Transcription
People often say to me, disheartened by relationship difficulties, "I am simply not relationship material." They sometimes say, "I'm broken. I am damaged. I am not fit to be with other people."
But of course, there are several underlying assumptions here. One is that there are bad relationships and good relationships. And that's quite true on the face of it. But it's important to understand that there is no such thing as a wasted relationship. Time is never wasted. Being in a relationship is a learning process, and you can learn from bad ones as you can from good ones. No one is universally adapted to all relationships. We each must strive to find an optimal or even suboptimal match. Many of us fail. Let it be clear. Many of us fail. But worse, many of us compromise.
Today I would like to discuss damaged, broken people. Now, there are two types within this group. People who are damaged and broken because they have mental health issues. For example, people with borderline personality disorder, with dependent personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, mood disorders, and so on. Obviously, they're damaged and broken by their own internal dynamics. And people who are damaged and broken because they have been exposed to people who are damaged and broken, because they have been abused, because they have been mistreated. And so these two groups seem to be mutually exclusive. There is the saying, "Hurt people hurt people." But the truth is that regardless of how we ended up being broken and damaged, all broken and damaged people share the same clinical features. And I'm going to discuss these in today's video.
My name is Sam Vaknin. I am the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited. I'm in Paris and I'm a professor of psychology. Before we proceed, if you want a paid consultation with me face-to-face, or if you want to organize a free seminar or a free lecture, I do not charge a speaker fee in Paris, please contact me: sambakin@gmail.com. I'll place the address in the description.
How do we know if someone is damaged or broken or scarred for life or temporarily? Because sometimes it's just kind of a rebound effect. It's just a temporary phase, a transient phase in the wake of a horrible relationship or a trauma of some kind or even a natural disaster. So there are transient brokenness. There's transient brokenness and there's permanent brokenness. But they both are indistinguishable clinically speaking. And so how do we know? We observe, like everything else in psychology. We observe habits. Everyday habits, behaviors, reactions reveal a lot about the past and they tell us if someone is dysfunctional, if someone is broken, someone is damaged behind seemingly normal behaviors. They're very often unhealed emotional wounds from difficult experiences. And so today I'm going to discuss these patterns that you should and can observe if you wish to make up your mind in a due diligence process whether you want to be with someone or not. Whether you want to develop a relationship with someone, or relationship of any kind, as a friend, as a co-worker, as an investor, as a romantic intimate partner, as whatever the case may be.
And so the first issue I think which is very critical is trust. Trust is a key differentiator. A key difference between people who are who have it all together, people who who are well put together, people who are healthy and normal, and people who have been impacted by abuse and trauma. So first, let me say that it is normal and even I would say advisable to be cautious, to ask questions, to delve deeper, to investigate, and in some cases, interrogate. These, these are all, all healthy behaviors. Um, but if these kinds of behaviors persist indefinitely, if you question everyone's motives all the time, if you are constantly suspicious, constant permanent paranoid ideation, if you are hypervigilant, then something's wrong. It means that your brain is aroused. There's arousal, what we call hyperarousal. It's on the con. It's constantly defensive. It's working overtime.
People who have been betrayed, they hurt. The pain is indescribable because betrayal is perceived as a total rejection of everything the betrayed person is and could have been. A rejection not only of a relationship but a rejection of the person in the relationship. And the mind creates protective membranes and protective filters to prevent similar pain in the future. And so these kind of people, children who have experienced broken substantial promises, or inconsistent care, neglect, abandonment, classical abuse, parentifying, instrumentalizing children who have been traumatized, they often develop this type of defensive posture, a pervasive mistrust and distrust of other people. It's a prime indicator that something is seriously wrong. If you constantly analyze other people's words, you strive for the hidden texts, you blatantly and repeatedly ignore what you are being told in favor of some conspiracy theory as to what is behind the scenes, the ulterior motives, to read between the lines, and so on and so forth. Um, that's an indication of of some kind of problem.
Uh, the thing is that mistrust and distrust is a positive adaptation in certain circumstances. When you are in a relationship with someone who is an abuser, someone who gaslights you, someone who manipulates you, it's it pays dividends to be to walk on eggshells, to be cautious, to be careful, to be suspicious, and even to be paranoid. And then it becomes a habit. There's habituation. And then this kind of habit blocks the possibility of genuine, authentic, real, loving, compassionate connections. Recognizing this pattern of mistrust and distrust is crucial in the treatment of broken and damaged people.
The next indicator is emotional absentism. Emotional, um, I would say distance. When you are too casual about relationships with other people, when you maintain space, when you never share any kind of meaningful information about yourself, including information that is utterly innocuous, not dangerous. And when this is not random but it is a pattern, and even to some extent you are aware that you are doing this, when you have become a master at being present without being available. Keeping all conversations on the surface, superficial, light, and when things get too personal or too intimate, redirecting the exchange or fleeing, running away. There is an invisible but impermeable boundary around such people, as if they are peering at us through a glass darkly. It's very protective against potential hurt on the one hand, but on the other hand, it prevents any meaningful bonding or attachment or even meaningful discourse, meaningful conversation. These kind of people are flimsy. I would say they're entertaining. They can be fun. People enjoy their company, but they're fleeting. They are here here now and gone tomorrow. And no one is the worse off of that. These people are clearly anxious. When relationships deepen, when intimacy rears its head, when things are taken beyond a certain point, these people become absolutely terrified, and the anxiety is overpowering and creates a flight response. They keep people who are damaged and broken sometimes keep other people at arm's length because they have learned to associate closeness and togetherness with pain. The pattern becomes so familiar that these walls, this solitary confinement, feels like safety, not like isolation. And that's the second clinical feature.
Of course, there's the classic abandonment anxiety. The clinical term is separation insecurity. People who are damaged and broken have difficulties to maintain what we call object constancy, the ability to trust other people, to be there, to remain present, to not run away, to not abandon, to not reject. And another group of damaged and broken people have difficulty to maintain introject constancy. They are very bad at internalizing the presence and the features and the characteristics of other people, creating an internal representation of these people so that they never feel alone. In some mental health disorders, such as borderline personality disorder, there is a failure in the formation of introjects. The borderline is incapable of creating avatars or representations or handles or snapshots or introjects of other people in her mind. And so when they're not there physically, they're gone out of sight, out of mind. And this creates a lot of anxiety and sometimes even rage and aggression. So the brain, in this case, has been conditioned by repeated neglect, rejection, and abandonment. There's a sinking feeling that if someone doesn't text back right away, or if someone is on the phone for too long, or if someone is on a trip and it gets extended by one day, they're about to vanish altogether, never to be seen again. This is a form of overanalyzing or overthinking. The brain goes into a loop. It expects the disappearance of the counterparty. It expects other people to just vanish. And the brain scans constantly for signs that someone is pulling away, someone is about to break up, someone is about to go, never to return. And this is this is vigilance. This hypervigilance stems from significant losses or from relationships in the past that were highly unpredictable, including relationships with intermittent reinforcement as the main feature of the relationship. The fear manifests in a variety of ways. Like everything else in human psychology, there are numerous guises and disguises of the very same thing. Some broken and damaged people check in excessively. Some scarred people, people scarred by previous relationships, need constant reassurance, and they become clinging and needy. Others end relationships, abandon and reject preemptively. "I'm going to abandon you before you abandon me." The body keeps the score. The nervous system remembers the intolerable pain, the excruciating pain of having been left, having been so utterly and totally rejected. The conscious mind knows the situation is different. The conscious mind is not in control. The limbic system is, if you wish. The protective mechanism is there to protect the individual, to spare the individual from repeating these past hurts because at the time they were perceived as life-threatening and critical.
Another interesting sign, um, in the case of people who have been damaged or hurt in previous relationships, is what we call autoplastic defenses. It's a tendency to assume blame and responsibility and to hold oneself in charge of other people's happiness and well-being. This is setting yourself, this is setting yourself up for failure. If you're in charge of other people's happiness and well-being, then you will constantly fail, guaranteed. And so there's a stream of apologies. "Sorry, I shouldn't have done it. Forgive me." Time and again, hundreds of times a day. In the majority of cases, an apology is not called for. It is a bit of a grandiose defense, a bit of a narcissistic defense because there is this assumption, an internal hidden subtle unconscious assumption that you are in control. There is such a terror, such a fear of losing control that the individual assumes imaginary control over other people. And then when things go all right, when they go bad, he feels or she feels guilty because they're in charge. They're in control. They're the masters. They should have gotten it right. Apologizing for everything. When you reflexively say sorry for anything, for taking up space, for having entered the room, for having needs, for expressing emotions or opinions, anything, "Sorry, sorry, sorry. I apologize. Forgive me." And this habit develops when people learn have learned that preventing conflict means taking blame. Whether the blame is deserved or not, conflict aversion is there. So by apologizing, there is a preemption of conflict. We see, for example, children who are raised in unpredictable environments. They develop this kind of response. They develop autoplastic defenses. Constant apologizing becomes a preemptive strike against potential anger or potential rejection. When you apologize, automatically it's a strong indicator that you are terrified. You're afraid. You're anxious about what might happen if you were not to apologize. Ask yourself, was there actually a mistake? Was there anything I could have done? And if the answer is no, then why are you trying to minimize yourself? Why are you trying to make yourself microscopically small? So small that you're no longer noticeable and therefore cannot serve the target of anyone's eye or wrath or anger or rage. This kind of awareness can break the cycle of unnecessary guilt, can roll back autoplastic defenses and rebuild a sense of deservingness. It's a bit of work, but all the problems that I'm mentioning are actually treatable, and the prognosis is pretty good. So, I advise you to attend therapy to cope with all these issues.
The next one is a classic. If you're unable to set boundaries on the one hand, you're wide open to invasion, intrusion, penetration, takeover, hostile or not. If you're this kind of person who is unable to put your foot down and insist on what's good for you and punish, penalize or reject what's bad for you. If you have no boundaries, that's a sign of brokenness. And on the other hand, if your boundaries are too rigid, and I would even say punitive and sadistic, that's a sign of brokenness. The middle ground in terms of boundaries, the middle ground is very important. Saying yes when you actually feel like saying no is not about being nice. It's not about placating other people. It's not even about averting conflict. It's a survival strategy. Something you have learned when you have felt that setting limits could be absolutely dangerous and life-threatening. And so you keep saying yes. Your calendar fills with commitments that drain you completely. Your own needs remain unaddressed. You neglect important things and people in your life because you are absolutely, absolutely horrified by the idea of saying no. You catastrophize the negative response. You think that saying no would bring on a cataclysm, a disaster, and a punishment the likes of which has never been heard of. This pattern emerges when early boundaries or boundaries in early life when not respected or were even perceived as aggressive, when you were not allowed to separate from, for example, your parental figures. When you were not allowed to become an individual, when you were emotionally blackmailed into remaining merged and fused in a symbiosis with your parents. When approval seemed to be conditioned on compliance, and love was a mere derivative of servitude. The temporary relief of avoiding conflicts masks the long-term exhaustion of living for others. This is a big part of what is known as people-pleasing. People-pleasers struggle with the belief that their value comes from what they do for other people rather than from who they are. It's the service that renders you lovable, not the servant, not you. You need to break this pattern. Start small. Say no to minor things and grow from there.
All this is part of a larger pattern of conflict avoidance. Conflict avoidance emanates from conflict aversion. Aversion is the affective part. It's simply a feeling that conflict is an issue of survival. That any conflict can and will escalate to the point that it will be out of control and will absolutely consume everything and everyone, you included. Conflict is perceived, is perceived as life-threatening, and it needs to be avoided at any cost. When tensions rise, you change the subject. You're not only being polite. You're not only being nice or kind or diplomatic. You, you're afraid. Your body, pay attention to your body at such moments where your body is reacting. Whenever there's disagreement, whenever there's criticism, whenever you have a different opinion, um, at that point your body is reacting as if you're faced with a tiger, with some kind of danger. It triggers an instinct to escape the situation or at least to change it or reframe it by capitulating, submissiveness. Many people who avoid conflicts grew up in environments where disagreements escalated unpredictably to the point of physical violence, very often. Whereas peacekeeping became their responsibility. They were in charge of keeping the peace. They were in charge of keeping the peace by disappearing altogether, by subjugating themselves, by becoming submissive, by not being. Even healthy debate can trigger the same physiological stress response as these genuine threats in early childhood or in bad relationships, in abusive relationships, toxic relationships. And so become self-aware. Ask yourself, "I've just said that I agree with this. I'm agreeing externally. But do I really agree with this? Am I also agreeing internally?" If there is a discrepancy, a dissonance between external agreement and internal disagreement, you're trying to avoid conflict. You are completely shutting down in conversations which are less than pleasant, conversations which implies some kind of tension or stress or disagreement. It's a protective response. It's a flight response or a freeze response, and or a fawn response. It's a protective response that makes perfect sense given previous history, relationships in which expressing who you are, anything your opinions or emotions was penalized. Whenever you exposed yourself as independent, agentic, personally autonomous, you were punished. It was a punitive environment which denuded you and denied you your core identity and the actionable parts of your core identity: decision-making, choice-making, having family, having friends, traveling, working. So isolation comes hand in hand with conflict aversion. You need to learn to distinguish safe disagreements from danger. There are, of course, situations where a disagreement could and does escalate. For example, if you find yourself in prison, don't make a habit of it. But otherwise, most disagreements are pretty safe, and you need not have this fight-or-flight response. You need not have this hyperarousal, adrenaline, cortisol, stress hormones. You don't need to have any of this. It's a sign that the self-regulatory systems in your body are malfunctioning.
Similarly, averting conflict, avoiding conflict goes hand in hand with deflecting praise, brushing off compliments. That's not a sign of modesty. When the compliments are warranted, when you deserve, when you're deserving of the compliments, and you absolutely refuse to accept the compliments, you minimize them. You mock them, you mock them, you reframe them so that they appear to be erroneous somehow. When you constantly deflect praise, when you constantly change the evaluation of you from positive to negative, this is not modesty. It is your brain rejecting information that contradicts your self-image as a bad object. There's a cluster of voices inside you that keeps informing you how unworthy you are, what a loser and a failure you are. And someone praises your work, it conflicts with a bad object. And you need, you have been taught, you have been conditioned by your parental figures, role models, teachers, God knows who, peers even, you have been conditioned to uphold the bad object, to validate the bad object, to justify the bad object. And so praise and compliments challenge the bad, the bad object. Immediately you point out flaws or redirect the credit elsewhere. You know, "I didn't do much. He did it." And this automatic deflection develops when childhood accomplishments were dismissed or when receiving positive attention felt unsafe because sometimes it was immediately followed with negative attention, by negative attention. So, um, intermittent reinforcement. The nervous system has learned to protect you from the vulnerability of being seen at all. It was preferable to not be seen, to not be noticed, than to be the recipient of attention, sometimes positive and sometimes negative. The discomfort you feel when you are praised is real. Your body even tenses. Your face flushes. Your heart rate goes up. Your blood pressure. Hormones are secreted. These are real. It's a real bodily reaction. However, there are very simple techniques to counter this. Say thank you without diminishing yourself. Try, try it. Retrain yourself.
All these issues, I repeat, can be resolved, usually in therapy, and the prognosis is excellent. And they, they all involve what I just called the internal bad object. It used to be known early on in psychoanalysis as the primitive superego. And colloquially, people use the phrase "harsh inner critic." By the way, this is Paris. Like 99% of the time, there are sirens, you name it, fire, ambulances. I mean, the whole city is like on the verge of falling apart. Okay. Harsh inner critic. That's a phrase currently in use. It's a voice, or actually a constellation of voices inside your head. They're known as introjects. And these voices hold you to impossible standards, set you up for failure. Only these voices would expect this. Anyone else you ask would tell you that these standards are stupidly high, like they're unattainable. But these voices insist. These are not just high expectations. It's the internalized voice of critical voices of critical figures from your past. And sometimes your defense against these voices is to become a perfectionist because perfectionism has two benefits. Number one, you never finish the job because it's never perfect. Imperfection guarantees lack of completion. And as long as you delay the completion of the work, you can't be subject to criticism and denigration and ridicule. And the second advantage of perfectionism, should a task be completed finally in the distant future, imaginary future, you will have been rendered by the completion of the task, you've been rendered a perfect being. Perfect beings are never exposed to criticism and ridicule. They meet these high standards of the internalized bad object, the internalized disparaging and critical voices. So perfectionism is a protection against external criticism that has been internalized. External criticism that had become embedded in your mind and now is operating from within rather than from without. If you criticize yourself first, if you are harsh on yourself, if you criticize yourself the hardest, no one else's judgment is going to hurt you. You're going to outdo them all. You're going to be your own biggest critic. This inner critic believes that it is keeping you safe, that it is success, keeping you ensuring your success. It's like a tough love voice. So sit down, sit back and listen. Just listen to the way you talk to yourself, to your self-talk. Would you speak to someone the way you're talking to yourself? Would you, would you apply the same standards, the same implacability, the same harshness? Would you be that critical? Is that the way you communicate with other people? Probably not. The critic developed to help you survive difficult circumstances. But if you want to heal and if you want to silence the critic and replace it with a loving, self-loving, authentic voice, you need to recognize the existence and the speech acts of the harsh inner critic and silence it because it's a liar. The harsh inner critic is sadistic. It's an enemy. It wants you dead emotionally and otherwise. It's not a friend. And it lies. It does not hesitate to lie, to reframe reality, to invent all kinds of things. It tries to impact your reality testing, tries to divorce you from reality.
For some people, all this is too much, and they develop what we call emotional numbness, as I was telling you, emotional numbness or reduced affect display. When you feel disconnected from your emotions, disconnected from any emotions, you're not just chilling. It's not just, you know, I'm impervious, I'm impermeable, I'm invulnerable, I couldn't care less. That is not the truth. Emotional numbing is a sophisticated defense mechanism of the brain. When emotions are felt to be overwhelming, they become too dangerous to experience, let alone express. And the mind learns to disconnect this module and to render you detached from threatening waves, threatening affective waves. So emotion dysregulation actually precedes emotional numbing, and emotional numbing precedes the reduced expression of emotions facially and body language. And this is known as reduced affect display. All these are common in people who are broken and damaged. People who have been seriously impacted by relationships which have shattered them, taken away from them their core identity and their self-confidence and self-esteem and sense of self-worth and ability to regulate everything: emotions, moods. And so this protective response usually comes about when expressing emotions has been punished. Like every time you express emotions, it was followed by some kind of punishment: banishment, silent treatment, physical punishment, psychological torture, verbal abuse, you name it. Whenever you express emotions, expressing emotions is being true to yourself. Whenever you've been true to yourself, whenever you sustained your identity, whenever you shoved it, rubbed it in people's faces, so to speak, they came back at you. They took you down. They trampled on you. So you've learned to associate emotions and their expression, affects with punishment, with rejection, with being overwhelmed, and with the absence of any kind of support. The brain essentially created a circuit breaker that trips before emotions become too intense. Numbness is experienced as being flat, feeling flat, having trouble identifying even how you feel or if you're feeling at all. Experiencing emotions physically, tension, fatigue, without the corresponding feelings. It's like your body does the emoting, not your mind. And this protective barrier did serve you once. Everything in this list used to be adaptive. Everything in this list guaranteed your survival to this very minute. You're alive because you have been using these things. But it's time to let go. The danger has passed. Your tormentors and abusers and torturers are long gone. You need to reacquire life. You need to embrace life where once you have rejected it. You need to develop a core identity. And you need to be you without fear and bias.
And of course, this is a tall order. And some people say, "Rather than be me, I'm going to do me." Or in other words, rather than be, I'm going to do. Action displaces being. Like if I'm active, if I'm busy, I don't have time to think. I don't have time to be hurt. I don't have time to experience pain, and I don't have time to be overwhelmed and disregulated by emotions and labile moods. None of this. I have a packed schedule. I have an endless to-do list. I am overwhelmed not by emotions, but I'm overwhelmed by my schedule and itineraries. This is not productivity. This is an escape route from uncomfortable inner internal processes. Things are happening inside you that are noisy in a way. And to drown the internal noise, you create external noise. It's a drama. Actually, it's a drama survival strategy or coping strategy. Constant busyness is a form of drama, and it is accentuated by and incorporates drama. Like when you see very busy people, workaholics or chief executive officers or I don't know what, they're very dramatic about their business. Their busyness constitutes their being. Take away the business, and nothing is left. And that's precisely the idea behind being busy, that it should, it should displace existence. Stillness feels threatening. Emotions feel healing. These people self-medicate with action. They have an actionable existence. This pattern emerges when difficult emotions became overwhelming without adequate support or internal coping tools, maybe too early in life, maybe at a moment at a time of vulnerability or sickness or something. And so these emotions drowned the individual. The brain learned that activity provides relief from internal distress. Ironically, we advise people with depressive disorders, including major depression, to be active because it's therapeutic. So ask yourself, how do you respond to unscheduled time, leisure, sudden leisure, even canceled plans? You had a plan, it's canceled. Do you feel anxious when your time is empty? When you are confronted with this void into which you might resonate finally? Do you feel terrified, terrorized when you are faced with an empty afternoon? This awareness isn't about judging your busy life or your schedule or your work or your job. But you need to understand what drives your addiction to being busy. What forces you to invent out of whole cloth completely unnecessary activities and actions and commitments and investments and so on. What is it that drives you to fill your life to the brim so that you're no longer able to experience it fully and truly? You need to begin to gradually build tolerance for being rather than doing, for not doing. And of course, the risk when you give up on busyness is that you do have these empty hours, and in these empty hours, you may introspect and self-reflect and become self-aware. You may suddenly be overwhelmed or flooded with emotions. Your mood might go up and down. And worse comes the worst of all is that someone may share these leisure moments with you and show you affection and compassion and, God forbid, intimacy and love. You see, the opposite of intimacy is busyness. The opposite of love is indifference. The opposite of intimacy is busyness. When you are busy, you don't have time to be intimate, which is my big beef with social media. They keep you so busy that you're unable to have a life. You're unable to be intimate. You don't have time to be intimate with anyone. But that's an aside.
So the broken, damaged people perceive affection, love, compassion, and empathy as threats, not as promises, not as good things, but as menacing, ominous developments. Pulling away when someone shows genuine care or interest in you isn't about being independent. Insecure attachment style is not healthy. It's not about, you know, being a lone wolf, self-sufficient, the hallowed malbor. No, it's not about this. It's a protective system. It is an indication of weakness, not of strength. It is activated. It's this protective system is in action because there is a perceived vulnerability in you. This reflexive distancing, it happens unconsciously. And sometimes you ask yourself, "Why do my relationships feel so uncomfortable? Why when, on the face of it, intimacy is growing, love is displayed, exhibited, I am engulfed by compassion and caring and empathy? It's palpable, and it makes me really, really ill. It is really uncomfortable. Why is that?" You see, we often say that damaged, broken, hurt people find it difficult to love. But I think it's the opposite. They find it difficult to accept love. They find it difficult to be loved. And that's why they don't love in advance. They preemptively don't love because they cannot be loved in return. When you're struggling with accepting emotions, accepting affection, accepting other people's compassion and caring for you, care for you. When you experience love in a way which is inconsistent, conditional, entangled with pain and hurt and harm, harmful kind of self-mutilation, then something is very wrong with you. Your brain categorizes even completely healthy and commendable and recommended attachments as potentially dangerous. And again, your body is signaling to you. Your body talks to you constantly and ferociously, and I would say vigorously. You notice physical discomfort when there are tender moments, when there's intimacy, when there's real opening up and vulnerability. You feel acutely uncomfortable. You even feel something really bad is going to happen. You catastrophize these moments and you find yourself creating conflicts when the relationships deepen, introducing drama, undermining it somehow. And when you recognize this pattern, it would help you to explain why part of you craves connection, craves intimacy, while another part seems determined to undermine it. You are self-sabotaging. It's a form of self-defeating behavior. And in the long run, it's self-destructive.
I mentioned perfectionism as a reaction to impossibly high standards embedded in the bad object. But it's also a protection. When you exhaust yourself in order to meet these impossibly internalized high standards, it's not just because you're being ambitious. It's a defense, as I said, against criticism and rejection. But it takes you also takes you out of the game. You are too exhausted, too depleted to do anything else, to think anything else, to feel anything else, and to interact with anyone else. Perfectionism leads to compulsive addictive behaviors such as workaholism. The flawless presentation, the spotless home, the stellar performance, they not only allow you to feel worthy, to regulate your sense of self-worth via narcissistic supply, but they also occupy you. They also pervade you and permeate you and monopolize you and colonize you so that, God forbid, you don't have the minute necessary to be loved or to be vulnerable or to be intimate. And so perfectionism is a double-edged sword because it fulfills multiple psychological needs. And it develops when love or acceptance seem conditional on performance or achievement. You become performative, a performative being because you've learned that the only way to secure empathy and attention and compassion and love and caring and so on, starting in early childhood, was to perform, to meet the standards, to comply with expectations, expressed implicit and explicit expectations. Achievements, attainments, accomplishments were the currency, the coinage of the realm. You wanted emotions, you traded them for accomplishments. Children who received attention primarily for accomplishments learned that perfection equals safety. The need to be seen is overriding. And in many households, in many families, you're not seen unless you're doing something successfully. May I add, perfectionism whispers in your ear, tells you, "You will finally be enough when everything is just right." But you're never there. The finish line keeps moving for reasons that I've explained earlier. And you need to break this cycle. You need to recognize that you have inherent value by virtue of existing. There's never been anyone like you before. There will never be anyone like you ever in the whole history of the universe. You need to, you need to realize how unique you are. Not in the grandiose narcissistic sense, in the factual biological sense. You are special because you are you. And then, taking off from there, you will realize that your value is independent of your personal biography. Your value is independent of your accomplishments and achievements and your contacts and your access and your money and your power. And all these are not relevant to your value as a human being. They are relevant to your value as a social being. I'm not denying this. But they are not relevant to your value as a human being. The minute you internalize this insight, a great calm will prevail. Your anxiety will have dwindled to nothing, and you will be open to introduce other people into your life, recognizing that first and foremost, we're all human, and this is where our value lies.