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Never Good Enough

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Never Good Enough

by David A. Crenshaw, Ph.D.

One of the surest paths to unhappiness is to adopt a life goal to please someone who is impossible to please. You are guaranteed to fail. No matter what you do, how hard you try; you will be faced once again with the stinging judgment that you are never good enough. Why do people keep trying? Why can’t they accept that this simply is a person whose expectations are impossible to meet? Easier said than done, especially if it is a parent whose approval you desperately crave or a romantic partner you don’t want to lose. When our sense of worth or value as a person is hinged on the affirming response of another person we are vulnerable to even the slightest hint of disapproval or rejection. I find it helpful in this context to consider the distinction made by Dr. Albert Ellis, who developed a school of therapy called Rational Emotive Therapy. Ellis in his extensive writings and presentations has emphasized the critical difference between preference and necessity. It would be nice and most of us would prefer to receive approval from the important people in our lives, but we get into emotional trouble if we make it a necessity. If we make it an imperative we are inviting heartache and misery into our life, because if the person we are trying to please is a perfectionist who invariably focuses on even minor flaws than he/she will never be pleased.

I discussed this issue with the late, eminent psychoanalyst, Walter Bonime, M.D., who I was privileged to study with and consult during the decade of the 1980’s and he remarked how sad it is to see people well into their adult lives who still go back for visits with their family secretly hoping that this time will be different. They delude themselves into believing that this time they may finally gain the approval they have always longed for from a mother or a father or older sibling, only to come away once again “empty handed.” The highly critical, perfectionistic one is often highly self-critical as well. The standard of perfection applies to everyone including oneself. According to the way the perfectionist thinks, when you do something right—that is simply what is expected. Therefore you are due no credit. If, however, you make a mistake, even a minor one—that tends to be viewed as monumental. Utilizing these standards it is impossible to succeed. It is a set-up, a no-win proposition.

The only solution is to stop working so hard to obtain the approval of someone who does not know how to give it. Dr. Bonime used the analogy of diligently preparing and cooking a Thanksgiving feast for someone and then when you put the plate in front of the person they get up and dump it in the garbage. What would you do—go back in the kitchen and start again? I don’t think so. But in a sense that’s what people do when they keep going back trying to win the approval of the not-to-be pleased one.

In my work, I often find the perfectionist parent to have suffered the same fate as he or she now imposes on her/his daughter or son. In childhood, that parent was not able to please someone who was very important to him or her no matter how hard she/he tried. How sad that this pattern can go on for multiple generations with such heartbreaking results.

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