GOING TO THE OPPOSITE EXTREME

As a child watching your parent act in ways that scared or embarrassed you, you made a solemn promise to yourself: "I will never be like that" 🤝. What began as an attempt to break generational patterns of dysfunction became a full-blown mission of constant self-surveillance to ensure you never become like them - a pendulum swing in the opposite direction ⚖️.

While you're watching your family's problem behaviors so carefully, you miss the forest for the trees 🌲. You successfully avoid their obvious mistakes—you don't yell like they did, don't neglect like they did, don't manipulate like they did. Yet somehow, you still end up recreating the same patterns, but only in reverse: their enmeshment becomes your emotional distance, their drive for control becomes your excessive drive for independence, their frugality and risk-aversion turn into your addiction and risk-taking. Your drive not to repeat the same mistakes is itself a form of reactivity. Your fear of being toxic makes you so self-focused that you can't fully show up for others.

The cruel irony is that your frantic attempt at differentiation creates its own form of undifferentiation and disconnection from your authentic self. You've traded one problem for another: you're driving in the opposite direction along the very same road your parents traveled from 🚗—only to end up at their starting point.