknowledge past ‘poor’ behaviour, you must to do several things:
• You should try to recall the specific incident of the ‘poor’ behaviour as accurately as possible, without trying to worm your way out of it. This can be quite painful, if you are really truthful. You then need to be honest with yourself about the extent of damage you caused other people, and yourself, by behaving the way you did:
What were the consequences of your behaviour for other people? What were the consequences for you? What harm was done? How much did that outcome lead to other poor decisions, whose outcomes then led to other even poorer decisions? (This is known as collateral damage or a chain reaction.)
You might want to write this stuff down, or you might just want to sit with these thoughts for a while. Whatever the case, you need to accept responsibility for causing this harm, and fully acknowledge your role in the harm occurring. It is often quite difficult to do this, and you may want to skip away from such hard-to-acknowledge feelings. It is important that you do not skip away, and instead allow yourself to sit with these feelings for a few moments at least.
• You should then realistically appraise what your options were at the time of the ‘bad’ behaviour incident, and try to find other, better solutions apart from the one you adopted. The tendency here is to try to tell yourself that you had no other options at the time (which is another strategy to let yourself off the hook and avoid taking real responsibility for your behaviour). Do not let yourself evade responsibility; there are always other options. Make yourself aware of these other options. Try to think differently. Think outside the square, about what you have learned from this book, how you could have done it differently, and how you could have done it better—not perfectly, but better:
What strategy were you using? What other strategy would have achieved a better result?
Criticise yourself, reflect honestly, ask your closest friend what you could have done differently, and solve the problem together. Thinking things through, or writing ideas down, or talking about alternative actions you could have taken will help you to clarify how you could behave differently in the future. It means that you learn a new strategy, instead of keeping on with the old habits that have been getting you into trouble. Make sure you don’t just find a different version of the old habit. Find a completely new one.
• You must understand why you did not choose that better option at the time. Perhaps you lacked experience and knowledge. Perhaps you had experienced a negative childhood, and an approach strategy was not even seen as a possible option. Perhaps at the time you were feeling too unsafe yourself to be able to think about caring for another person’s safety. Perhaps you were just too sad to be able to think much at all.
Whatever the reason, you must understand it, and acknowledge it. It might be helpful to do some therapy at this point if you are having difficulty in clarifying the explanation. It is through realistic acknowledgement and understanding of the reasons for your failure that you will be able to forgive yourself and feel at peace.
• Finally, you should try to retrospectively make amends wherever possible for the consequences of your past behaviour. Remember that forgiving yourself does not mean evading responsibility. Quite the opposite. Forgiving yourself depends upon truly accepting responsibility, by acknowledging your role in any harm done.
Few things cannot be undone, even years later. You might think it is easier to leave things as they were, but this is not always the case. A better approach might involve trying to re-establish communication in a damaged friendship to enable the giving of a sincere apology; writing letters of apology to an injured party; or trying in some way to compensate or make up for past ‘poor’ behaviour. If the injured person has died, it might involve writing a letter of apology to the deceased person, or saying the apology out loud as though speaking to the person or, if you are religious, praying to the person.
Both issuing an apology and genuinely accepting responsibility are strong approach strategies. What I am talking about here is a full apology; not an initial apology quickly followed by an excuse for the behaviour, as this will partly or fully negate your approach. A negated apology is a passive–aggressive (avoidance) strategy aimed at creating the appearance of an apology which, in reality, usually continues to place the blame or responsibility onto the other party. A true or full apology reveals your own feelings of distress, and enables you to approach the other person to make amends. A negated apology helps you avoid taking responsibility for your behaviour, and further alienates the other person by refusing to acknowledge the harm done to them by you. We have all heard examples like, ‘I am sorry I yelled at you, but you made me feel so angry’. Note how the ‘but …’ leads into a justification for continuing to blame the other person. Instead, the apology ought to be, ‘I am sorry I yelled at you. I behaved badly and unfairly, and you did not deserve that. I will not do that to you again. I know it is my job to manage my temper.’
The problems with rumination
The whole process outlined above may only take half an hour or so (and possibly less) for any one incident. It is an appraisal of your ‘poor’ behaviour, not a self-whipping exercise about what a ‘bad’ person you are as a whole. When you spend hours worrying that you are ‘totally bad’, as though the ‘badness’ is inherent and central to your character, and feeling that you might as well give up, you are not evaluating yourself realistically; you are ruminating. Rumination in this context prevents you from taking action, since you perceive yourself as totally irredeemable. No person is completely ‘bad’, but we all behave badly at times.
When people think they are bad, not that their behaviour has at times been ‘bad’, it reflects a black-and-white, unchallenged, rigid view that has survived, without critique, from a negative childhood. This rigid view has almost certainly survived because they have protected it by using self-deceptive techniques such as the anger-deflect or overly nice strategies. Rumination reinforces the underlying assumption of ‘badness’. Paradoxically, when people ruminate, they often end up searching for proof and reassurance that they have behaved better than they did in order to keep themselves from ‘bad’ feelings. However, people can become obsessive or compulsive in their search for reassurance. Excessive rumination makes them feel so bad that they either want to kill themselves or they cannot sustain the level of intensity in the feeling. The intensity of the ‘totally bad’ feeling is so extreme that it forces a sense of urgency or necessity in them to flip back into using the old, self-protective strategies, or into making a negating apology.
It is important then, not to let yourself ruminate. You have considerable control over whether or not you allow yourself to do so. You need to allow yourself a limited amount of time to realistically evaluate your past problematic behaviour, following the procedure outlined above. However, when that time is up, you need to move your thinking onto another subject.
The ‘know your needs’ exercise
Sometimes, when people have not received enough love as children and have instead received too much criticism, hurt, or harm, they have very profound feelings of shame and deep fears about whether they are worthy of being loved. If this is the case for you, it might be helpful to try an exercise that helps connect you to your feelings about your parents, and helps you to identify your own needs:
• Sit with your eyes closed, either alone or with a very close friend. Start with your father first. Picture him. Even if he is no longer alive, picture his face, his hair, his skin. Hear his voice, notice his eyes; give yourself time to ‘experience’ his presence. Try to stay soft and open to your feelings during this exercise.
• Ask yourself what your feelings are about your father, both good and bad. Speak your feelings aloud. Try not to think too much about it; these are your feelings, and you are entitled to have them.
• Next, ask yourself what you needed but were not able to get from your father. Again, express your answer aloud, trying not to allow feelings such as guilt to get in your way. Clearly acknowledge what it was that you needed and did not get. Voice your needs aloud.
The next day, do the same exercise with your mother:
• Ensure that you take enough time at the start of the exercise to ‘feel’ her presence, and to allow openness to your feelings about her. Make sure you picture her face, her hair, her skin; hear her voice; notice her eyes. Experience her presence.
• Ask the same questions. What are your feelings about your mother, both good and bad?
• What did you need from your mother that she did not give you? Remember to speak your feelings aloud, and acknowledge them fully.
This exercise is important because many of our feelings of our ‘deep-down badness’ are connected to what as children we received or did not receive from our parents. How they responded to our needs affected whether we felt loved or worthy of love. Our needs do not go away when we are sidelined or ignored or punished. Often, the desperation to have our needs met gets stronger and more demanding; the resentment, more and more harboured. Chasing others in order to get our needs met can become a habitual and ineffective strategy that is resorted to over and over throughout life. We can become too concerned about other people liking us, and we can keep chasing the love we missed.
This exercise tries to make you shift. It does two main things. First, it will help you become more aware of what you are feeling. This especially happens when you voice your emotions aloud. Becoming aware of what you feel deep down is important so that you have insight into what might be motivating you to behave in certain ways. Being aware of your feelings does not necessarily mean that you will want to keep them. If you do want to change them, you must be able to honestly acknowledge them first. Without acknowledgement, strong emotions fester, sabotaging your every action.
Second, this exercise will help clarify which of your needs failed to be met in the relationship you had with your parents. You need to know what your needs are in order to meet them. In asking these questions you will have faced some of the limitations of your parents. You may have had needs but, for whatever reason, your parents were unable to meet them. This was their limitation in the past, and it may well still exist. It could be that your parents are still unable or unwilling to provide you with what you need; it might be that your parents have died, and so they cannot help you. No doubt you have wished it could have been different. You may have spent many years chasing your parents, trying to get them to give you what you needed. You may not have even known why you were chasing them.
Now you can find the strength to accept what has happened. It was sad; perhaps it was devastating. Face these feelings, breathe them in. You no longer have to push feelings away. Now it is time to draw on your inner strength and stop trying to disprove or avoid your parents’ limitations. Accept their limitations. Accept the damage, and learn to give yourself what you need.
Not meeting your own needs and trying to get other people to rescue you is an avoidance strategy. It is about avoiding taking responsibility for your own life. It is based upon the assumptions of being too out of control, untrustworthy, powerless, or bad to do things for yourself. It is about seeing the world as too dangerous, and other people as too hostile or yourself as too fragile, for you to be able to tolerate emotional pain or distress. The trouble is, without taking responsibility for your own life you cannot recover. After doing this exercise, you can decide to stop spending years chasing other people to give you what you can give yourself.