{"id":29009,"date":"2015-08-19T06:00:21","date_gmt":"2015-08-19T13:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/?p=29009"},"modified":"2019-06-04T09:41:01","modified_gmt":"2019-06-04T16:41:01","slug":"when-compliance-in-childhood-haunts-you-in-adulthood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/when-compliance-in-childhood-haunts-you-in-adulthood-0819154","title":{"rendered":"When Compliance in Childhood Haunts You in Adulthood"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"ChildWhat I am going to describe is what can happen when children<\/a> grow up and begin to realize that they are not living their lives according to their own wishes and desires. They start to recognize that their sense of personhood\u2014who I am and how I must be\u2014is based on expectations learned in their earlier relationships with significant others. In therapy<\/a>, they engage in a process that allows them to discover the ways in which they are controlled by what were spoken and unspoken expectations and the consequences of noncompliance. This was the work with a person I\u2019ll call \u201cAnnie.\u201d<\/p>\n

Annie began therapy by expressing strong feelings of confusion and unhappiness about her sense of self<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m so unhappy. I don\u2019t know who I am and I can\u2019t figure out what I want. Or if I think I want something, I\u2019m never sure if it\u2019s me who wants it, or my mother, or my husband. Everybody thinks I\u2019m so wonderful: sweet, kind, easygoing. They have no idea how sad<\/a> and irritable<\/a> I feel. I find myself getting angry<\/a> at everyone, but they don\u2019t seem to deserve it and I don\u2019t know why I\u2019m angry. Who am I, anyway? What is wrong with me?\u201d<\/p>\n

Annie, a 48-year-old recently married woman, began to tell me how, since her marriage two years ago, she has been feeling increasing dissatisfaction in her life:<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t get it. I met my husband Steve three years ago. We had a very strong, instant attraction and immediately started to see each other all the time. It felt wonderful to be together. He was funny and smart and he made me feel special. He was always saying how kind and sweet and thoughtful I was. We got along amazingly, never argued or disagreed. My parents loved him. After five months we were engaged, and married about five months after that. I think something started to change for me when we were planning the wedding.\u201d<\/p>\n

I asked Annie if she and Steve had conflicts about the wedding. She responded:<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s funny. Steve wasn\u2019t very involved in the wedding plans. Me and my mom really put it all together. I don\u2019t know. Maybe it started when Mom was so clear about what kind of wedding it should be. She wanted a large, fancy wedding. I was not a young bride, and I thought something small and more intimate would be better. But she was so excited and kept telling me that she was going to give me the wedding that she and my father never had. So I agreed to the big wedding. I think I was very used to saying yes to my mother, so I don\u2019t think I let it register that it wasn\u2019t what I wanted. At the time, it didn\u2019t feel like a big deal. Looking back, after the wedding I started to feel more irritated toward anyone who told me what to do. It didn\u2019t even matter whether or not I wanted to do it. I just wanted to say no to everything and everyone. I stopped making sense to myself. I didn\u2019t feel like the nice, sweet Annie anymore. \u201c<\/p>\n

Annie and I began to explore the \u201cnice, sweet Annie.\u201d I asked: \u201cWho is she and how did she get that way?\u201d<\/p>\n

Half smiling, half crying, Annie recalled that her parents used to sing made-up songs to her about \u201csweet little, kind little Annie\u201d who everybody loved. She began to sing to me: \u201cShe\u2019s sweet and neat and very, very good. Just ask anyone in the neighborhood \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

This cute, little song became central to our work. Annie and I began to look at her associations and memories as we unpacked the meanings the song evoked. Annie spoke of her close relationship to her parents and how wonderful it felt to be so loved. She began to wonder if she associated all the approval, love<\/a>, and appreciation she got from her parents with the expectation that she be a good, nice, sweet girl:<\/p>\n

\u201cI have this very strong memory<\/a>\u2014I must have been 9 or 10\u2014where I remember begging my mother to let me go for a weekend with my friend Ellen and her family. My mother didn\u2019t want me to go and, very unlike me, I yelled at her and told her she was mean. She started to cry. My father was in the room with us and started to berate me. He told me, \u2018You\u2019re mean. How can you be so hurtful to your mother? She knows what\u2019s best. You need to listen to her.\u2019 I was devastated. I felt like such a bad person. I\u2019m pretty sure I was crying and ran up to my mom and tried to hug her. She pushed me away and left the room. I felt so ashamed<\/a> and sorry. It was awful.\u201d<\/p>\n

Over many sessions, Annie uncovered many meanings and expectations of what it meant to be a good girl: \u201cGood girls listen to their parents. They are polite. They don\u2019t get angry. They work hard in school. They are helpful. They don\u2019t upset people. They don\u2019t disappoint people. They don\u2019t make people angry. They\u2019re cheerful …”<\/p>\n

Annie began to recognize that she was expected to fulfill these good-girl requirements or risk painful consequences: \u201cI think the memory of my dad telling me I hurt my mother is significant. It was one of the worst moments of my life. I think I spent the rest of my life making sure my mother was not upset, hurt, angry, or had any bad feelings. I think I not only made sure I wasn\u2019t the cause of any of her bad feelings, but I took on the job of protecting her from anyone else making her uncomfortable or unhappy.\u201d<\/p>\n

The more Annie and I talked, the clearer it became that she has been feeling pressure and anxiety to conform to those old good-girl requirements with \u201cSteve,\u201d her new significant other. She began to emotionally understand that the expectations she attributed to Steve belonged to the relationships with her parents, her earlier significant others. <\/span><\/p>\n

The more Annie and I talked, the clearer it became that she has been feeling pressure and anxiety<\/a> to conform to those old good-girl requirements with \u201cSteve,\u201d her new significant other. She began to emotionally understand that the expectations she attributed to Steve belonged to the relationships with her parents, her earlier significant others. She explained: \u201cI feel pressure with Steve to be compliant and make sure he doesn\u2019t have any bad feelings. Now I\u2019m beginning to think this is not so much what Steve wants, but more about me and my parents. I think this is how I believed I had to be in any loving relationship. I\u2019ve started to talk with Steve about this and I’m feeling less pressure to be the \u2018good girl\u2019 with him.\u201d<\/p>\n

Annie was beginning to make efforts to let Steve know her wishes even when she thought he would not approve. With Steve, she was becoming more comfortable allowing herself to discover her needs and wishes and to ask for what she wants. Her relationship<\/a> with Steve is developing into an attachment that repeatedly confirms that she can experience acceptance and love in the face of not always being the \u201cgood girl.\u201d This is helping Annie with her most noteworthy transformation: her evolving strength to tolerate her mother\u2019s bad feelings and emotional withdrawal.<\/p>\n

In contrast to her relationship with Steve, it is much more difficult to express her own opinions, needs, and desires around her mother. The old beliefs that she is responsible for her mother’s bad feelings and required to protect her mother from hurt and disappointment were internalized at a young age. Ideas about what is required of a good daughter are not easily transformed. Annie can acknowledge intellectually that it is not her job to keep her mother in an emotional comfort zone. She recognizes how her impulse to respond to her mother\u2019s unspoken requests for soothing is triggered<\/a> when her mother calls her to report an emotionally upsetting reaction to something. She is aware that when her mother is upset by something that occurs between them, she immediately feels responsible for causing the bad feelings and needs to act quickly to make her mother feel better.<\/p>\n

She explained:<\/p>\n

\u201cI know I am feeling more anxious around my mother because now I\u2019m aware of my conflict between wanting to take care of her feelings and wanting to be free to know what I want and be able to express it. Since we\u2019ve been working together, I am much better at knowing what I want, but it mostly still feels too risky to not protect my mother. I feel like I must soothe her. I\u2019m so afraid of her hating<\/a> me. She can get very cold when she feels hurt, angry, or disapproving. It’s so scary to think of losing my mother.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Annie\u2019s \u201cgood girl\u201d behaviors toward her mother began to change, it was difficult for her to consider the possibility that her mother\u2019s old responses could also change. It was helpful for Annie to accept that if she took small steps to express her own voice to her mother, she could test if there could be any change in her mother\u2019s old emotionally abandoning responses. Annie has discovered that while her mother can get cold and dismissive, she recovers after rejecting Annie and can shift to being a more loving mother.<\/p>\n

Annie continues to work on developing the ability to assert her individual self to her mother. She now understands that she has not only been protecting her mother, but has also been protecting herself from feeling emotionally abandoned<\/a> by her. She knows she can’t significantly change her mother, but she has been slowly changing her own ability to withstand the intolerable fear<\/a> of being abandoned and losing the emotional connection with her mother. Most essential in this process has been Annie\u2019s growing ability to feel her emerging strength and resilience as she increasingly believes in her capacity to survive abandonment and be less frightened of asserting her own wishes and needs. This bodes well for her ability to develop and express all of her self states to others as she allows herself to engage more fully in the world.<\/p>\n

Note:<\/strong>\u00a0To protect privacy, names in the preceding article have been changed and the dialogues described are a composite.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A child’s eagerness to please his or her parents may serve the child well, but for some people, it can have implications on their sense of self in adulthood.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1777,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[542],"tags":[31,450,25,41],"class_list":["post-29009","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-featured-articles","tag-psychotherapy-practice","tag-individuation","tag-psychotherapy-issues","tag-marriage-counseling-relationships"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29009","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1777"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29009"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29009\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}