For most people, to be told, “You’re mature for your age,” is a great compliment and it is typically meant with good intentions. While I always appreciated being considered “responsible” or “wise beyond my years”, at times, I can’t help but cringe. Whenever I hear it, I fight an urge to reply with a cheeky, “Thanks, it’s the trauma.”
The sentiment brings home the many reasons I am the way I am and highlights a substantial gap between me and my peers that was present for much of my life.
This “maturity” that many have noticed comes from a variety of different factors. For one thing, I grew up as a “glass child”, and “parentification” was one result of this. Parentification occurs when a child takes on parental responsibility for their siblings or parents, whether physically, emotionally or mentally. This could include household responsibilities that adults typically look after, or caregiving.
I grew up with a sibling with high needs that required additional attention and support. This support was not only sought from my parents, but I too had to step in. This meant that I needed to grow up very quickly and become responsible from a young age. Being reared in this environment, I learned early on that I was the one who would have to meet my own needs. I didn’t want to bring any problems my parents’ way because they already had so much on their plate.
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To everyone else I seemed to be a highly mature and even-tempered child. Other parents would express their jealousy to my parents, wishing they could have such a well-behaved and “easy” young girl. When I reached my teen years, they would say to my parents that I was an “old soul”, “wise beyond my years”, and speak of how grown up I was compared with others my age. They thought I had everything going for me, but what they didn’t realise was that I was masking to avoid adding additional burden.
It was a highlight of my strength, but meant I could rarely show my own vulnerability and so had to rely on myself for emotional support when I didn’t even fully comprehend what was happening within my own mind.
In a lot of ways, it felt like I was an adult in a child’s body because I was acting as an additional parent to my sibling and was independent, self-sufficient and helpful at an age when those characteristics shouldn’t be attributed.
This method of resilience or way of coping accelerated other habits within me that have been hard to beat. Some of these include people-pleasing and perfectionism. The intense feeling of wanting to be an easy child and please my parents continued throughout my life until pretty recently. However, it was no longer just wanting to be an easy and good daughter that raised no concerns – I strived to be the reliable friend, the confidante, the best partner, one of the top students, the hard worker and much more. I wanted everyone to like me and not see what I was working so hard to mask.
Being a perfectionist doesn’t mean I’m perfect at everything I do. Far from it; what it really means is I cannot handle making mistakes and not having control over every situation. Where others make a mistake and move on, I allow it to control me, eat into me, define me, and manifest into something larger
As a result, I put great pressure on myself to ensure I upheld the image I was trying to portray. This was a very exhausting process because it consisted of so many smaller steps and actions. For instance, my desire to want to be liked by absolutely everyone I met instilled in me an urge to make sure anyone in my presence was happy and comfortable. While this sounds like a good thing to do, and to some degree it is, I was failing to cater to my own emotional needs. I was playing a part and putting everyone else ahead of myself.
I had a significant desire and need to be loved, and feared any kind of rejection. Feeling somewhat invisible in my household growing up, I had an idea in my head that I was hard to love or not so worthy of the attention I sought out. I completely attributed my self-worth to other people – and, naturally, this was not a very sustainable model. As mentioned previously, when I was growing up, strangers had very high expectations of me.
[ Agoraphobia: I became a complete recluse, and now I don’t know who I amOpens in new window ]
I suppose receiving these kind words made me feel seen, and this manifested as a robust belief that I always had to meet these expectations no matter what. A lot of the time, when people hear the term ‘perfectionist’, they think someone is full of themselves, that they are claiming to be perfect. They think that by saying this, the person is claiming they are capable of anything and do no wrong. Overall, the term is typically viewed negatively.
Unfortunately, there is a lot of misunderstanding here. In my experience, being a perfectionist doesn’t mean I’m perfect at everything I do. In fact, far from it; what it really means is I cannot handle making mistakes and not having control over every situation. In other words, where others make a mistake and move on, I allow it to control me, eat into me, define me, and manifest into something larger.
I’ve overcome a number of mental health difficulties, from an eating disorder to self-harm and intense anxiety, but my perfectionism and people-pleasing tendencies were some of the hardest to overcome. These mental health struggles are formed from the beliefs we have about ourselves, and I now understand that the reason these two tendencies were so hard to beat was because of that and I hadn’t got to the root of my issues until very recently.
I cannot overemphasise the importance of discovering the root causes of your mental health issues. In other words, looking at those traits that have manifested into mental health disorders. From there, people suffering can really assess the beliefs behind these traits and address them to experience improved mental health and wellbeing.
If we don’t take tendencies like people-pleasing or perfectionism seriously, we never come to the realisation that our sense of worth isn’t based on other people’s approval and set ourselves free.