The Trouble With Being Good at Being You

There are some things in life we become exceptionally good at without ever having a lesson.

Worrying, for example.

People-pleasing. Overthinking. Apologising for things that have absolutely nothing to do with us.

Some people can detect a change in someone’s mood from three rooms away. Others can turn a perfectly ordinary email ending in “Regards” into a full psychological investigation.

Regards?
Not kind regards?
Interesting.

And then there are the fiercely independent people who would rather spend four hours assembling an IKEA wardrobe, lose three screws, put a shelf on backwards and have a minor existential crisis than ask someone to hold the other end.

The funny thing is that nobody necessarily sat us down and taught us to be this way.

Nobody sat us down and explained how to worry about things that hadn’t happened yet, anticipate everyone’s needs or feel personally responsible for keeping the entire world running smoothly.

But somehow, we learned.

We learned through what got us attention. What earned approval. What kept the peace. What made life easier or at least a little more predictable.

Sometimes through what people said. Often through what they did. And sometimes through what happened when we didn’t behave a certain way.

We watched. We adapted. We learned.
And we got rather good at it.

So good, in fact, that somewhere along the way, the things we learned to do became the people we believed ourselves to be.

And that’s where things get interesting.

Who put you in charge of being you?

One of the questions at the heart of Integral Eye Movement Technique (IEMT) is:

How did this person learn to be this way?

I love that question.

Because when someone comes into therapy describing themselves as anxious, controlling, oversensitive, needy or incapable of saying no, there’s often an understandable temptation to focus on changing whatever they’ve identified as the problem.

But I’m usually interested in something else first.

Why did being this way make sense?

Because perhaps it made perfect sense.

Perhaps being helpful brought affection.
Perhaps getting everything right meant avoiding criticism.
Perhaps keeping everyone happy made life feel a little more predictable.
Perhaps being fiercely independent meant never having to experience the disappointment of relying on somebody who didn’t come through.

Children are rather good at noticing what works.

Which behaviours get attention. Which ones bring approval. Which ones cause trouble. Which ones make the adults around them a little easier to live with.

And they adapt.

Sometimes those adaptations are very clever.

The child who learns to read the room may become an adult with remarkable emotional awareness.
The child who learns to take responsibility may become wonderfully capable.
The child who discovers that humour can diffuse tension may become the person who can make everyone laugh when things get difficult.

None of those qualities is inherently a problem.

Quite the opposite.

But there’s a difference between having a useful skill and feeling obliged to use it every waking moment.

And that’s where the trouble can begin.

Congratulations. You’re now the responsible one.

Every family seems to have one.

The person who remembers birthdays, organises Christmas, checks everyone got home safely and somehow knows where everyone else’s passport is.

They’re dependable. Capable. Organised.
Wonderful qualities.

Until they’re exhausted, overwhelmed and quietly fantasising about moving somewhere remote where nobody knows their phone number.

Except they can’t quite let anyone else take over.

Because they’re the responsible one.
And responsible people don’t fall apart.
They don’t need rescuing.
They certainly don’t let someone else organise Christmas.
Have you seen what happens when other people organise Christmas?

So, they carry on.
And everyone else carries on letting them.

Not necessarily because anyone is selfish or unkind. Often, it’s simply because this is how the arrangement has always worked.

And the responsible person may even feel uncomfortable when somebody offers to help.

Because being needed has become familiar.
Being capable has become part of how they understand themselves.

And somewhere along the way:

“I can be responsible”
became:
“I must be responsible.”

Those two sentences might look similar.
Psychologically, they’re worlds apart.
One offers a choice.
The other sounds suspiciously like a life sentence.

When knowing better doesn’t mean doing differently

Here’s where things get interesting.

You can know exactly why you behave a certain way and still find yourself doing it.

You can understand your childhood, recognise your patterns and explain precisely why you struggle to say no.

And yet, someone asks you for a favour.

Your brain says, “Absolutely not.”
Your mouth says, “Of course! Happy to help!”

Well, that went exactly as we knew it shouldn’t.

Because understanding how we learned something doesn’t necessarily mean we’ve stopped doing it.

And this is where three questions within IEMT become particularly useful:

The first two direct our attention towards emotional and identity imprints. The third invites us to consider what IEMT calls the Patterns of Chronicity, the processes that may be keeping an unwanted difficulty going.

It’s an important distinction.
Because sometimes the problem isn’t simply what we’ve learned.
It’s what keeps us repeating it, even when we know perfectly well it’s no longer helping.

Within IEMT, structured eye movement processes are used to work with learned emotional responses and aspects of how people experience themselves. The approach doesn’t rely solely on talking through the past or understanding why something happened.

For me, what makes the model interesting is that it encourages us to look beyond the presenting difficulty and consider the learning and patterns that surround it.

Perhaps we should stop trying to fix everything

Here’s something I think is worth considering.

When someone comes into therapy with an identity they’ve learned over many years, are we always right to assume that the identity itself is the problem?

Because being responsible isn’t a disorder.
Neither is being independent.
Or sensitive.
Or ambitious.
Or someone who likes things done properly.

These characteristics may have helped someone navigate difficult circumstances. They may have brought genuine advantages. And they may still be valuable.

I don’t think therapy should necessarily be about dismantling everything someone has learned to become.

Sometimes the more interesting question is whether they have any flexibility around it.

Can the responsible person let someone else take charge?
Can the independent person accept help without feeling diminished?
Can the peacemaker disagree with someone and survive the discomfort?
Can the high achiever do something badly and still enjoy themselves?
Can someone who has spent years being the strong one occasionally admit they’re having a difficult day?

Not because they’ve become weak.
But because being strong no longer has to mean never needing anybody.

We’re not necessarily trying to replace one identity with another. We’re exploring whether someone can experience themselves in ways that previously felt unavailable.

Whether they can have more choice.
More flexibility.
More room to be human.

There’s a tendency in some conversations about personal change to talk as though everything we’ve learned needs to be unlearned. As though somewhere underneath all our adaptations is a perfect, authentic version of ourselves, patiently waiting for us to remove the psychological packaging.

I’m not entirely convinced.

Perhaps authenticity isn’t about finding the person we were before life got involved. Perhaps it’s about having the freedom to live in ways that reflect what matters to us now, rather than being governed by rules we learned a long time ago.

Keeping the competence without the relentless pressure.
The sensitivity without feeling responsible for everyone else’s emotions.
The independence without the inability to ask for help.
The ambition without the belief that our worth depends on achievement.

Because the qualities themselves may never have been the problem.

It was the rules we learned to attach to them.

I must be useful.
I must get it right.
I must never let anyone down.

And perhaps one of the most meaningful changes isn’t becoming somebody entirely different.

It’s discovering that some of those rules are negotiable.

That “I must” can become “I can.”
And eventually:
“I choose.”

What if that’s not the whole story?

We spend years becoming the people we are.
Learning what works.
Discovering what gets us approval, belonging, security or a sense of control.
Developing skills and ways of being that help us navigate the world.
And some of those adaptations are genuinely brilliant.

But life changes.
Our circumstances change.
We develop different resources, relationships and possibilities.

And sometimes the identity that made perfect sense in one chapter of our lives starts making the next chapter unnecessarily difficult.

That doesn’t mean we became the wrong person.
Or that everything we’ve learned needs to be undone.

It simply raises a rather interesting possibility.

Perhaps we can keep the parts of ourselves we value without remaining quite so obedient to the rules that created them.

Which brings me back to the IEMT question:

How did this person learn to be this way?

I think it’s a wonderful place to begin.
But perhaps there’s another question worth asking.

Now that they’ve learned to be this person, who else might they discover they can be?

Because the trouble with being good at being you isn’t that there’s anything wrong with who you’ve become.

It’s that the person you learned to be doesn’t have to be the only person you allow yourself to become.