Would They Still Love You If You Stopped Doing Everything? | (#113) Beyond Success: Psychology & Philosophy for Achievers, with David Tian, Ph.D.

Welcome to the Beyond Success Podcast: Psychology and Philosophy for Achievers on the Bigger Questions Behind What You’re Building, and I’m your host, David Tian.

Consider this familiar situation. You’ve taken care of business. You’ve taken care of all of your obligations and responsibilities. You’ve done what you said you would. Maybe you’ve paid for whatever needed to be paid for. You’ve made all the necessary arrangements. Or maybe you helped someone through a problem and they should be done by now, and you ought to be able to relax now, right? Except someone is still unhappy.

Maybe your partner seems disappointed or your mother now sounds lonely, or your adult children don’t know what to do with their lives next, and before you’ve even thought about whether there’s anything you should be doing, you’re already trying to fix it. Your mind is already focused on how to fix things, how to solve this problem, how to make everyone happy and feel taken care of. [00:57.2]

You may be so used to being in that role of the fixer, the rescuer, the problem solver for your family or your loved ones, or those who you’re used to taking care of that there isn’t even a question of whether you should take care of this. Of course, you should be the one taking care of this, and there may be a perfectly good rational reason to help them. But notice how quickly their feelings of distress lead in your mind to a judgment about you and your worth.

For example, if you see that they’re struggling, it means to you that you haven’t done enough. Or if they’re disappointed or disappointed with you, it means in your mind that you have somehow let them down, and if you’ve actually succeeded and they don’t need your help anymore, maybe you have discovered that it doesn’t feel quite as much of a relief as you thought it would. It doesn’t give you quite as much peace or calm as you were hoping. [01:56.6]

In this episode, I’ll reveal what it takes to actually give the people that you love and feel responsible for true independence and self-agency, and it’s also a requirement for you to experience being truly loved, especially when you aren’t solving a problem for somebody, rescuing them or fixing them, or providing something for them, and if you don’t understand what I’m covering in this episode, even a life full of people can actually feel very lonely to you.

So, right off the bat, I want to set to rest a myth, a misconception, and that is this idea that loving someone makes you responsible for ensuring they’re always alright, they’re always feeling good. Another adult can be unhappy and unhappy with you, while you are, in fact, treating them well. When you’ve taken that to heart, here’s another one—another adult could become less dependent on you while actually loving you more. [03:00.0]

Now, on the face of it, these two statements may sound obvious, but if you are an achiever and you are used to taking a provider role for your loved ones, you might notice that there’s a major difficulty coming up when someone you care about is upset, and upset especially with you, and it feels like every impulse you have is telling you that you need to do something about it, that it’s your job or your responsibility to fix this.

Many achievers have what I call a provider part. This provider part learned early on that being useful is fundamental to his self-worth. That being useful then makes you worthy of connection or love, or attention or approval. By the provider part, I mean the part of you that looks after people, anticipates what they’ll need, and tries to make sure that things get done to take care of them. [03:53.5]

Now, first of all, there is a great deal to appreciate about this provider part or parts. The part of you that provides may have helped you through years or decades when other people genuinely depended on you. We don’t need to deny any of that in order to ask whether the provider has taken on more than it can possibly deliver, and I mean “possibly” in terms of logical possibility. In other words, it’s going to be impossible for the provider to ultimately deliver what he’s aiming at.

The problem is that the provider sees providing as the way that you establish that you deserve love when being useful through providing becomes the basis of your deservedness for love. Obviously, this doesn’t mean that you should never help anyone. Obviously, you can help people, and that’s great. This is virtuous and you should feel good when you’re helping someone. That’s just ordinary, but it shouldn’t feel like it’s always your responsibility or obligation. It is instead voluntary, something that you do voluntarily. [05:01.2]

So, if you can feel secure in a relationship only when you’re being useful, then this kind of toxic usefulness has ended up becoming a condition that you believe you must keep meeting in order to keep being worthy of love or connection—and this applies to family principals, the patriarchs and matriarchs of their family. It applies to many parents in relation to now their adult children.

It applies even in a dating context when, let’s say, as an example, when you were younger and you were used to caretaking mother or father’s feelings, making sure that they’re happy and feeling that it is your responsibility to make sure that they’re okay emotionally. Then as you grow up into dating relationships, that same person brings that same dynamic into their dating relationships, into their marriages, and caretaking their partner’s feelings by taking responsibility for how that partner feels. [05:56.0]

All of these situations have this in common—it’s a person who seeks love or connection or appreciation by continually rescuing others. Now, the insidious part is that even when the provider is successful, he ends up failing.

Why? Let me explain. At first, the provider solves the problem, and for a temporary time, this gives him relief. “Ah, I’ve done my job. I am now reinforcing my worth, my self-worth in this relationship or in this family, or maybe in the company.” Then, of course, someone else will need him, and he’ll jump in and know exactly what to do, or he’ll figure it out. He’ll be on it and fix the situation or that person and rescue the situation and solve the problem. Then for a while again, he will feel certain of his value.

But then, when there’s a long stretch of no one needing anything from him, when there are no problems and he can step back, it will actually be quite unnerving, destabilizing, and it will feel frightening for him and he will be unconsciously looking out for problems to solve so that he can feel useful and, therefore, of worth, worthy and enough again, and he’ll be doing this even when there’s no good reason to keep jumping in and intervening. [07:12.7]

Now, his motives can be mixed. He can care deeply about his family and also unconsciously rely on their dependence on him in order for him to feel secure in the relationship or in the family system. Acknowledging the latter does not, of course, erase the former. He does care deeply about his family and have this toxic relationship to being needed, to being useful, and to relying on their dependents in order for him to feel secure.

So, here’s a litmus test question, and it’s not perfect. In some cases where you still need to understand what I’m covering in this episode, it may not land, but in many cases it does, and here’s the question: When someone that you care about doesn’t need whatever you’re offering, can you still enjoy being with that person without feeling anxious, or do you start looking for some problem that you can solve for that person, another reason that they should keep you around? [08:13.3]

So, healthy providing is one thing, but toxic providing is emotional caretaking. Emotional caretaking begins when you take over another adult’s responsibility for their own thoughts, feelings, and behavior. Let me give you an example so you can understand this better. Imagine that your child is now grown up to be an adult. This child is now in their 20s, and this child, this adult child, is anxious about getting and choosing a job, and they share this with you.

So, you listen. You ask them what matters most to them. You help them think through the process. You share whatever you can think of that’s useful from your own experience to them, but your adult child at the end of this conversation still feels uncertain. Lots of uncertainty and anxiety. [09:00.4]

This doesn’t mean that your conversation with your child failed. A difficult choice remains difficult even after a good, thought-provoking conversation that led them through a lot of important reflection, but if you have been used to taking on the provider role and emotionally caretaking, their sense of uncertainty and unease will keep bothering you. You will feel in some way that you have failed, that you haven’t done enough, that you have to keep fixing.

So, maybe you start calling people that you know. Maybe you start networking and looking for openings for your child. You research options that they haven’t asked you to research, and before long, you’re more involved in getting this settled than your adult child is, and they sit back and you do a lot more work.

The key distinction here is who is responsible. You can help them out of the goodness of your heart voluntarily because you want to, without taking responsibility for them so your adult child has to think for himself. He’s got to deal with his own emotions. He still has to decide, act, and live with whatever his decisions are. [10:10.8]

This dynamic can show up with an intimate partner or your parent, or an extended family member. Let’s take the example of a parent’s loneliness. Your parent’s loneliness may deserve your attention and practical help if you want to, out of the goodness of your own heart, but if you keep interpreting any remaining loneliness in your parent as meaning that you have failed as a dutiful child, then there is no amount of attention that can finally establish that you are enough for your parent, because you have taken from your parent the responsibility that is rightfully theirs.

The more that you take responsibility for something that they need to be responsible for, their own thoughts, feelings, and actions, the more you do that, the less capable and experienced in practice they will be in taking responsibility for themselves. [11:05.6]

At first, you may think, It must be wonderful to not have to take any responsibility for myself and have other people take responsibility for me, but that is the position of an infant, and as an adult, having the agency of an infant is actually a kind of hell. It’s painful. It’s a constant feeling of helplessness. It’s like a mental jail. It’s like having your mental, emotional arms and legs cut off and being dependent on another person to do even the most basic things for you.

If you can’t take responsibility for your own emotions, or if you aren’t experienced or skilled and practiced at taking responsibility for your emotions and your thoughts and actions, you will never be able to experience lasting happiness or fulfillment, or calm or peace. [11:52.7]

So, when you’re tempted to swoop in and rescue this person, this other adult, or when you notice you might be on the lookout for some problem that you can then swoop in and fix, pause and ask what your intervention is actually doing for each person. Does it help them exercise their own judgment better or does it take over something that they could actually manage given time and support and practice? How much of your urgency comes from your own difficulty tolerating how the other person feels?

Just because you can fix it doesn’t mean you should. Being able to fix something doesn’t, in and of itself, tell you whether taking over is wise. Maybe you’re quicker at it. Maybe you do do it better, but if you always do it for them, when do they get to become someone who can do it for themselves?

An easy example to illustrate this is something I learned the hard way as a dad. When your child is learning to tie his own shoelaces, it can take a long time for him to get his shoes on the right way, and you might be rushing out the door or needing to make a deadline or something. [13:01.1]

When there’s real urgency, you don’t always have this luxury, but as much as you can, you want to let the child struggle through putting on his own clothes, struggle through putting his shoes on, and that might take a lot longer and need a lot more patience than you want, but this is the requirement to allow the space and the time for your child to learn to do it himself. Otherwise, he’ll always need the teacher or you or someone else to tie his own shoelaces.

Now, an example of learning how to walk, or learning how to put on your own clothes or tie your own shoelaces, it’s pretty darn obvious, but the same dynamic of taking too much responsibility for someone, such that it deprives them of their rightful responsibility for themselves, leaving them thereby dependent and helpless and constantly frustrated, leading to a feeling in them of being powerless,and this is even more true for other adults, including your adult children. The provider’s blind spot is boundaries. This is what we’ve been articulating over the past few minutes. [14:07.5]

Sometimes, the real problem isn’t more effort or more motivation. It’s knowing the right direction. A lot of people listening to this podcast are capable and driven. Things still look fine on paper, but life still feels strangely flat. When that happens, more advice usually isn’t the answer. Clarity is.

I’ve put together a short assessment that takes about two minutes. It’s simply a way to see which area deserves your attention most right now, whether that’s relationships, decision-making, or how pressure is being handled day to day. Based on your responses, you’ll be sent a short set of master classes related to that area.

If that sounds useful, you can find it at DTPhD.com/quiz. That’s “dtphd.com/quiz.”

Healthy boundaries make responsibility much clearer. Healthy boundaries happen when you take responsibility for your own thoughts, feelings, and behavior, and you do not take responsibility for another adult’s feelings, thoughts, and behavior. [15:07.6]

Obviously, we can influence each other. We can care for each other. We make commitments to each other, but we still remain two separate, independent people. That’s healthy. Again, if you want to help someone, then by all means, please do it. That’s great. Sometimes other people are facing more than they can manage and they need substantial help, and if you want to help them, then that can be a fine thing to do. If they ask for your help, then you can choose to decide whether you want to help or not, but in those cases, you are not obligated or responsible for that person such that they are no longer responsible for themselves. [15:45.3]

Now, a common objection to healthy boundaries put in this way is that “Surely, what I do affects how someone else feels,” and the answer is, obviously, of course, it does. If you lie to your partner and they feel hurt, simply telling them to “Take responsibility for your own feelings” is obviously an evasion. You are responsible for the lie that you told and for what you do to repair the harm. You’re responsible for what you do in this case. [16:16.2]

But if you make a reasonable decision and someone else just dislikes your decision or dislikes you, their disappointment in you doesn’t, on its own, prove that you have somehow wronged them and are responsible for their feelings. You are responsible for your conduct. Did you break a promise? Did you neglect a commitment that you said you would make? Did you make a reasonable choice that maybe this other adult just wishes that you hadn’t made?

Healthy boundaries make room for virtue, for moral goodness, because when you do something out of kindness or compassion when it is not an obligation or duty or responsibility, then you have actually exercised your free choice to do this, the right thing, or this good thing, whereas if you did it only because it’s your duty or obligation, it actually undermines the moral merit in the act. [17:12.1]

Imagine you do all these nice things for your wife on her special day, and when she finally meets you, she says, “Wow, this is amazing! Why did you do all of this? This is incredible. I feel so loved and happy. Why did you do all this and go through all this trouble?” and you said, “It’s my duty.” How loved would she feel versus if you say, “Because I love you, and because it gives me so much joy to see you happy”? Good acts done voluntarily when you don’t have to do them will always trump those done out of mere duty.

Now, I keep saying adult because there are actual dependencies. For example, a young child needs help managing their feelings and meeting basic needs. There’s a lot of things they don’t know and haven’t done before, and your job as the parent is to help them through that. Another adult who is facing illness or disability or crisis may need extensive care and has contracted you to deliver that aid. [18:09.7]

So, I’m actually not talking about those situations. This is about other adults, especially your adult children, who have now grown into their own responsibility for themselves and for their own lives—and let’s pause here and focus on that example a bit more. You, as a parent, may want your adult child to become independent, but also fear what happens when they do.

A loving parent can sincerely want their child to grow up into a capable, independent adult. That parent wants them to use their judgment to make important decisions and to handle their problems, but then that adult child makes an important decision without consulting Dad and Dad feels hurt. Maybe the decision they made is different from how Dad would have done it. [18:58.5]

Now, let’s pause on this variation of the dynamic here. This is actually a very common inner conflict in people who are used to taking the provider role. The growing independence of their adult children fulfills something that the parent has wanted for them all along, but the growing independence also takes away this familiar way of being and of knowing where he belongs and of sussing out his worth.

So, the parent may unconsciously respond to this growing independence by finding fault with their adult child’s decision or jumping in and offering more advice to steer them in a different direction, or continually reminding them of everything that the parent has done for them.

Now your adult child ends up facing an almost impossible expectation: on the one hand, to become fully independent as Dad has always wanted, but keep needing Dad enough that he doesn’t feel excluded, and learn to make your own decisions, but don’t make any decisions that would be different from how Dad would have made them. [20:08.4]

So, now your adult child is in a bind. You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t, and it’s very difficult to be grateful when it seems like you’ve got to surrender your own judgment and then play along as if you are fully independent. That just creates resentment in your adult child.

So, high-achieving provider, if you need someone to remain dependent on you so that you can feel secure, needed, and worthy, then their growth will sometimes, maybe often, feel threatening, and you might end up interrupting the very struggle or adversity that they need to face and go through themselves that would then make them more capable—and then you feel frustrated, right? You’re left frustrated that they still need so much help. [20:56.6]

So, here are the litmus test questions for you, high-achieving provider:

Are you willing to support their development when it changes your role?

Can you take pleasure in something going well for them, even when you weren’t responsible for it, and even when it may be something that you wouldn’t have done or that you might disagree with?

Can they refuse your help without having to comfort you afterwards?

These questions are not meant as accusations. They’re merely intended to show what the provider in you needs help with. Your provider parts need another, more effective way to experience belonging and worth, besides remaining indispensable and needing to be always useful. The hardest boundary for you as a high-achieving provider may be in allowing your own fear to remain unresolved for a while and taking full responsibility for your own feelings of uncertainty, fear, and anxiety. [22:00.0]

You can understand everything we’ve covered so far and still end up taking too much responsibility the next time someone that you feel responsible for becomes upset, because in that moment, you don’t feel like someone that is applying some principle you learned in a podcast. Instead, you feel like you’re a bad parent, right? Or a selfish partner or maybe an ungrateful child to a loving, powerful parent.

When you feel all of this coming up again, pause and take a moment to ask yourself this question: “If they could now manage this without me, how would I feel about that, truly, honestly?” Your answers may reveal both a legitimate concern for some negative consequence, but also perhaps a fear or worry, or concern about your own worth. So, taking responsibility for your own feelings becomes very practical here. [23:01.3]

You will notice the urge to rescue, to swoop in and fix it. Before you act on it, first consider whether help is truly needed and what kind of help is truly needed, and whether you want to do it or whether you only feel obligated to do it. If you notice that taking over or taking responsibility for them would end up being unhelpful, you can allow the discomfort in you to sit there and notice it, and not immediately act on it, not immediately make this other person’s life into your pet project.

Their freedom to struggle through their own adversity and your freedom to stop rescuing them are actually two sides of the same coin. They get to practice handling their adversity and you get to discover whether you can remain connected while feeling still uncertain about your own worth or usefulness. [23:58.0]

Notice that this does not feel good for either party, right? You’re not supposed to enjoy every minute of this in order to grow from it, so expect it to be difficult. Going through it, practicing it, getting more experience with it, sitting with it longer, more often is a necessary part of the process of growth. Don’t rob yourself or these other adults that you care about of that gift.

Lastly, lasting love requires freedom. Each person needs the ability to choose, to commit, to respond without being controlled by the other person. Love can’t develop in a mature relationship if one person must always hide disagreement or remain dependent on the other in order to allow the other person to feel secure. [24:48.7]

So, actually, being needed can’t tell you whether you are actually loved. If someone relies on what you give them, you know that what you give them matters to them, and if you’re smart, you should still wonder whether they really love you, whether they enjoy you intrinsically for you, whether they care about you for you, or whether they would choose to spend their free time with you without needing some favor from you—and doing more for them or offering them more value cannot, in itself, answer that question. [25:22.3]

Being a provider, providing, can still be essential part of your life and your identity, but it cannot determine your worth, whether you are worthy or enough for love or connection, or affection. You might notice how exhausted your provider parts are. Providing becomes exhausting when, on top of all of the provision, it must also prove your worthiness for connection and love.

Emotional caretaking extends that task to their feelings and to decisions that you can’t actually and should not be controlling. Healthy boundaries, then let you fulfill your responsibilities while allowing other adults to exercise theirs. [26:09.4]

Once you take all of that to heart and practice healthy boundaries, you might notice that the parts of you that are the provider might need help facing what all of this brings up. This will highlight for you where you need to grow in order for you to experience another level or higher level or more connection and love, without having to continually feel like you need to earn it.

I went through this journey myself, noticing I had so many fixer parts, rescuer parts, provider parts in me, of me, when it came to the dating context and entering into intimate relationships and trying to create long-term mature relationships out of it. Every time, it would sabotage things.

This doesn’t mean that it was always my fault, but my provider dynamic definitely played into the toxicity—and it’s a trap because you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t. In the end, it will always sabotage relationships. [27:08.6]

So, I needed to go through the process of understanding my own provider, rescuer, fixer parts, how they came to be from early childhood, what the early conditions were for how they arose and what they believed their job was and what they were doing for me.

Of course, this might sound weird to you as I’m externalizing my own parts, talking about them as if they are not me, but of course, they are a part of me—and helping those parts of me or me come to a new understanding of my worth, what it takes for me to be worthy of love and connection, and feeling that I am enough just as I am for love and connection, then dramatically altered and transformed how I am in relationship and completely changed my relationships. [27:56.0]

Now, notice what happens if you don’t take to heart and understand what we’ve covered in this episode. You can spend years or decades, or the rest of your life, arranging other people’s lives while actually postponing your own. They can become accustomed to handing all of the important decisions back to you and being dependent on you, and being frustrated with that, on both sides, both parties.

Despite everything you’ve given, you may still lie awake at night wondering whether anyone would stick around and love you and stay if you stopped being so useful.

Now, if you do take to heart everything we’ve covered here and start to go through that process of having your provider parts grow through this, and let go of their burdens of needing to be useful in order to be worthy of love, you can enjoy your adult children’s growing confidence without needing to intervene or take credit for every decision, without the anxiety that’s in the background.

You can disagree with your intimate partner without needing to treat that disagreement as a threat to your worthiness or to your place in their life or in the relationship. [29:04.7]

You can have a difficult day and let someone else look after you without you feeling guilt that you need to make it up—and when you do provide, you can give truly, freely, voluntarily, from the bottom of your heart, because you care about that person and believe the help is worthwhile, without neurotically needing to scratch that itch to reassure yourself that you are worthy, and this will allow your you to belong even on the days when you feel like you have nothing to offer.

Thanks so much for listening. If this has helped you in any way, please share it with anyone else that you think could benefit from it. If you liked it, hit a like or give it a good rating on whatever platform you’re listening to this on. I look forward to welcoming you to the next episode. Until then, David Tian, signing out. [29:51.0]