Autonomy and a sense of independence are the core capacities that have failed to develop fully in those who exhibit this survival style. Autonomy individuals are often kind and openhearted, but they have difficulty setting limits and establishing boundaries. As a result, they easily feel put upon and secretly resentful, particularly in intimate relationships, where they often feel trapped. They prize loyalty and are good friends, but they are so focused on avoiding conflict and pleasing others that they are not forthcoming about negative feelings they may have. As such, it is hard to know where one stands with them.
Individuals with the Autonomy Survival Style may have been welcomed into the world and had their dependency needs adequately met. The challenge for them begins between the ages of eighteen months to two years when their capacities for independence and autonomy are in development. It is in this period of the “terrible twos” that toddlers want to learn how to do things for themselves. Parents of children this age have heard many times the age-appropriate “No!” or “Me do it!”
Attuned parents support increasing age-appropriate independence and autonomy. Highly anxious parents undermine their children’s developing need for independence because of their own unresolved fears. They prevent their age-appropriate movement toward autonomy in order to “protect” their children. Threats to the child’s healthy autonomy also occur when parents see their child as an extension of themselves. These narcissistic parents can be emotionally invasive, enmeshed, or over-controlling. In an attempt to protect their fragile, developing autonomy, children withdraw by superficially going along with their parents’ “program” for them while internally reacting to the control by secretly holding out to maintain their sense of autonomy and integrity.
Individuals with this survival style sometimes grow up in rigid, authoritarian homes with parents who believe that they always know what is “best” for them. Obviously, children need limits, but over-controlling parents believe that their rigid rules, beginning with eating habits and toilet training, are necessary for their children’s own good. When children resist, these parents withdraw their “love” and use shame, guilt, and sometimes power to force obedience. To avoid humiliation and abandonment, the children develop a superficial niceness that communicates “yes,” but at the same time, they also develop a secret self that holds a hidden resentment containing an unspoken “no.” On the surface, these children seem to accept the parents’ demands, but internally they hold out to avoid feeling controlled. Their hidden self-assertion is, “You have my body, but you’ll never have my soul.”
Some mothers, and occasionally fathers, feel abandoned by their child’s developing independence and use guilt or the threat of abandonment to undermine it. Their discouragement or obstruction may be overt or covert, but either way, it takes the form of disapproval, derision, or implied threats. When parents align themselves against the child’s appropriate expressions of autonomy and independence, the child comes to experience these impulses as dangerous. As the child grows older, obtaining love from the parents becomes linked to pleasing them, so that love is associated with duty, burden, and bondage. For many with this survival style, obtaining love becomes inextricably tied with the necessity to please, often at the expense of their own integrity and autonomy.
Individuals with the Autonomy Survival Style have had to face the dilemma of choosing between themselves or their parents. To submit to their parents leaves them feeling invaded, controlled, and crushed. On the other hand, their loving feelings and the need to maintain the attachment relationship keep them from overtly challenging parents. Faced with the impossible choice of trying to maintain the integrity of the self while keeping the love of the parents leaves them in a no-win situation. These children adapt to this dilemma by overtly submitting to parental power while secretly holding out. To do this, these children develop a powerful, though often covert, will.
In adults who have developed this adaptive survival style, self-assertion and overt expressions of independence and autonomy are experienced as dangerous and to be avoided. The major fears that fuel this survival adaptation are the fears of being criticized, rejected, and abandoned.
What was once a struggle with their parents is now internalized so that individuals with the Autonomy Survival Style spend their lives playing out the conflict between the internalized demanding parent and the withholding child. As a result, they feel paralyzed and bound by the internal contradictions inherent in the interplay of these two roles. Extreme ambivalence and a resulting immobilization are characteristics of this survival style.
Given their childhood experience, it is easy to understand how love and intimacy are associated with fears of invasion, of being controlled, smothered, crushed, or overwhelmed. These individuals long for closeness but associate it with losing their independence and autonomy.
Individuals with the Autonomy Survival Style are placaters and are afraid to expose their true feelings. Instead, they play the role of the “good boy” or the “nice girl” because they feel that since playing this role won their parents’ “love,” it will win other people’s love as well. A key statement for this adaptive survival style is, “If I show you how I really feel, you won’t love me—you’ll leave me.” Because they are afraid to stand up for themselves, they blame others for taking advantage of “their good nature.” Unfortunately, playing the role of the “good boy” or “nice girl” puts them in a no-win situation. Playing a role brings constant disappointment, resentment, and anger because, given that they are not authentic, they cannot feel loved for who they really are even when people respond favorably to the persona they have created. They develop a distrust of the world, a cynical belief that no one can really accept them as they are.
In personal relationships, these individuals allow frustrations to build without addressing them until they reach a point where they can no longer tolerate the accumulated resentments. They usually have escape strategies that allow them to leave relationships without confrontation: they withdraw without explanation, or they make their partner miserable so that the partner rejects them. This rejection by the other allows them to achieve “freedom” without the guilt of saying no, while at the same time reaping the secondary benefit of being the “innocent” injured party.
Living with pressure is an ongoing experience for these individuals. They are in fact so used to pressure that they do not recognize it as such. Having grown up feeling under pressure to live up to their parents’ expectations and demands, they have internalized this pressure and as adults, put tremendous pressure on themselves to be agreeable, responsible, trustworthy, and to do what is expected of them. Externally oriented, they are extremely sensitive to what they perceive as others’ expectations of them and experience these expectations, in intimate relationships and work situations, as pressures to perform.
Parental pressures are internalized as high expectations of themselves. Individuals with the Autonomy Survival Style are extremely judgmental of themselves. They are ruled by “shoulds” and strive endlessly to become who they think they “should” be. They perceive the continual pressure they feel as coming from outside themselves and not from the internal demands they put on themselves. Well-meaning friends and family, when trying to help Autonomy types with their dilemmas, feel frustrated about their complaints and their unwillingness to do anything to resolve their issues.
The tendency to brood and ruminate is typical of this survival style. These individuals ruminate after personal encounters, berating themselves about whether they did or said the right thing, chastising themselves for any “mistakes” they feel they made in the interaction, wondering if they said the right thing or hurt the person’s feelings.
A key aspect of the Autonomy Survival Style identity is a deep-seated ambivalence toward authority. Overtly, Autonomy types are deferential to authority, but covertly they harbor resentments and rebellious impulses. When dealing with authority, they feel that the only options they have are to submit to it or rebel against it. This “submit or rebel” dilemma leaves them in a no-win situation that has profound implications for the therapeutic relationship.
In the therapeutic process with individuals with the Autonomy Survival Style, it is important to keep in mind how paralyzed they feel as a result of their own internal contradictions. Not realizing how much pressure they put on themselves or how they constantly judge themselves, they experience their internal struggle as resulting from external circumstances. Growth takes place when they become aware that the pressures they experience are primarily the result of their own internal demands.
Not recognizing that their struggle is internal, they look to the therapist to align with one side or the other of their internal conflict. For example, they may come to therapy complaining about a project they are unable to finish. They identify their “procrastination” as the problem and ask the therapist for behavioral strategies to help them overcome their procrastination. For individuals who struggle with the Autonomy Survival Style, the request to help them find a solution to their procrastination is an invitation to frustration for both therapist and client. What is needed is a therapist who can remain neutral and bring to awareness these clients’ internal ambivalence around finishing the project without offering solutions. As soon as a therapist sides with one aspect of their internal struggle, these clients will take the opposite side: “Yes—but …” Or they may give the appearance of trying hard to follow the therapist’s suggestions while secretly resenting them. Ultimately, their resentment surfaces as sabotage, because successfully meeting the stated goal becomes associated for these clients with trying to please the therapist. Winning—that is, achieving the stated goal—feels like losing because it is associated with giving up their integrity to the authority of the therapist.
• “If people really knew me, they wouldn’t like me.”
• “If I show you how I really feel, you won’t love me.”
Compromised Core Expression
• “No.”
• “I won’t.”
• Any expression that might evoke conflict
Shame-Based Identifications
• Angry
• Rebellious
• Resentful of authority
• Enjoy disappointing expectations others have of them
• Burdened
Pride-Based Counter-Identifications
• Nice, sweet, compliant
• Good boy / good girl
• Fear of disappointing others
• Pride at how much they can take on their shoulders: “I can take it.”
Reality
• Autonomy comes from knowing what is right for them and the ability to express it to others so that their “Yes” is a real yes, and their “No” is a real no
Coping Mechanisms
• Indirectness: Not laying cards on the table
• Will: efforting, trying
• Passive aggression
• Guilt
• Rumination
• In relationship, rather than communicate their real feelings, they strategize
• Projects authority onto others
• Procrastination
Behavioral Characteristics
• Ambivalent, paralyzed by their internal contradictions
• Often complain of feeling stuck or in a morass
• Fear of losing their independence when they become intimate
• Choose to please others over themselves and then feel resentful
• Will-based, stubborn identity based on efforting
• Fear of their own spontaneous expression
• Fear of being rejected or attacked if they are openly oppositional
• Global feeling of guilt, inappropriately apologetic
• Superficially eager to please
• Covertly feeling spite, negativity, and anger
• Passive-aggressive; self-assertion and access to healthy aggression is limited
• Secretive about their pleasures for fear that they will be taken away
• Feel their only choices are to submit to authority or rebel against it
• Strong fear of humiliation
• Often complain of feeling “stuck”
• Forceful in defending others but not themselves
• Will avoid or distance themselves from a situation rather than confront it
• Projection of authority on others
• Believe that others have an agenda for them; imagine it even when not true
• Want to know what is expected of them so they can do the opposite
• Pressure themselves constantly while imagining the pressure as coming from the outside
• Continual self-judgment and self-criticism
• Confuse their unwillingness to stand up for themselves with flexibility
• Use the pressure of waiting until the last minute before a deadline as a motivating force to break through their paralysis in order to complete tasks about which they are ambivalent
Energy
• High energy, contained as if in a vice
• Compressed and dense
• Because of their pressured existence, they are prone to psychosomatic problems such as neck and back problems, ulcers, colitis, high blood pressure, pinched nerves
Breathing Pattern
• Contained
• Heavily armored chest
TABLE 5.1: Key Features of the Autonomy Survival Style
Working with individuals with the Autonomy Survival Style is complex; there are many traps into which therapists and clients can fall. The dilemmas of this survival style cannot be resolved by efforting—by the use of will—by taking sides in the client’s conflict, or by presenting a goal-oriented approach. These clients focus on what they think they should do and lose connection with what they really want to do. They don’t know how to work out the conflicts that arise from their competing needs.
The following are some of the will-based efforting traps that Autonomy clients create for themselves:
• How can I change this?
• What can I do about it?
• Do you have any homework for me?
• So what should I do?
Being goal-oriented avoids or overlooks the client’s conflicted internal world. Paradoxically, the less these individuals and their therapists try to force change, the more they are apt to change. Clients may complain about feeling put upon at work or in a personal relationship. The therapist, wanting to be helpful, offers suggestions about how they can stand up for themselves. What seems like a simple interaction to the therapist evokes complex emotions in the client. By focusing on a behavioral strategy, the therapist misses the childhood fear that self-assertion—in this case standing up for themselves—will bring abandonment. Feeling unconsciously that their internal world is being missed yet again, they experience the therapist as one more parent figure that is trying to impose their personal agenda on them.
Autonomy types will try to figure out the therapist’s program and will attempt to be the best possible client. For example, if the therapist believes in getting anger out by beating on a pillow, they will go at it enthusiastically. If the therapist believes in the importance of feeling the body, they will pressure themselves to feel their bodies. This kind of “winning” by being the good client feels like “losing” or selling out to the therapist’s agenda, and these clients will ultimately sabotage the process.
It is important for the therapist to communicate to these clients that they are accepted as they are, and that the therapist has no personal stake in getting them to change. This can be difficult to get across to these individuals. Autonomy types want the therapist to have expectations of them so that their internal struggle can become externalized. Autonomy types are very sensitive to a therapist’s subtlest expectation. Even when therapists have no expectations, these clients will imagine/project them. The greatest gift a therapist can offer these clients is unconditional acceptance. Paradoxically, this acceptance also creates the most powerful frustration because now these clients have no one upon whom to externalize their struggle.
It is therapeutically helpful to support their self-awareness through mindfulness and to help them increase their capacity to accept all parts of themselves. When these clients effort toward a goal, the opposite side of their internal conflict will surface and sabotage their efforts. Until clients can learn to listen to all sides of their internal struggle—until all sides are allowed a voice and taken seriously—Autonomy types will not experience internal peace.
These individuals need to see that as long as they continue to choose to please others at their own expense, they will be trapped. They need to discover how they try to control other people’s responses by being the “good boy” or “nice girl” for them. They need to find the courage to give up that control by being frank and honest with people and allowing them to respond as they will. Resolution of the dilemma for the Autonomy Survival Style is achieved when these clients let themselves be honest and forthright in close relationships and allow intimacy while remaining in touch with their independence.
• Encourage them to be curious about their internal conflicts rather than judging themselves and “efforting” to resolve them.
• Explore internal conflicts without taking sides.
• Support non-efforting and a non-goal orientation.
• Have a clear contract about what clients want from therapy: Make sure they set the intention.
• Be careful not to have an agenda for them.
• Do not let them externalize their conflict into the therapeutic process.
• Watch out for their “good client” behavior that can lead to sabotaging the therapy.
• Explore the difference between counter-dependency, rebellion, and true autonomy.
• Help them learn that they can have intimacy without giving up their autonomy.
• Know that any authority, including the therapist’s, will evoke resentment.
• Help them see their hidden contrariness and rebelliousness.
• Support their developing capacity to self-reference.
• Support the possibility of self-expression.
• Help them see how they get others to reject them so they can be “free.”
• Reflect to them, but do not get caught in their internal struggles, their self-created pressures and the unrealistic expectations they hold for themselves.
• Help them develop a sense of personal authority.
• Help them learn to say no and to set realistic limits with people without feeling guilty.
• The antidote to the will and efforting is the development of trust and self-confidence.
TABLE 5.2: Therapeutic Strategies for the Autonomy Survival Style