WITHDRAWING FROM OTHERS & REALITY HAS CONSEQUENCES

On the flip side, sometimes the individual responds to threats to their self esteem by withdrawing from the world.

Withdrawing allows them to protect themselves from any additional bad news, taking an “I can’t fail if I don’t try” strategy. Despite quitting, the individual maintains their grandiose fantasies of success, retreating to these fantasies to maintain their self esteem, despite doing less and less in the real world, and becoming more and more dependent on others in the real world because of it.

This conflict between goals and behavior is often sustained by externalizing the blame for their failures: this wasn’t the right major, the right class, the right job – I’d do really well if I found the right job. Or that teacher got in my way; if they knew how to teach I could learn. The individual's expectations of others to meet their needs get higher and higher, with more anger and contempt at each disappointing failure. While the individual’s expectations of themselves, and their self esteem gets lower with each failure.

As the chasm between fantasy and reality becomes too hard to cross, the individual may get moments where reality sinks in: and they have to face the shame of what they haven’t done, haven’t become. This shame is incredibly painful and debilitating, and either leads to more avoidance behavior…or leads to despair and suicide risk.

Outsiders often react in one of two ways to individuals in these situations. Either they get (understandably) frustrated with them. Friends whisper about “one of the smartest guys I’ve met, but he just can’t get out of his own way.” Parents may call them lazy, undisciplined, ungrateful, spoiled. It’s hard to reconcile the obvious raw potential with the clear lack of achievement. Unfortunately, this reaction only serves to deepen the sense of shame, increasing avoidance behaviors and eliding the clear deficits that the individual also has. The problem is that the individual feels that achievement should be easy for them. When achievement isn’t easy, they interpret this as something wrong with the achievement or with them, and they abandon one, the other, or both. By reinforcing the message: “you’re so smart it should be easy”, we ignore the incredibly hard, painful work and tolerance of intense emotional distress required to break the shame cycle.

The other way that people tend to react is by validating the externalization of the problem. This can be through medicalization: you’re depressed, bipolar, ADHD, anxious. It’s not to say that these conditions may not be present. They may indeed be present. The problem is that this creates an external locus of change. The individual is given meds, and then lays in bed waiting for them to make him want to do the work. That heroic tsunami of motivation rarely ever comes, the work doesn’t get done, and the despair deepens.

Externalization can also be done by validating that it was, indeed, the wrong class, college, major, job. Again, this is tricky because in reality people do match better with certain subjects or careers. And it may be that a job is a bad fit for someone and contributes to their problems. But the emphasis on finding the right job to motivate work is problematic because it again places the locus of change outside the individual. The individual hops from job to job, waiting for a job to “ignite his passion.” This current push in society to “find a job you love and you’ll never have to work a day in your life” doesn’t really get it quite right. Instead I prefer the quote: “to find the work you love, you first have to fall in love with work.” Most of us fall in love to do work we are good at…that we feel mastery over. That means that to find work you may love, you first have to learn to tolerate the pain of being bad at something for long enough that you can eventually get good at it.

We call this second case “failure to launch syndrome”. The only solution for failure to launch is launching – but launching with right-sized goals, and sufficient support to tolerate failure and keep coming back for more. The only way out is to stick with something long enough that you build enough evidence that you can do it: show up consistently, tolerate necessary effort and failure, and ultimately build a sense of mastery based on real work and accomplishment.