The performance report

“This business of loving ourselves no matter what doesn’t appeal to me. Is that bad?”

My client, a late twenty-something, stares at me. She is in therapy because she wants to reduce her anxiety and the habits it evokes in her—mainly smoking.

I take a deep breath, aware that a part of me has become distressed—a caretaking part. 

“Tell me why you think it might be bad,” I reply.

“Well that’s what we’re taught, right? But I like focusing on my achievements.”

I can certainly understand that. She has plenty of achievements of which to be proud. I work with a few clients who share her values and I have learned something important about them. They are not in therapy to be dismantled. They really don’t want to contemplate a world in which their worth exists independently of what they produce. I respect that. My role is not to show up with my values and impose them on theirs — however well intentioned that might be. Carl Rogers called this unconditional positive regard and I am a big believer in this.

And also…

(I love the phrase, “and also.” One of my favorite supervisors said it a lot.)

There’s something else that I hold in the room with her. I don't impose it, but I don’t put it down either. I’ve sat with enough people — people who were, by every external measure, succeeding — to know how quickly the performance-based inner world can destabilize. Not because performance is bad or ambition is pathological. But because a self built entirely on output is, by its nature, contingent. It depends on the next result, the next review, the next achievement and requires constant renewal.

And the life events that can interrupt that renewal — illness, failure, loss, aging, the simple and inevitable arrival of a season in which the results don't come — are not rare. They are universal.

In IFS terms, I wonder about the parts beneath my client’s performance. The manager parts, working tirelessly to keep everything running smoothly, to keep the metrics looking good, to keep whatever lies underneath safely out of view. They are capable and impressive, and have served her extraordinarily well. And I, as her therapist, am also curious about the parts they protect.

I think about what it means to hold two things at once — genuine respect for her values, and a quiet knowing that those values, unchallenged and alone, may not be enough to hold her when the ground shifts. 

The other piece of this puzzle is that she is familiar with being dissatisfied with herself. She doesn’t like the way it feels, but that dislike isn’t enough to cause change. It’s only when she develops a familiarity with self-acceptance that she may feel safe examining that dissatisfaction.

If this resonates with you, I invite you to ask yourself the question — who are you when the performance isn't there?

Not what do you do? Or how do you recover? But who are you?

It helps to sit with the question rather than answer it immediately, because the immediate answer is rarely the interesting one. If the question lands with some unease, that discomfort is worth paying attention to. Not because something is wrong with you, but because it may be pointing to a part of you that has never been given permission to exist.

That part deserves to be known. Jung would call this your shadow, and that only by shining a light on it can it be healed and know that it belongs. This creates a lovely kind of inner-connectedness which, in my experience, does not diminish ambition. It deepens it.

So, going back to this client—I don’t know if she’ll want to embark on this particular journey right now. All I know is that we’re both here, and for now that is enough!