The performer, the perfectionist, and the caretaker

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Hi and welcome back to our read-along of Are You Mad At Me? In this chapter, we’re going to be exploring a little bit about this idea of being good and looking at a couple of case studies of how this might develop in different homes. And while we’re exploring this, maybe we’re just going to hold the curiosity of each of the learnings that these individuals may have experienced in their lives that led to learning that they needed to fawn, to people please, to not have needs, in order to maintain their attachment relationship. We know that all of our survival strategies, our parts, our adaptations, however you like to think about them, are not beliefs.

They don’t come from beliefs. They come from learnings, meaning they come from acquired experiences in our lives. We develop these things in response to our environment because we are so adaptive as humans.

We’re always taking in that data from our experiences, especially those that are very intense or those that happen frequently, and then we’re learning how to respond to those to minimize any suffering, any pain, any potential loss of connection and relationship. Our brain then embeds those learnings as predictions, and those predictions then drive much of our behavior. If your brain learned to predict that having needs, having emotions, being yourself led to people getting upset, you being punished, people kind of withdrawing their love or withdrawing from you, your brain would have very quickly predicted that doing those things was bad and dangerous.

These things often develop or start developing in childhood because when we’re children, we don’t have the cognitive complexity to understand, oh, my mom, my dad, my grandmother, whoever can be upset, and it doesn’t mean anything about me. I’m still okay. We rely entirely on our caregivers to take care of us, to keep us alive, and we’re biologically wired to stay in connection with them, and so these experiences as children of, you know, having a parent who gets upset can feel very dangerous, very scary to us, and our own emotions in the situation can feel dangerous and scary to us, too.

In the beginning of this chapter, the author is giving an example of being in the car on the way to vacation and her father missing the exit and getting really upset, slamming his foot on the gas, accelerating because he’s so angry. He grabs the directions and starts tearing them to pieces, and she’s flinching, and her mom says, just calm down. It’s fine, right? So they’re all cramped in this tense silence, holding their breath, and her mind is telling her to be good.

Now, so much is happening in this situation, but you could imagine that if you were a child and your parent is behaving in this way, you might feel scared, you might feel angry, you might feel sad that is happening, and all of those emotions make the situation feel even more complicated, because if your parent is acting out in this way and you’re angry about that, why do you always have to act this way? Why do you always have to ruin our vacation? That would be a really normal thought to have, but the anger in its own way can start to feel dangerous because if you feel anger, you might provoke more anger from the other person. So in this case, even our emotions become dangerous. Our brain predicts that even us feeling our feelings becomes dangerous.

So it’s not just about not having needs. It’s not just about being good. It’s about managing our entire experience, thoughts, emotions, body sensations, behaviors, impulses.

All of that context is tied up in these predictions of what we need to do to keep feeling safe. There’s so much justifying we do about our experiences, and she talks a little bit about her experience of saying, well, a lot of this turmoil happened in my teenage years, so I thought it didn’t count. Wasn’t I old enough to handle it? It wasn’t really that bad.

It wasn’t that bad all of the time. You know, my parents painted my room pink, and they would let me watch movies that I enjoyed, and they would spend time with me, and this is something many of us have felt. Well, it wasn’t bad enough.

Someone else had it worse, or it wasn’t bad all the time. You know, my parents put me on a travel soccer team and took me here and there, or like my parents took me on vacations. They did all of these things.

You know, when you’re exploring whatever feelings might come up for you in this work, we just notice those things, those parts of us that say it wasn’t bad enough, or it could have been worse, because that too is part of the predictive pattern and part of the protective strategy, because what would it mean if you confronted these feelings, right? That’s where we start pushing up against, if I feel all of these feelings, it’s too much. It feels dangerous. Making my parents bad feels dangerous, so I must be the bad one.

I must be misremembering it or being too sensitive. When we’re doing this exploration, we’re not putting our parents on trial or our caregivers on trial or whoever it was. We’re noticing our experience of it.

That is what is the most important, our experience and our perception. And if you can do that, at least in the beginning, without feeling like you have to make your parents the bad one, then you can accept little bits at a time what your experience was. Eventually, when we get to the other side, when we’re more in our adult consciousness or in the self, as we call it in IFS, more in our cognitive brain, we can hold that it’s not quite so black and white.

But in the beginning, it’s very important that we notice the part of us that wants to shut down the idea that our life could have been challenging. And by the way, yes, these learnings can develop in adulthood as well. They can develop in romantic relationships.

They can happen at work. All of the time we’re having new experiences and those things are impacting the way our brain predicts what’s going to come next. So yes, the same thing is true about a partner, a work situation.

Notice how a part of you always wants to say you’re getting it wrong, you’re too sensitive, you’re the one messing it up, and how that detour might be part of a predictive pattern. It might be your brain detouring you away from something that feels dangerous to feel. But what we know for all survival strategies, in this book we’re discussing fawning, is that they are necessary.

They are solutions. They are perfectly coherent and adaptive in the specific environments in which you grew up, in which you have lived in your adult life. So they are not problematic behaviors to be managed.

Instead, they are solutions. And until we figure out what they are solutions to and work with that deeper prediction, we will stay stuck in them, right? This is why behavioral interventions can be necessary sometimes, but they’re just counteracting. That’s what we learned in our last book, right? Unlocking the Emotional Brain.

They’re just counteracting these deeper predictive patterns within our brain. And so it takes a lot of effort. It takes a lot of effort to go against what our brain is predicting.

That’s why, while it sounds good to say, oh, I’m going to learn how to set a boundary and then I’m going to set a boundary. If having boundaries your brain predicts is dangerous, then it will take so much effort and there will be so much anxiety around setting boundaries. If you can work with a deeper learning, the deeper prediction, then eventually there won’t be danger around setting boundaries and you won’t have to work so hard.

So Meg offers us here these case studies that demonstrate different types of environments that might lead to different survival strategies, all stemming from that survival response of fawning. We’re trying to make the people around us feel okay so that we can feel safe. So we have environments where there was a lot of conflict and no repair.

We have environments with constant tension. We have environments where we had to play a parental role. We were parentified when we were a child.

We have environments of emotional neglect, where we weren’t allowed to feel certain feelings. We have environments of bullying and we have environments of abuse. Now, of course, there are many environments where these strategies develop, but these really give you sense that there’s such a broad way that we can develop fawning or people-pleasing survival strategies because it is such an effective tool to try to be good, to try to make others okay.

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It works so well to prevent us from feeling any danger because it makes us feel like we have a sense of control. It gives us back a sense of power, especially when we’re children. Things feel out of control.

We don’t have any power. This is a way to try to manage that. If I can just make the people around me feel better, feel good, then finally, finally, finally I can be safe.

Of course, again, underneath of that is oftentimes anger and sadness and disappointment and hurt. We might feel that as an adult too, where we think, why doesn’t anyone ever see my needs? Won’t someone ever swoop in and finally give me what I need? That is often coming from that child consciousness part of us who lived in these environments and had to develop these survival strategies to try to feel okay. In this first environment of a lot of conflict but no repair, this is a very close-knit family, but there was this conflict of screaming matches and then silent treatment.

If mom was happy, everyone was happy, but if mom was upset, then there would be these big conflict swings. This is what I often refer to as the slot machine parent, where it’s this very intermittent experience. Brianna, in this case study, would always be wondering, which mom will I get now? The family is resolving, revolving around trying to keep this person happy.

Brianna would get stuck in these situations where her mom would ignore her and give her the silent treatment once for an entire month, which of course was incredibly confusing and lonely to her as a child. It would be confusing and lonely to us as an adult, but as a child, it feels like your world is ending. Trying to make sense out of that leads to this idea that it’s her fault.

It’s the child’s fault. She is responsible for her mom’s happiness. She learned she had to make herself the problem and that would be the way out of it.

The learning was when someone isn’t responding to me, it’s because I’ve done something terribly wrong. When someone is mad at me, I need to immediately apologize in order for things to get better. This leads to that peacekeeping role.

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So in her adult relationships, she often feels like a burden. She downplays her own experience, feels too dramatic and too sensitive, goes along with what everyone else wants, and over-apologizes when conflict does arise. And if we look at that learning one more time, there’s this feeling of when someone isn’t responding to me, it’s because I’ve done something terribly wrong.

And so this shifts to this idea that I am bad. My feelings are bad. My needs are bad.

I am bad. And you’ve probably heard me talk about how shame is like a lid on a pot. It keeps all of those confusing, terrifying, scary, hurtful emotions that we’re having managed.

It gives us back that sense of control and it is so much safer to think that we are bad than to think our parents can’t take care of themselves and are chaotic. And then that means they can’t take care of us. So you see, oftentimes people ask me, how can thinking I’m bad be a prediction of safety? But in this case, of course, we can see very quickly that it feels so much safer to make ourselves the problem and then just berate ourselves into being good than it does to accept all those other confusing, scary feelings about our caregivers.

In the next case study, we have the performer, Theo, who grew up in an environment with constant tension. There was a lot of passive-aggressive remarks and he learned to try to mediate that, to crack a joke, to try to move things into a safer place. And this constant feeling of tension led to all of this hyper-vigilance, always having to be on edge, focusing on everyone else’s mood around them so that they could be ready to course correct, to help mom, to help dad, to manage things, to make things feel like I need to make my parent happy and it’s my job to perform, to be positive, to use humor, whatever the thing might be, to try to make my parents feel better.

So then as an adult, he feels responsible for making everyone around him feeling happy. He’s very hyper-vigilant, always unconsciously or consciously aware of anyone’s needs at any given time and he really never feels like he’s being himself. Again, a very lonely, exhausting and anxious place to live.