Whose Version of You Are You?
Recall the messages you got from people in your early life—family, teachers, coaches, and other significant people. Originally, these messages came from the outside, but over time they become our inner voices.
Consider several types of messages: those that you experienced as pressures to succeed, those that communicated doubts, and finally, those that came through as basic support regardless of your success or failure. Jane, the younger sister of a brilliant older brother, never forgot the day she came home from school carrying a sixth-grade report card with all As, and her mother exclaimed with surprise, “Wouldn’t it be funny if you turned out to be the smart one?” Sometimes the pressuring or doubting messages are communicated without words through body language, tone of voice, or facial expressions, like a mother’s raised eyebrow when you announced you had landed a part in the school play, or the ugly family fights that erupted every time you had a special occasion to celebrate.
You might find it helpful to write down each message you can remember in these categories and identify the person it came from. If the message was an indirect one, what was communicated between the lines? Someone may have given you contradictory messages and may appear in more than one category.
Below are a few examples of remembered messages we’ve culled from our Procrastination Workshops.
Pressures to Succeed
Mother: I know you’ll be a success! You can do anything!
Father: If it’s not done right, it’s not worth doing.
Grandfather: Coming in first is all that counts.
Father: A mistake is an indication of a disorganized mind.
Mother: You have to make a lot of money to help support this family.
Mother: You’re such a good kid. What would I do without you?
Sister: You’re so pretty; you’ll never spend a Saturday night alone.
Teacher: You’re the smartest student I’ve ever had.
Doubts about Your Success
Father: I’ll help you with your math homework, because you’ll never get it.
Mother: You’re just a good-for-nothing loafer!
Father: What do you want to go to college for?
Mother: If you’d listened to me in the first place, you wouldn’t be in this mess.
Father: I was expecting too much from you. I should have known better.
Father: I’m your father. I know what’s best for you.
Mother: Well, at least you’re cute.
Coach: This kid is nothing but a whiner.
Basic Support
Grandfather: Whatever happens, we’re always behind you.
Grandmother: I love you no matter what you do.
Father: That’s not what I would do, but I hope it works out for you.
Mother: You should live your life the way you want to.
Father: Don’t worry, everybody makes mistakes. It’s only human.
Aunt: You really tried your best. Good for you!
Brother: No matter what, I’ve got your back.
Neighbor: I love being with you. Come visit me anytime.
Look at your list. Think about how these messages have affected your life. Is this how you talk to yourself now? Have these outer voices become your inner voices? How do they contribute to your procrastination? How can you respond to unhelpful messages? See if you can answer with something positive or hopeful. For example, when that inner voice says, “If it’s not done right, it’s not worth doing!” you might respond, “That’s not true. It’s worth getting started.” Or if that inner voice says, “Be careful! You’re not ready!” you might stand up for yourself by saying, “It’s all right if I don’t know exactly what I’m doing. I can give it a try anyway.” This new conversation has both psychological and biological benefits. When you consciously shift from a negative to a more positive emotional focus, you are disrupting ingrained brain patterns and creating new ones.7
FAMILY THEMES
Over the years, we have heard procrastinators describe five primary family themes that go along with the fears that underlie procrastination: pressuring, doubting, controlling, clinging, and distancing. All five themes exist to some degree in every family. In your family, the one that somehow bred a procrastinator, what was the particular mixture of these themes? One theme may stand out as primary, or you may have received a confusing array of mixed messages. Some families, for example, hold all their members up against a high standard of achievement, while other families are primarily concerned with demonstrations of family loyalty. By contemplating the interplay of these five themes in your own family, you may see a fuller picture of the development of your self-esteem and of your tendency to procrastinate.
The Pressuring Theme
The pressuring theme is apparent in families that are highly achievement-oriented. There may be a long lineage of accomplishment, or perhaps the parents are unsatisfied with their own lives and place their hopes for great achievement onto the children. In pressuring families, top-notch performance is the only thing that’s appreciated. Strengths don’t matter unless they’re perfect; limitations are viewed as unacceptable. Mistakes are evidence of failure and therefore a source of shame: “You’re either first or you’re nothing!” The pressure can be a heavy burden that can lead to maladaptive perfectionism and procrastination, if you’re not supposed to be anything less than #1. In a study of college students, maladaptive perfectionism was associated with high parental expectations and parental criticism, and the students were overly concerned with living up to the expectations of others.8
Being average is not tolerated, although this message can be conveyed in the guise of support: “You’re so smart. You can do anything you want!” Hearing inordinate and indiscriminate praise can leave a child feeling fraudulent, confused, and ultimately inadequate. Or, an average performance may be blamed on external factors, not on you, conveying the idea that if not for outside interferences, your performance would have been top-notch. It’s as if your true ability can’t stand on its own but must be falsely embellished to be good enough.
Siblings play a role in pressuring families, too. Having a “perfect” sibling can drive you to try to be even more perfect (what’s more perfect than perfect?), or maybe you were the one the family counted on to make up for the failings of the other kids. A transfer student from junior college who was in danger of flunking out of the university tearfully insisted that he couldn’t fail, because his other siblings were a mess, and he was the only child left in the family who could make his parents proud.
Pressures to succeed can extend well beyond the immediate family. Rico, an intelligent Chicano man, was the first person from his small California farming community to graduate from college. Everyone in the town proudly followed his academic progress through graduate school. When Rico went home for vacations, he felt that many people expected him to represent not only their community but all Chicanos. Rico experienced their praise as an honor but also as a responsibility—one he was not sure he could live up to. He procrastinated for years on his doctoral thesis, feeling it was never good enough.
However the pressure was conveyed in your family, the focus was probably on what you did rather than on who you were. If your acceptance in your family has been tied to achieving greatness, it may seem safer to procrastinate and never risk falling short after you’ve done your best. You may not realize that most people will accept your normal human limitations more than you are accustomed to expect.
The Doubting Theme
When the doubting theme is prominent in a family, the communication is, “You don’t have what it takes.” Doubts may be conveyed directly—“What are you so proud of? It’s only a baseball game”—or indirectly, through lack of interest. Encouragement may come only when the child does things that interest the parent, so that the child doesn’t develop confidence in his own passions. Parents who have unsuccessful or chaotic lives may convey the idea that their children should not expect their own live
s to be any better. When parents feel threatened by their child’s progress, they may express criticisms that make the child doubt not his parents but himself.
Children may be given the message that there are some things they just can’t do. Perhaps you are compared to a sibling who performs well, implying that you can’t measure up. An older brother or sister may resent being shown up by a younger sibling who is in fact better at some things, and the younger one defers by lacking confidence, procrastinating, and limiting achievement. Or you might get the message that because of your gender some things are off-limits to you (“Girls aren’t good at math”), so you just don’t try.
Children who are heavily exposed to these doubting messages are likely to believe them and act accordingly, retreating from new challenges or anything that feels like a test, whether it’s batting practice or homework. Their automatic reaction is to feel apprehensive and think, “I can’t do this.” Even when they do take the initiative, they may give up as soon as the least difficulty is encountered, reinforcing those old doubts.
Another way procrastinators respond to their doubting families is by rebelling, taking on the attitude, “I’ll show them how wrong they are!” They push themselves hard, determined to succeed in spite of the doubts, but this determination can lead them straight into the trap of perfectionism, which as we’ve seen can lead to procrastination.
Whether you have retreated or taken a defiant stance, if you have internalized self-doubt, you may lose heart when you are faced with a challenge. Procrastination appears to be a safe course of action, because it protects you from testing what you fear to be the awful truth: you can’t do it.
Procrastinators who come from families that continually expressed doubt tend to assume that any failure, big or small, means that all those doubts are true. What they have lost sight of is that one failure, or two, or even a hundred for that matter, does not make a person bad, unlovable, or incapable forever.
The Controlling Theme
The controlling theme comes through in efforts to take over and direct a child’s life. A parent may make all decisions for the child—what to do, what to wear, how to act, whom to befriend—and give “advice” that the child is expected to follow without question. Parents are often unaware of being controlling, feeling instead that they are protecting their children or using their wisdom to prevent a child from making mistakes. Some parents feel they have the right to be in control. They set the rules, call the shots, and are clear about the “shoulds” in life. You should always eat everything on your plate, whether you like it or not. You should want to visit your grandparents every week. Every child should learn to play the piano. A child on the receiving end of unending advice and directives develops the feeling that he or she has no right to an independent self. Sometimes the control is harsh. A parent may explode with anger, and while the anger may have little to do with the child’s actions and more to do with what kind of day the parent is having, the child absorbs the anger just the same. Verbal or physical expressions of anger undermine a child’s confidence in himself and in others. When the world has in fact been a dangerous place, direct rebellion is too risky, and procrastination can be a way to rebel while staying under the radar.
If rules are changed capriciously, or if rewards and punishments are doled out inconsistently, the child gets the idea that parents can change the rules whenever they want. Too frightened to protest directly, confused by inconsistencies, the child may slow down and do chores or homework at a snail’s pace and become skeptical that consistent effort will reap steady rewards.
When someone else is always directing your life, you may find relief in procrastination. By delaying and refusing to do things, you can exasperate a controlling or demanding parent and attempt to weaken their hold over you. Although in the long run procrastination may not have been in your best interests, this passive resistance was a relatively safe way to fight back at a time when direct, open rebellion was too dangerous. Procrastination may even have helped you preserve some sense of independence, which was more important than grades or praise. Sometimes procrastination is a strategy for psychic survival.
The Clinging Theme
Clinging families discourage family members from creating lives of their own and instead promote dependency and enmeshment. Parents become not just a source of support and encouragement for their children but a lifeline assumed to be necessary for the child’s survival, as if the children need to be helped, protected, and taken care of into adulthood. Children who receive so much help may never discover what they can do for themselves or develop faith in their own capacities. So they put off not only challenges but also activities that would require them to be on their own, like getting a driver’s license, leaving a relationship, experimenting with some new activity that is not of interest to others in the family, perhaps even voicing a differing opinion. Some families operate like a single organism with many heads, everyone connected and interdependent. Having interests that don’t involve the family may be seen as betrayal. Making independent judgments, moving away, having different religious or political views—these steps toward separateness are not encouraged. The message is: you can’t think on your own, and you can’t survive without us.
A clinging theme may also be manifested in the expectation that a child take care of other family members. Explicitly or implicitly, the message is, “I need you; don’t leave me.” A parent may be ill, depressed, or emotionally needy and turns to the child for support and reassurance. Of course we all want to help family members in need. The problem occurs when the child takes over as the adult in a role reversal with the parent, managing the household, looking after siblings, mediating disagreements, or functioning as a quasi spouse. The child feels so responsible for the family that her own interests are sacrificed. She might not go out with friends or join after-school activities; she might postpone doing homework in order to attend to family matters. Children from clinging families may feel too needed to be able to leave the family, and if they do manage to separate, they continue to have deep feelings of guilt.
Procrastination may be used to keep you clinging to your family, as you avoid activities that could create a wedge. Or you may use procrastination to aid in the struggle for some sense of autonomy, an attempt to create distance between yourself and other people, avoiding entanglements. If the experience of being close has meant being smothered, leaned on, or isolated from the rest of the world, you may rely on procrastination to avoid attachments.
The Distancing Theme
The distancing theme is evident in families in which the members are unable to develop emotional closeness, physical affection, attentive interest, or protective comfort. Whether or not they give the appearance of being a “close” family, each person lives within a separate world. Feelings are rarely expressed or even alluded to; upsets are played down, if acknowledged at all. They don’t know much about each other’s emotional lives, and they don’t ask for or offer help.
Parents may go on with their adult lives almost as if they have no children, sending the message, “Go away, don’t bother me,” sometimes in words, sometimes in behavior. Think of a father who works all the time or one who watches TV every night, ignoring everyone else in the house.
Some emotionally distant parents are not able to empathize with a child’s experience, so that the child can feel isolated even in the company of the family. The child is expected to solve problems alone; no one is there to offer help with homework, to demonstrate how to approach writing a term paper, or prepare for a sports tournament. When in trouble, the child is expected to manage frustrations and disappointments by himself. Sometimes this training lays the groundwork for procrastination. In later life, the painful feeling of loneliness may interfere with a person’s effectiveness, as working alone can elicit a feeling of emptiness. If no one has expressed interest in a child’s thoughts and opinions, he may be reluctant in later life to express his ideas—who will care? So writing projects and other inde
pendent projects may be avoided through procrastination.
In an attempt to spark a connection with a distant parent, some children try to make themselves so delightful, interesting, and appealing that their parents can’t resist being drawn to them. “If I just make myself better, then they’re bound to be interested in me.” “Better” can mean anything: more intelligent, more attractive, more self-reliant, more athletic, more dignified. “Better” is defined by the child’s understanding of what the family values. But we’ve seen the relationship between perfectionism and procrastination: the more you expect of yourself, the more frightening it is to discover whether you can actually get what you want. When the purpose of being perfect is to make yourself appealing enough to be worth someone’s interest, the gamble is especially risky. With a background of distancing, people can seek out the intimate connections they’ve missed, or they can perpetuate the distance in relationships, using procrastination to keep people at bay.
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