Reinventing Your Life: The Breakthrough Program to End Negative Behavior and Feel Great Again (47 page)

You may have a less severe form of Achievement Orientation. Perhaps the balance between work and play is slightly off in your life. You cannot really relax, but at least your life is not totally consumed with work. And you may be a workaholic about things other than your job. It may be decorating your house, shopping for clothes or sales, or hobbies and sports. It could be anything—any form of activity that you turn into work and that enslaves you.

Status orientation
is an excessive emphasis on gaining recognition, status, wealth, beauty—a false self. It is often a form of Counterattack, to compensate for core feelings of Defectiveness or Social Exclusion.

If you have an excessive Status Orientation, you never feel good enough, no matter what you do. You tend to be self-punitive, or to feel
ashamed
, when you fail to meet your high expectations. You are caught in an endless struggle to amass more and more power, money, or prestige, yet it is never enough to make you feel good about yourself.

THERAPIST: It’s funny, but even though you managed to get invited to such an exclusive party, and you brought, as you said, „the most beautiful woman there,
“
it still sounds like you were unhappy the whole time.

KEITH: I was upset about where they sat us at dinner. It made it obvious that we weren’t really part of the inner circle.

Keith is never
satisfied.
It is never demonstrated to his heart’s content that he is worthwhile. He feels driven to ever higher levels of success. But no matter what he gains, deep inside he still feels ashamed of who he is.

The status-orientation can be a way of making up for feelings of Emotional Deprivation as well. You may try to fill your emotional emptiness with power, fame, success, money—substituting status for genuine emotional connection. Yet the status is never enough. One patient like this, Nancy, married a rich, unloving man and spent most of her time buying
things.
She had the best of everything. She would sit alone in her big house, surrounded by all her things, and wonder what was missing.

There are four common origins:

THE ORIGINS OF UNRELENTING STANDARDS

1. Your parents love for you was conditional on your meeting high standards.
   
2. One or both parents were models of high, unbalanced standards.
   
3. Your Unrelenting Standards developed as a way to compensate for feelings of defectiveness, social exclusion, deprivation, or failure.
   
4. One or both parents used shame or criticism when you failed to meet high expectations.
   

Growing up in an atmosphere of conditional love is the first common origin. Your parents may have only given you affection, approval, or attention when you were successful or perfect. This is what happened to Pamela.

PAMELA: It was as though I didn’t exist for them except when I won some award or got the highest grade. I remember when they told me I was valedictorian, my first thought was rushing home to tell my parents, that they would be happy with me. Most of the time they just didn’t seem to care.

With conditional love, your childhood is spent running a race to win your parents’ love. The race is endless, with few points of reinforcement along the way. One time we asked Pamela to give us an image of her childhood:

PAMELA: I’m running and running toward my house, but the house keeps receding, and the faster I run, the further away the house becomes.

Alternately, you may have had loving parents who gave you
lavish
love and approval when you met their high expectations. The important thing is that meeting some standard of school achievement, beauty, status, popularity, or sports became the most effective way for you to win your parents’ love, respect, or perhaps even adulation. Your parents may have placed you on a pedestal because of your success.

Your parents may have been
models
of unrelenting standards. They themselves were perfectionistic, orderly, status oriented, or high achieving.

You learned their attitudes and behavior. Often this origin is striking because no one in the family knows that the standards are so high. They feel normal to everybody.

PAMELA: Until I started therapy, I never really thought of my standards as unrealistic. I never used to think of my parents as perfectionistic. I always thought of them as just normal average people with normal average standards.

It wasn’t until I started looking at it more closely that I realized my mother had to have the house perfect. There was never a trace of mess. If I walked in and left a piece of paper on the table, within five minutes my mother would be asking me to put it away where it belongs.

And my father was completely perfectionistic about his work. He owned his own business, and whatever it was, even hanging up a sign, he had to do it himself and do it perfectly. He was always working.

No one ever said to Pamela, „You must do very well.“ She learned it purely through modeling, by observing her parents. If you have parents who themselves have high standards, they have, either subtly or directly, communicated those high standards to you.

High parental expectations are particularly common in affluent suburbs where many professionals live. The more professional the parent is, the more likely it is that the child is going to be subjected to these pressures. The whole culture supports high expectations of achievement. However, we have also had many patients with Unrelenting Standards from working-class families. You can have parents with Unrelenting Standards who are mechanics, cashiers, painters, or musicians—they come from all rungs of the social ladder.

We have some patients whose Unrelenting Standards resulted from trying to rise above their childhood environments. You may have felt inferior relative to your peers, or felt that your parents were inferior, and tried to compensate through high achievement or status. This was true of Keith. Keith grew up in a working-class neighborhood and was ashamed of it. He went to a school that was mostly working-class, but Keith envied the rich students from the wealthy part of town.

KEITH: I felt like where I came from wasn’t good enough. I wanted to get to where the rich kids were. I wanted the things they had. I decided early on I was going to get the things the rich kids had.

Keith planned his whole life around advancing his social class. His Unrelenting Standards were a reaction to shame regarding his family’s Social Exclusion.

Unrelenting Standards can also tie in to other lifetraps. For example, you may have the Emotional Deprivation lifetrap. As a child, you found that praise for your accomplishments could make up
somewhat
for too little love. Success can be a strategy for making a connection to others. Unfortunately, it is usually a pale substitute for real nurturance and understanding.

A parent may have spurred you on. Keith’s mother felt that she belonged in a higher class and had married beneath her. She fulfilled her desire for status vicariously through Keith. Consequently Keith could never relax. She was always in the background. He once gave us this image of his mother:

KEITH: I’m in bed trying to sleep, and I hear her voice going on and on. She’s saying, „You better get going, there are things you should be doing. Have you finished your homework, don’t you need to practice your tennis, don’t you have friends to call?“

Although people with Unrelenting Standards are usually remarkably successful as adults, their childhood memories rarely focus on feelings of success. In fact, they are much more likely to remember feeling defective, excluded, or lonely. Regardless of how hard they tried, they rarely got the respect, admiration, attention, or love they wanted.

PAMELA: I have so many memories of coming home from school with a top grade and not even getting any attention for it. It had to be something extraordinary for me to get attention.

In Pamela’s family, doing very well was treated as just average. Praise was rare. When we ask these patients if they are perfectionistic, they say „no.“ When we ask if their parents were perfectionistic they say „no“ as well. By their standards, they are far from perfection.

Parents can either fail to give praise when a child does well or actually withdraw love when the child falls short of their expectations.

KEITH: In my freshman year of college, l didn’t get asked to pledge the top fraternity. My mother wouldn’t talk to me for a week.

Another patient told us that her mother would suddenly stop hugging and kissing her whenever she got less than an „A“ in school.

You may have vivid memories of failures. We had one patient whose father used to mock him when he played sports with his brothers and lost. The whole emphasis in the family was on competition, on having to be the best. He and his brothers would fight to see who was the toughest. Though he became an excellent athlete, all he remembers is disappointment and pressure. There can be memories of striving very hard, yet failing to meet that impossibly high standard.

If your parents used shame or criticism when you fell short of their expectations, you almost certainly have a Defectiveness lifetrap as well.

UNRELENTING STANDARDS LIFETRAPS

1. Your health is suffering because of daily stresses, such as over work—not
   only
   because of unavoidable life events.
   
2. The balance between work and pleasure feels lopsided. Life feels like constant pressure and work without
   fun
   .
   
3. Your whole life seems to revolve around success, status, and material things. You seem to have lost touch with your basic self and no longer know what really makes you happy.
   
4. Too much of your energy goes into keeping your life in order. You spend too much time keeping lists, organizing your life, planning, cleaning, and repairing, and not enough time being creative or letting go.
   
5. Your relationships with other people are suffering because so much time goes into meeting your own standards—working, being successful, etc.
   
6. You make other people feel inadequate or nervous around you because they worry about not being able to meet your high expectations of them.
   
7. You rarely stop and enjoy successes. You rarely savor a sense of accomplishment. Rather, you simply go on to the next task waiting for you.
   
8. You feel overwhelmed because you are trying to accomplish so much; there never seems to be enough time to complete what you have started.
   
9. Your standards are so high that you view many activities as obligations or ordeals to get through, instead of enjoying the process itself.
   
10. You procrastinate a lot. Because your standards make many tasks feel overwhelming, you avoid them.
    
11. You feel irritated or frustrated a lot because things and people around you do not meet your high standards.
    

The basic problem with Unrelenting Standards is that you lose touch with your
natural
self. You are so focused on order, achievement, or status that you do not attend to your basic physical, emotional, and social needs.

PAMELA: Sometimes I feel like a machine, like I’m not really alive. Like I’m running on automatic.

Things like love, family, friendship, creativity, and fun—the things that make life worth living—take a back seat to your obsessive quest for perfection.

CRAIG: We went up to our summer house, and the kids and I changed into our bathing suits and went swimming in the lake. We were laughing and splashing and having a great time. Meanwhile Pamela was in the house cleaning, unpacking all our bags, and doing I don’t know what. We kept yelling to her to come out and swim. She kept saying, „Just a minute, just a minute,
“
and she never came out.

Your Unrelenting Standards are costing you a great deal. You are foregoing many opportunities for happiness and fulfillment in your life.

Your reward is a measure of success. In whatever arena you have chosen to perfect yourself, you are probably one of the best. If we go to the top of any organization, the chances are good of finding someone with Unrelenting Standards. Who else would put in the time and energy necessary to reach the top? Who else would be willing to sacrifice so many other parts of their life? If you read interviews with famous people, you constantly hear about their perfectionism, their dedication, their attention to detail, how they drive themselves and other people.

However, you do not stop to
enjoy
your success. When one thing is accomplished, you simply shift focus to the next thing, rendering the thing you just accomplished meaningless. And sometimes your success
is
meaningless. This is when you are perfectionistic about trivial things. Does it really matter in the larger scheme that your kitchen drawers are perfectly organized or that your children’s rooms are perfectly neat? Does it matter that your date is the best-looking person in the room, or that you are the best-dressed? Does it matter that you got a 99 instead of a 100?

Your intimate relationships almost certainly suffer. You may want the perfect partner and be unable to settle for less. The one woman Keith considers perfect for him is so beautiful, talented, and successful that dozens of other men pursue her as well; she has no interest in Keith. Once you are in a relationship, you can be extremely critical and demanding. You expect other people (especially those closest to you, like your spouse or children) to live up to your standards. And without realizing it, you probably devalue them for not meeting the standards you set. Of course, because these standards do not seem high to you, you feel that your expectations are normal and justified.

You may be attracted to perfectionistic partners who have their own Unrelenting Standards, or you may be attracted to partners who are the opposite, relaxed and easygoing. You might choose someone who offsets your pressured life—who brings to your life all the things you have lost. This kind of relationship can become your one avenue of relief and enjoyment.