Why Being the Most Reliable Person Is Ruining You

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

College football is back, so Hilton called on me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Ooh, that smells lucky.

Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake up call at 555 in 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

SPEAKER_2 (0:30)

This episode is brought to you by Nordstrom.

For 125 years, Nordstrom has been part of your story. The stylist who found the perfect outfit for your big interview. The first pair of walking shoes for your one-year-old. The tomato soup you shared with your sister at the cafe. These are the moments that make Nordstrom, Nordstrom.

SPEAKER_1 (0:49)

Big or small, we're here for all of it.

SPEAKER_2 (0:51)

Celebrating 125 years with new moments still ahead. Discover it all in Nordstrom stores and at nordstrom.com.

Alok Kanojia (1:03)

Hey chat, welcome to the Healthy GamerGG podcast. I'm Dr. Ollo Kanoja, but you can call me Dr. K.

I'm a psychiatrist, gamer, and co-founder of Healthy Gamer.

On this podcast, we explore mental health and life in the digital age, breaking down big ideas to help you better understand yourself and the world around you. So let's dive right in.

This is not about perfectionism. This is not about guilt. This is not about boundary setting. This is about the fundamental programming, the rules of the game that are in your mind, through which you interpret your interactions with other people. The schema dictates what emotions arise. And so if you try to solve the emotion or you try to solve perfectionism, or you try to set boundaries, you're not targeting the root. As a psychiatrist, I see this incredibly central pattern in so many of the women and many of the men that I've worked with, that they are the default caregiver. They are the responsible one. They're surrounded by people who would like fall apart if they stopped doing the supporting role. And this leads to a lot of draining, first of all, but it also leads to a lot of frustration because these people feel bound by their circumstances. And as the resentment builds up, as the anger builds up, what they'll sometimes do is like swing the pendulum. So they'll be like, okay, I need to be more independent. I need to stop letting everybody rely on me. I need to look out for myself. I need to advocate for myself. So they sort of swing into this hyper independence. And they may even do that for a while.

But as they do that, some kind of weird circumstance or like gravitational force pulls them back into that old environment. And that gravitational force could be feeling guilty, right? They're like, oh my God, I feel like such a terrible person. And now all these people are struggling. It could be being vulnerable to guilt tripping, right? People call you and they're like, oh my God, you left. And like, now I can't do anything. Then you kind of feel bad. It could even be anger towards yourself and other people. And sometimes even when you try to pull away, you may find yourself stumbling into additional relationships where people take advantage of you, where like you meet people at work and like, they're like, they need help. So you kind of step up, right? There's this big attitude of sort of stepping up. And so the tricky thing about this is if you're someone who's like chronically depleted and you're someone who is surrounded by people who don't have their shit together and you're the one that they rely on, the real problem with this is that you may look at this and you may think like, okay, I need to set better boundaries.

Fair enough, right? So like I need to set firm boundaries. But as you try to set firm boundaries, like it works for some people, but something gets in the way. This kind of feels a little bit like whack-a-mole, and it seems like nothing is sufficient. And this problem of whack-a-mole not working is something that I saw years ago, right? So I started making content on the Internet and it's like, okay, I teach this. Here's how to deal with perfectionism. Here's how to emotionally regulate. But for some people, they don't see outcomes. Literally why I built the coaching program. Because sometimes what happens is you need someone else to help you understand the specific nature and kind of like intersection of different problems that you have. And our coaches get great outcomes, do a really, really, really good job. And so if you're someone for whom whack-a-mole doesn't seem to be working, or you've watched a lot of content on the Internet and you're not getting the progress that you're really looking for, consider working with one of our coaches. So what do you do about this?