Good enough

In the introduction to his book, Why You Get Sick and How You Get Well, Arthur Janov, author of the famous The Primal Scream, distilled decades of research and clinical practice: “Over the last thirty years I have learned a great deal about humans and what drives them. As trite as it may seem, what I have found is a single yet complex emotion called love. Not the romantic love of novels, but a funda­mental love – the love of a parent for a child.” I’ve seen this, too, all along, and still the fact struck me in a new way recently in a morning session with a 44-year-old client.

He was an extreme workaholic, over-achieving and over-perfecting at all moments yet never feeling he was good enough, never respecting himself as much as other people did. In his memory, his father was his hero. But after a few months, we discovered the opposite. Nostalgic love and pain turned to anger. From our observation that “not good enough” is not an emotion or a fact but rather a mental attribution formed by his specific pain, we realized that his father had made him “not good enough” by defining “good” as hard work and assiduous struggle. I had him imagine that he was at the absolute pinnacle of expertise, wisdom and conscientiousness in his job and career. What, in that place, did he feel? “I’m not good enough! Daddy, can’t I be good enough? For you?” Following, he said: “Maybe I was never shown love in the way I needed it.”

 

We may “believe” we’re good, that we have value, but we will never feel right without that earliest love, which must be “the way I needed it.” When a parent ordains a stan­dard of performance, he is saying “You are not enough.” He is severing the bond that should be there at the beginning, the loving bond that says “You are good just to be.” He, a heroic father, has cast away his child, and has no idea of what he has done.