Becoming Comfortable With Success

By Carla Perez, MD

Carla Perez, MD, longtime OPEN EXCHANGE lister, is known for her common sense, compassionate approach to complex issues, "self-help without the hype." Dr. Perez is a psychiatrist in private practice in San Francisco. This is excerpted from her book, Getting Off The Merry-Go-Round: You Can Live Without Compulsive Habits:

Regardless of how many successes exist in their lives, most people struggling with compulsive patterns feel themselves to be losers. You may be a successful doctor, lawyer, or Indian chief, but if you drink, eat, or spend too much or compulsively overindulge in any other area, deep down you feel as if you are nothing.

As unpleasant as this image might be, in other ways it may feel extremely safe. It has meant that, as Zorba in Nikos Kazantzakis' Zorba the Greek said, you have never dared to "cut the rope and be free." You have never really taken ultimate responsibility for your own separate existence. You have never completely moved out from your family. You have never allowed yourself to fully compete and be proud of your own uniqueness. You probably have also consciously or unconsciously felt guilty about succeeding when many others in your life were unable to. You never felt you deserved to win.

Fears of succeeding must be effectively dealt with. You will have to stay alert to all the subtle ways that you could sabotage your success and the enjoyment of it:

• Diminishing it because it hasn't been achieved perfectly and at record speed.
• Consistently and unfavorably comparing yourself to others who you feel are more successful.
• Discounting any achievement by dwelling on all that is not yet accomplished.
• Attributing all success to good luck and negating ways that you have changed and actively contributed to it.
• Staying around those who fail and becoming uncomfortable because your success has made you different from them.
• Feeling unworthy of success.

Admire and relish each victory no matter what its magnitude. You can feel proud of accomplishments that don't necessarily move mountains, get A's or result in promotions. If others can't handle your successes, that's their problem.

A college student who I worked with had always been bothered by being overweight, a problem her family harped on consistently. After a fair amount of therapy and being in a support group, Anita finally lost the weight that had plagued her and ended up looking quite stunning. When she triumphantly returned home to visit her family, they not only made no comment about her weight loss, but added insult to injury with a remark about her dressing too provocatively. Anita was hurt and very much taken aback.

When we discussed it, she was able to see her family's emotional limits and their tremendous need to control her. Thus, when Anita did something for and by herself, even when it coincided with what they claimed they wanted for her, her success was perceived by them as abandoning the family.

As distorted as this thinking may sound, many of us from dysfunctional families are all too familiar with these kinds of contradictory messages. Each of us, it seems, fills a unique place in the system that is our family. If you change yourself, you "disrupt" the balance of the family system. Although the change may be one other family members have asked for, they'll likely resist it, and try to restore the balance, however dysfunctional.

After further work in therapy, Anita came to terms with the situation, felt proud of her success and appropriately sad that her family was unable to share it with her.

It is important that you view success as being strictly for you, and not as part of acquiescing to others' expectations. This entails savoring your own triumphs and not being influenced by the applause, or lack of it, from other people.