Part 1: Shaming Ourselves, The Challenges
People come to therapy for a variety of reasons. Sometimes people come to therapy because they are struggling with feelings of depression and anxiety. Sometimes they come because of feelings of worthlessness. Whatever brings them to therapy, it often emerges that on top of the depression or anxiety or what people call feelings of worthlessness, the person may be struggling with the challenges of shame and self-criticism. Some people confide, “I have this problem with criticizing myself. I just can’t stop criticizing myself for everything. I just can’t get out of this loop. It’s overwhelming.” Or they will say, “I am really struggling with feelings of low self-worth. I have high standards for myself and I just never measure up to them.”
As we explore further in therapy, we might discover that in the past, the person’s parents had high standards and expectations, and the person was often criticized for not meeting or measuring up to them. Now, by constantly criticizing themselves—by taking on the parents’ critical stance and applying it to themselves—they are employing a strategy developed in childhood to forestall their parents’ negative judgment.
As painful as it is to constantly criticize yourself, what people are caught up in when they do this is the fear that they may be negatively judged by others, because in the past, they feared the negative evaluation of their parents or others in their environment. They criticize themselves in the present because of the fear felt in the past about being judged negatively by the people on whom they depended for their survival. The deep-seated fear underlying a pattern of constant self-criticism is the fear of losing the parents’ approval, care, and love.
There are as many different possibilities about what people grapple with in therapy as there are different kinds of upbringings. Some people did not have a critical parent. Some people did not have a parent they could depend on at all. Some people were adopted; others moved from home to home. People with a variety of upbringings grapple with self-criticism and shame, and it shows up in a range of different forms.
Strategies To Cope
One strategy used by people who were criticized by their parents is to turn that criticism into high performance. They felt like they weren’t good enough for their parents, so in response, they put a lot of energy into getting kudos from their parents for their achievements, such as a 4.0 GPA. Being a high achiever can become the basis of their identity. “You’re so amazing!” people tell them. But why are they regarded as “so amazing”? Because of what they have accomplished and how they have performed.
What happens, then, if they can’t maintain this level of accomplishment? Will they continue to get approval from others, or will they be overlooked? The person might experience tremendous anxiety over how to maintain this level of recognition, how to continue to receive approval from others, and what will happen if they don’t get it. In seeking such approval, they can become very hard on themselves. They might pursue more awards and achievements and accomplishments, striving to be the best at things, because without all that, who would ever approve of them?
Or they may seek approval in their relationship with a partner—only to find that the partner wants more than their performance and accomplishments. The partner might want to know who they really are and what they feel in their heart. If the person’s identity is bound up with their performance and accomplishments, it can be hard for the partner to have a sense of their deeper parts or to feel that they really know them.
The high achiever may not want to share their vulnerability with their partner. They might have learned to hide or brush vulnerability aside. One partner might feel disappointed that the other is not relating on an emotional level. It can present a challenge in the couple’s relationship if one partner wants to know the other deeply, but the other is focused on performance, accomplishments, and appearance, and doesn’t ultimately get the approval from the first partner that they had hoped all their accomplishments would garner.
While some people seek parental approval through high performance and achievements, for others, trying to meet their parents’ high standards may have felt like a lost cause while they were growing up. In contrast to high performers, some people don’t even try to meet their parents’ standards. Their thinking is that they could try hard and have to deal with their parents’ disappointment when they don’t succeed, or they could give up prematurely, without making much effort, without striving to accomplish their goals or persisting when things get tough.
They fear that their parents won’t be pleased with them no matter what they do. They struggle with feelings of never being good enough, and consequently give up on themselves. While not striving to achieve anything may give them some short-term relief, down the road, they may beat themselves up for not trying harder to reach their potential or doing more with their lives.
