You Don't Owe Anyone

Free Yourself from the Weight of Expectations

Caroline Garnet McGraw

• Publisher: Broadleaf Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781506464091
• eBook ISBN: 9781506464107
• Topic: Desarrollo personal
• Subtopic: Salud mental y bienestar

"You Don't Owe Anyone is for anyone seeking escape from perfectionism." — Publishers Weekly in "Writing Woman to Woman"

You Don't Owe Anyone is for perfectionists, workaholics, people pleasers, and strivers who feel stuck in the try-hard cycle. Sharing her experiences as a life coach and recovering perfectionist, Caroline Garnet McGraw shows us how we can free ourselves from the weight of expectations and encourages us to move our lives forward without apology.

Inspired by the author's viral essay "You Don't Owe Anyone an Interaction, " this book invites us to make surprising choices that can help us get unstuck. Rather than offering more ways to effect change through sheer effort, these personal stories serve as a compassionate witness, a reflection of our own perfectionistic tendencies. They also are a wakeup call jolting us out of our martyr mentality and inspiring us to move in new, positive directions.

Through simple, accessible coaching practices, You Don't Owe Anyone shows us what it looks like to refuse to over-function in the old ways. It invites us to make the same surprising choices that have helped McGraw and her clients move past perfectionism, empowering us to quiet our fears and heal our hearts.

1

You Don’t Owe Anyone
the Good Child

The secret sorrows—and future difficulties—of the good boy or girl begin with their inner need for excessive compliance. The good child isn’t good because by a quirk of nature they simply have no inclination to be anything else. They are good because they have no other option. Their goodness is a necessity rather than a choice.

—The School of Life, “The Dangers of the Good Child”

If you were the good child and you’ve kept up your “good” status into adulthood, the secret truth is that you’re tired.

Not just tired in the physical sense, though often that’s true too. It’s more like a deep-down weariness; your heart and soul feel spent.

This is what readers write to me:

“I try so hard to do everything right and not screw up. Caroline, do you know how exhausting that is? I think you do; that’s why I’m writing to you.”

They’re right; I do know. I know how exhausting it is to be the good child, and I also know how it feels like an imperative. As in the epigraph to this chapter, I know what it’s like when your goodness seems like “a necessity rather than a choice.”

It’s been your survival strategy for years, hasn’t it? Just keep going, just keep fixing and saving. That’s your job, isn’t it? To help but not be helped?

To wit, another reader’s message:

All my life I’ve been good at offering help to others, but I don’t want to ask for or accept help myself. If I am able to do it on my own, then I should, right?

But I’m so tired. I can put on a fun-loving front some of the time, but lately it’s getting harder. If I’m honest, I don’t think I am worthy of love or companionship. Secretly, I think that I am a disappointment to my family and friends.

Getting honest about our fatigue is a first step. But however many self-help articles we read or commonsense solutions our friends offer, slowing down and resting feel wildly uncomfortable. We drive ourselves hard, it’s true, but there’s a familiar comfort in the fast pace. On some deep level, we believe that this is how life is supposed to be for us. And as a result, we keep going right up until the breaking point.

A reader at that critical juncture wrote to me: “I have had enough of living this way. I have a daughter who I hope does not turn into me. I want more for her than just going through the motions. I want her to live freely and without regrets. But how?”

When we want more for our children, it’s time to take a closer look at our younger selves. It’s time to look at their “secret sorrows” and hidden joys, to see life once more through their eyes.

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When I look back at my first dance recital, I remember a shiny sequined costume and a belly full of butterflies. For a kindergarten girl, it was pretty much heaven.

I wore a bright-blue satin top trimmed with silver sequins and a stiff tutu. My ballet shoes, tights, and gloves were white. The sequined straps and choker made my chest and back itch, but they sparkled so much that I didn’t care. The auditorium was dark, but the spotlights were bright. On stage I could see dust motes we kicked up and how the sequins from our costumes caught the light. I could hear the music and feel it in my body. Performing wasn’t as scary as I thought it would be. In fact, it was fun!

At the end of the dance, I was in the front row, kneeling and then rising along with the other girls. But instead of pushing myself up from the floor with my hands like we’d practiced, I wrapped my hands around the microphone stand and used it to pull myself up. Then I sang the last words of the song right into the microphone. That improvisation came to me without thought; it just felt right. The audience clapped for us, and in that golden moment I felt like a real ballerina, like a star.

After the show, Mom and Dad found me in the front hall of the auditorium. Mom reached me first, and I felt the soft fabric of her floral dress against my cheek as she held me in a tight hug. She handed me a little bouquet of pale-pink plastic roses, saying, “For you, my beautiful daughter.”

Flushed, I smiled up at her. In the packed hallway with the other dancers and their families, Mom smoothed my hair, tucking in a strand that had slipped from the hairspray-shellacked, heavily bobby-pinned bun she’d made hours before.

“My big girl! You were so confident up there! How did you get so grown up? Oh, we need to take a picture. Where’s the camera?” She turned to my dad.

“Right here,” he said, passing the camera to Mom and bending down to give me a quick side-hug. “Good job, Cari-Cat.” He called me Cari-Cat because we liked the way it sounded and because my fondest dream was to have a cat of my own. At Dad’s side, I felt both smaller and safer.

Since I’d learned about the solar system in school, I thought about our family members in celestial terms. If I was the earth, then Willie was the moon. He was the closest to me yet also quietly separate, in his own world. Dad was gravity, constant and steady but invisible while he was at work. And Mom was the sun, the bright, volatile fire at the center of everything.

When Mom held up the camera and said, “C’mon, sweetie, smile!” I showed as many of my teeth as I could and fought not to blink for the flash.

As I squinted away the blind spots, Mom raised her eyebrows and said, “Now really, honey, I have to ask: What on earth were you doing with the microphone? You couldn’t get up by yourself?” Her tone turned scolding, critical. “Do you want people to think you had to use the stand to help you? It was just so . . . melodramatic!” She shook her head in dismay, then softened a little. “Well, I guess you had to do it your way, huh?” Then she laughed, and Dad chuckled too.

My face burned. My stomach sank. I didn’t know what melodramatic meant, but by the way Mom said it, I knew that it was not something that I was supposed to be. My teacher had not taught me to slide my hands on the microphone stand, but I had done it anyway, and I understood from Mom’s words that it had been a bad decision.

Shame cast a pall over that bright evening; the excitement was gone and the fun was over. I had messed up, and the feeling inside of me was terrible.

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Did you ever have a moment like that, when you thought you were OK—doing well, even—and then you felt a cold bucket of water thrown over the experience? Ever stood with your family and pretended to feel fine when inside, you were drenched in shame?

It’s akin to playing a video game like Super Mario Bros. for the first time. Chances are, you start off feeling relaxed about the whole thing. Oh, this is silly, but this is fun! Look how high I can jump! You learn to operate the controls while your character stumbles and flails around, and you laugh at your own ineptitude.

But when you’re a kid and you gain even a little bit of mastery—and get a few well-timed criticisms from the authority figures in your life—then what happens? You stop goofing off. All at once, there are expectations. You have to perform. If you do well on one round and then flub the next, you’re disappointed (and perhaps so are the people around you). The game becomes both more interesting and more intense because you are invested in it. It feels good to win and even better not to lose. You fight to gather up the gold coins; you do whatever you need to do to stay alive.

You love the thought of doing well, and you dedicate yourself to that pursuit. You work hard to avoid flubs and mistakes, and when they do happen, you try your best to hide them. Gradually, you forget how it was when you started. You forget that you were only ever playing a game.

Does that feel like the story of our lives or what? We start out fumbling around, just playing and having fun. That’s our job as children. But then at some point, we get the message that life is very serious business. We are asked to be good, to say yes, to respond as the grown-ups expect. And some of us get the sense that making a mistake equals death.

We carry this attitude forward into our adult lives—we’ve got to keep going, keep hustling, make sure we never slip! Yet the irony is that while we’re running scared, both the video game universe and the real world are more generous than we think. We believe that we must enact a perfect performance, but the truth is that if we miss a step, we can choose to restart and begin again.

Anne Lamott says that “perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting every stepping stone just right, you won’t have to die.” To some people, a statement like that sounds hyperbolic. Surely no one walks around feeling that kind of pressure! But you and I know better. We know what it’s like to believe that we owe the world the Good Child.

Nobody gets through this life unscathed. All of us have had times of trouble; as the saying goes, everyone has a story that would break your heart. For some of us growing up, it was the struggle for financial survival. Some of us lived in communities so disadvantaged that perfectionism was our only way to order our worlds. I want to be clear, dear reader: from the moment I was born, I had a head start. Parents who wanted children. A nice house on a quiet, suburban street. Good public schools. White privilege. Money for dance lessons for me and early intervention therapies for Willie.

I was fortunate—there is no question about it. But still, the soundtrack of deep fear accompanied me throughout childhood. Good fortune and fear are not mutually exclusive. It has taken me decades to understand that, but it’s true. I was lucky, and I was afraid.

How can this be?

To answer that question, we need to talk about the true nature of trauma. Specifically, we need to talk about the difference between physical and psychological trauma. Physical trauma involves injury to the body, such as a broken bone. It’s medical and mostly measurable. There’s a fairly straightforward connection between cause and effect. (If you’re cut, you bleed.) Psychological trauma, on the other hand, is entirely subjective. It’s all about how a given circumstance registers for you personally. If an event was hurtful and shocking to you—if it led you to believe that it wasn’t safe for you to be yourself—then it was traumatic for you. Period. No one else gets to judge. No one else gets to tell you that it doesn’t count or that it wasn’t real. If it was scary and shocking within you, then it counts as trauma.

Two people can encounter the same external event and have very different internal experiences. For example, another little girl might have heard her mother’s words about being melodramatic during her dance recital and brushed them off or forgotten them. But I didn’t. My mother was the sun around which I orbited. I took her every word to heart, and melodramatic hurt. Whenever my mom spoke critically, I made myself a rule: I would do whatever it took so that I’d never have to hear those words again. I’d do anything to avoid the darkness I felt when the sun turned her bright beams away.

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Do you know what it’s like to orient yourself around other people’s approval, to seek it like sunshine? For those of us who were addicted to gold stars, elementary school could be a reassuring place. All we needed to do was follow the rules, and we got our fix: positive reinforcement, validation, and a sense of safety, however temporary. Good grades meant that we were not about to fall off the face of the earth.

Small wonder, then, that I was a good student. By the time I was in first grade, my worksheets always came back with “Excellent!” on the top. For me, words of praise went into the same sweet category as cupcakes and shortbread jelly cookies. They were my favorite things, worth every effort to obtain.

But one fateful day, my first grade teacher, Mrs. Summers, returned my paper with “See Me” written in red ink. Getting a “See Me” meant lining up by Mrs. Summers’s desk and waiting to talk to her privately, in front of everyone. For a girl like me, this meant adding the public shame of being corrected to the private awfulness of making a mistake.

At “See Me” time, I slunk to the back of the line. I stared down at my pink T-shirt, floral-print leggings, and Keds sneakers and tried very hard not to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: What If You Didn’t Owe Anyone?
• 1. You Don’t Owe Anyone the Good Child
• 2. You Don’t Owe Anyone Your Spiritual Allegiance
• 3. You Don’t Owe Anyone a Savior
• 4. You Don’t Owe Anyone a Brave Face
• 5. You Don’t Owe Anyone Your Forgiveness
• 6. You Don’t Owe Anyone Superhuman Strength
• 7. You Don’t Owe Anyone Your Compliance
• 8. You Don’t Owe Anyone an Explanation
• 9. You Don’t Owe Anyone Your Time and Energy
• 10. You Don’t Owe Anyone an Interaction
• Epilogue: You Don’t Owe Anyone, Period (You Are Free)
• Acknowledgments
• Notes & Works Cited