When Monica first sat down in my clinic room, she did so with a weariness and heaviness that spoke volumes. I knew from her W
intake questionnaire that intense anxiety and a deep state of depression were what had brought her to see me, but clearly there was a lot more going on, too.
It soon became apparent that the despondency that emanated from Monica wasn’t because she lacked the will to make changes in her life; instead, it was because that will had been pushed so hard and to little avail. Like many of us do, she’d tried everything she knew to improve her situation, but nothing had worked. With each effort to change, she felt a further reduction of the joy that had once filled her world.
As we explored Monica’s life a little, I asked her what she did for work. She told me she was ‘just a stay-at-home mum.’ I gently interrupted her to ask, ‘Just a stay-at-home mum?’ She regarded me with a slightly dismissive expression, and then replied, ‘Well, I used to be a lawyer in a top law firm, but my husband has a big job and with the three kids, one of us needed to be at home.’
I looked at Monica and said softly, ‘You know, I also have three kids, and I come to work for a rest on Monday mornings after two days of parenting!’ Her face softened a little as she continued to share the details of her daily life, and it became clear to me that Monica not only held impossible standards for herself, but she also seemed to place everyone else’s needs above her own.
Ultimately, Monica had learned that to be worthy of love, she had to become a perfect, virtually impossible-to-achieve version of herself, and becoming that wasn’t only exhausting, it was also causing unsustainable pressure on her nervous system.
We talked about the history behind her need to be this idealized version of herself. She shared that her mother had been a successful doctor, and her father a decorated academic. She knew that her parents loved her, and they gave her many opportunities as a child. However, Monica also received a very clear message from her parents: The love you receive is in direct proportion to what you achieve, and if you don’t feel loved, it’s your fault.
If Monica scored 99 out of 100 in a test at school, her parents were more interested in the one question she’d got wrong than the 99 she’d answered correctly. If she came second in the class, what mattered was how she could be top next time, not the fact that she’d outperformed dozens of other children.
Furthermore, Monica had noticed that when she placed her parents’ needs above her own, they would praise her heavily, and she’d feel closer and more connected to them. She shared a particular memory of this behavior from when she was around 10 years old. She’d come home from school upset about an incident with a friend and desperately needed comfort and time with one of her parents. However, they’d both been preoccupied with work, and so she’d hidden her feelings and played by herself. At bedtime, both parents praised her for being a ‘big girl.’
When it came to Monica’s relationship with her husband, it was the most natural thing in the world for her to consider his needs as more important than her own – from the big decisions like giving up her career to be with the children, to day-to-day things such as making sure he got to sleep in at the weekend. And Monica was desperate to give her children the unconditionally loving and accepting environment that she hadn’t experienced, regardless of how overloaded or exhausted she might feel. From giving each child quality one-on-one time before bedtime, to cooking different meals to accommodate their food preferences, no act of service was too much.
But deep down, Monica often felt like a slave in her own home. She was overworked, underappreciated, and there was no end in sight. The more we dug into Monica’s life, the more obvious it became to me that her anxiety wasn’t a sign that something was broken, it was her nervous system functioning healthily to give her warning signs that her lifestyle was unsustainable.
Now, the details of your life may be very different to Monica’s, but I’m guessing that some of her patterns might be familiar to you. Furthermore, what Monica had learned to do is something we all do in our own way.
You see, Monica had designed her life around the strategies she’d learned as a child to meet her three core emotional needs of boundaries, safety, and love. As we discussed earlier, as young children we’re completely dependent on our primary caregivers to meet these needs for us, and as we get older, in time we must find other ways to meet them ourselves.
If our development as children was healthy, we’ll have internalized positive messages from our caregivers. We will also have learned how to meet the three core emotional needs inside of ourselves, and so will not believe that they are dependent upon external events needing to happen or not happen. However, most of us have to develop various other strategies to find ways of meetings these needs, and these strategies themselves are often the source of enormous suffering in our lives.
In Monica’s case, the primary emotional need she’d designed her life around meeting was love. And her learning was that to experience love, she had to elevate everyone else’s needs above her own – she had to become a ‘helper.’ She’d also learned that the more she achieved, be it in her career as a lawyer or by trying to be a ‘supermom,’ the more love she’d receive.
Monica’s depression and anxiety were due in part to the huge pressure she was placing on herself, but they were also down to the fact that however hard she worked, her core needs were not actually being met. The love deficit she felt was still driving her life.
Just like Monica, we all have stories and ideas about the person we need to be for the world to meet our core emotional needs. Perhaps we need to do things perfectly right, or perhaps we always need to be seen to be in control of what’s happening. Or perhaps, like Monica, we need to make our life a masterpiece of achievements or be a helper with endless patience.
This person we need to become is our ‘idealized self.’ Sometimes this idealized self is a slight detour from our true self, and other times there’s a giant chasm between the two which becomes a huge source of day-to-day suffering as we try to traverse it.
The really sad thing about our intense battle to become this idealized self is that it’s a relatively fruitless one to fight. Even if we’re temporarily successful in meeting our emotional needs in this way, in doing so, we’re actually creating two rather major problems. The first is that we’re still dependent on someone else or the environment around us to meet the need. The second is that the place we truly must have the need met is in our relationship with ourselves.
Now of course there are as many different idealized selves as there are people on Earth because we’re all unique in our own individual expressions. But at the same time, there are some common personality patterns with which it’s helpful to become familiar to create more awareness around our own patterns. Let’s spend some time exploring five of these now.
Let’s start with one of Monica’s key patterns, the helper. The helper pattern is where we regard other people’s needs as more important than our own, and it becomes our responsibility to meet their needs for them. It can also be that we’ve learned that by meeting the needs of others, we’ll then be safe – this is known as ‘fawning.’
For example, imagine that you’re travelling home from work after a particularly long day and you’re feeling in desperate need of some quality downtime before you call it an early night. A mindless TV show alongside a healthy takeout is just what the doctor ordered.
Halfway through your journey, you receive a text message from a friend asking if you’ll go over to their place for the evening. They’ve had a crappy day, they explain, and want some company. Now, it’s obvious that your friend isn’t in some sort of immediate and intense distress that may justify changing your plans. In fact, they’re in a similar space to you, except they want company, and you want time alone.
Governed by your helper pattern, though, you don’t give this a second thought, and you redirect your journey to be there for them. After all, their needs are more important than your own, and this is the pattern around which your life’s been designed. The result may well be that your friend feels better, but at what cost to you?
The helper pattern can play out in micro ways such as this, but also in macro ways, including in the career we choose, or how our intimate relationship is set up. And if you recall that being in a maladaptive stress response can distort how we read the cues in the environment around us, what often also happens with the helper pattern is that we interpret others’ struggles as a need for our input, when they might be just fine as they are. And in fact, what we’re often doing is teaching others to become dependent on us.
Here are some common beliefs held by someone with the helper pattern.
The other pattern we explored with Monica’s story is that of the achiever. Achievers believe that their sense of value as a person is tied to what they do and achieve in the world. Often, they’ve had childhood experiences of feeling that healthy boundaries, safety, and love were connected to their achievements, and their life can become a constant, relentless pursuit of achievement in a painful bid to meet the need.
The stereotypical example of an achiever is someone who’s driven by their career and financial status, but this is just one of many. Achiever patterns can play out in anything from being the best parent to being the most impactful eco-activist. For some people, the achiever pattern can also manifest in being an anti-achiever, and effectively celebrating not being defined by external things. However, in a sense, it’s the same pattern, just in rejection of achievement.
The key principle with the achiever pattern is that we believe there are things we can make happen on the outside that will change how we feel on the inside. And the more we make those things happen, the more we can meet our core emotional needs.
Here are some common beliefs held by those with an achiever pattern.
The perfectionist pattern is a close relative of the achiever pattern. Perfectionists put a disproportionate focus on getting things right; whereas the achiever is driven by reaching the destination, perfectionists are motivated to get the details right along the way.
The perfectionist pattern will have us obsessing over small details, inflating them to a disproportionate sense of importance. This can play out in everything from our performance at work to our personal appearance, or in the way we communicate with others. Examples might be obsessing over our body image, or a relentless focus on spelling and grammar in writing, in a way that actually obstructs our progress.
When we have a perfectionist pattern, we often also have an acute sense of right and wrong. We can be particularly judgmental and harsh in our thoughts and actions toward those we believe are wrong, and we can feel an inflated sense of superiority. This can sometimes create more distance from those around us than, deep in our heart, we’d like.
Here are some common beliefs we may have with a perfectionist pattern.
The controller pattern is about being seen as strong and in control. This can play out in needing to be in control of the people and circumstances in the environment around us, but also of our own internal state.
In a healthier expression this pattern can present as being highly capable as a leader; however, a less healthy version will see people being manipulated or bullied to suit the needs of the controller. Because of the need to control their internal state, controllers also find it very hard to show any kind of emotion or vulnerability.
One of the things that’s so stressful about living with a controller pattern is that ultimately, we cannot control the world around us. The constant attempts to do so, and the endless efforts to predict our environment, become incredibly depleting and are a fruitless task.
Here are some common beliefs we may have with a controller pattern.
The peacekeeper pattern is in many ways the opposite of the controller pattern. With this pattern, we’ll choose peace and harmony over directness and confrontation. This will often involve ignoring and rejecting our own needs for the convenience and comfort of those around us. Conflict and disagreement are our Kryptonite, and we’ll work as hard as we can to create circumstances that won’t make people feel uncomfortable.
The cost, of course, is that the more we work to create harmony and ease for those around us, the more we must reject and ignore our own needs and emotions. Almost by definition, asking for and expressing our needs would risk offending someone or putting them out, and so it’s easier for us to blend into the background and prioritize the needs of others in the group.
Here are some common beliefs we may hold in a peacekeeper pattern.
Please note that this isn’t an exhaustive list of personality patterns and there are many variations to how these patterns might show up in our lives; and of course, they can do so to varying degrees. It’s also important to bear in mind that you’ll likely have several, or perhaps even all, of these patterns. That’s just fine. What’s key is that the more aware of them you become, the more empowered you’ll be to do something different.
In this exercise, the goal is to understand as best you can the person you believe you need to be to get your core emotional needs met. Please remember, this isn’t about self-judgement or criticism – it’s about bringing fresh awareness to help empower you to change. Answer the following questions as honestly as you can using the worksheet at www.alexhoward.com/trauma.
As you answer these questions, please bear in mind the five personality patterns we explored above. Do you need to help, achieve, perfect, control, or peace-keep to feel boundaried, safe, and loved in the world? You can find a full checklist of the personality patterns in your companion course at www.alexhoward.com/trauma.
I often find when working with people that when they can make sense of why they feel the way they do, it’s a key step in taking back some of the power. Returning to Monica one last time, as she came to realize that at the heart of her compulsive helper and achiever patterns was a deep need to feel safe and loved, something started to soften. For the first time in years, she didn’t feel as if she was going crazy; instead, she recognized that the way she was approaching her life was causing an untenable level of stress that was consistently pushing her nervous system into overdrive.
However, it was also obvious that this awareness alone wasn’t enough to retrain a nervous system that had been programmed over decades. Indeed, it was where we’re going next in our journey that was so important for creating lasting change for Monica and ultimately transformed her life.