How to Grow a Backbone
“How do I grow a backbone? I tend to say yes to everything and everyone. Then I get taken advantage of and angry at myself. It happens at work a lot, not [being] compensated for things that I'm spending money on or asked to do some extra jobs that cause extra work and to lose focus on my actual work… When I spoke up most recently, I got hostility, a long and loud argument about why it's impossible. That becomes scary, i HATE confrontation and disappointing people. I can't quit, I need to be heard and understood.”
A huge number of people bring this exact set of issues into therapy (what causes us to have the experience of saying yes to everyone, having a hard time saying no, and feeling like we are giving a lot to others but not getting a lot back, and fearing confronting it). There a few ways this can come about, but one major one that is most often at the root so I can explain the usual cause and basically how to approach it, just noting there is a possibility this is not connected to your experience (you'll either resonate with it or not).
For most of us who struggle with this, the problem originates with a role that we took on early in life that we are struggling to exit from. Usually this has to do with growing up in a family where one or both parents or caregivers were not functioning well for some reason (chronic illness, addiction, mental illness etc.) to the extent that they struggled to meet our needs as children due to their difficulty understanding, tolerating or making space for our needs. They would also have tended to respond negatively when we asked for our needs to get met - either by becoming angry ("You're ungrateful", "Nothing is ever good enough for you"), or by responding with distress ("I can never do anything good enough", "I'm a failure as a parent"), by being unavailable (ignoring our requests or being unavailable to respond - drunk, in bed depressed etc.), or by being clearly preoccupied with higher level needs (such as in domestic violence situations where the child feels their needs pale in comparison, or in some cases where there is extreme poverty). It's not usually the case that the parents in these situations are bad, it's just that they are themselves struggling and not able to figure out how to respond well to their children.
As children in these situations, we take in a few ideas. One is that our needs tend to be burdensome to others (both because of how our caregivers respond negatively when we ask for things, but also because of the experience of the huge weight we feel we are carrying when exposed to our caregivers' own heavy burdens). Second is that it's not a good idea to ask for our needs to get met or to try to plead that case. Third is that we should try to be self-reliant in meeting our own needs. Lastly, that there is something about us as a person that is unacceptable to others (since children tend to believe that if we are not getting our needs met then it is due to some lack of worth in us rather than something in our caregivers' ability to offer it - consider how the first question that children ask when hearing that their parents are divorcing or separating is often something like, "what did I do wrong?").
These ideas that we take in lead to a few things as we move into adult life:
1) Because we feel that the problems we experienced were caused by a lack of self worth, we tend to pursue an endless path of trying to become good enough in the hope that if we reach acceptability in other people's eyes then we will finally meet the bar for people to begin to take care of us. That was usually our hope as a child (so we usually worked really hard to get good grades, or clean up the house, or get meals ready, or anticipate and take care of our caregivers' needs in the hope that at some point we would become worthy of love and attention).
2) Because we learned that it's dangerous or ineffective to ask for help, we do not tend to ask for our needs to get met as adults. It can get to the point of a lot of us not even knowing how to respond to questions like "What do you want?" or "What are your needs?" or "What would make you happy?" since we have worked very hard to shut down our needs due to it being too painful to experience them consistently not getting met.
3) Because we are trying so hard to become good enough to become a person of worth and so fearful of asking for our own needs to get met, we eventually run dry and become frustrated at other people for not reciprocating. By that point, we have often surrounded ourselves with people who are fairly happy taking and not giving back, and have difficulty experiencing relationships where people do offer us things since we do not feel worthy and often reject the kindness of others as a result or deny that we need anything (we worry about incurring a debt, or receiving something good feels very painful due to memories of not having received good things etc.).
The healing work is mostly about beginning to recognize that it was not our lack of worth in childhood that caused our needs to get met, but that this was more about our caregivers' inability to meet our needs. Again, not necessarily because they were bad people, but just because of their own struggles. It can help to think about if we had a child who had needs like we did when we were children, how would we want to parent that child differently, would we want to know their needs, would we feel pleasure in meeting them and why, how would we feel about that child when we connected in that way? And importantly, if we were getting it wrong, would we want our children to tell us? Then consider what it meant that our own caregivers were both unable to consistently or sufficiently experience the pleasure of meeting our needs, and also did not want to seek to understand how they were impacting us in order to make change.
Secondly the healing work is about beginning to treat ourselves as a person of worth. Consider again how we might help our own child begin to believe in themselves, discover things they love, and pursue confidence and self-worth through this exploration, and then help ourselves begin to walk that same path. Gradually find people who encourage that. Grieve the pain of what we have been through and lost in order to find a place for that in our lives.
In therapy this is considered to be codependency work - codependency is basically the experience of depending on other people for our self-worth and the connected belief that we need to sacrifice ourselves to gain love. A good book to start with is Codependent No More by Melody Beattie. Recovery from this is a painful journey, but also one of beautiful discovery and healing.
