The Power of Approval in your Life

04/30/2013

Human beings are pack animals. We are mammals just like wolves and deer, and we need each other to survive. Children of human beings have a much longer period of vulnerability after birth when they are helpless and completely dependent on others for survival. As a result, we learn to turn to others to meet our needs from an early age. Human parents have the power of life and death over infants. Human infants cannot use their bodies or their minds to ensure their survival. They can’t feed themselves, put on warmer clothing, or find someone besides their parents to protect them from the elements if their parents don’t do the job. Infants don’t even own the “territory” of their own bodies. They have no personal power or protection from the world except what their caretakers give them. The only survival technique or personal power that infants have comes through affecting the behavior of others. As children grow, they become more skilled at managing both their bodies and their minds. They learn to walk, and open refrigerator doors. They learn to change their clothes and run to a parent for a hug. They see themselves as more powerful than before, so they begin to test the results of saying ‘no’ to their caregivers. If parents teach their children that the children sometimes have good reasons to say ‘no’, and that saying ‘no’ is sometimes acceptable to parents, the children emerge from childhood feeling like they own themselves. The children learn that they have rights that others recognize. However, it isn’t the fact that a child can feed himself that allows a child to feel comfortable about taking food in the house. Children believe they own themselves as a result of the parents’ permission to do things. Children learn rapidly that although they can open a refrigerator door, and get food out, they have to have permission. Children learn that they don’t own what is in the refrigerator. They didn’t buy the food, or stock the refrigerator, and they don’t have a right to make decisions about snacks or dinnertime. Children can have the practical skills to achieve their goals, for example, to get food by opening a cupboard or a can or a refrigerator. But they also learn that they have to get approval to do so. Children learn at an early age that when they do things their parents don’t like, they don’t get their parents’ approval. Children need that approval to survive, and without it they feel powerless and vulnerable. Parents’ power to control children is overwhelming: A parent can hurt the child, ignore the child, abandon the child, and punish the child in an exquisite variety of ways. A parent can be abusive, neglectful, and exploitive when raising a child, and the parent will rarely be caught by the authorities. As much as children may know that they can control their body to go to the refrigerator and take out food, they also know that they are not in control of their parents and they are not in control of their parents’ approval. Adults who have been abused as children continue to suffer as adults from the things they learned during their childhood. During their childhood, they didn’t have the opportunity to leave their parents or exchange them for non-abusive parents, or at least they didn’t think they did. Abused children are forced to put up with abuse, so in some ways they get used to it. They believe that abuse is terrible, but they may equally believe that there is something worse than abuse, and that is abandonment. No matter how terrible their parents were, they still saw their parents as standing between the children and death. Abused children believe that if their parents abandon them, they wouldn’t be able to survive. And they may not have been wrong! To them, the approval of others is a life-or-death affair.

When you were a child, you felt powerless and vulnerable if your parents were mad at you. Your parents controlled you with their approval or disapproval long after they no longer controlled your body. Children know that they don’t own themselves. Anything they own is a gift from their parents and their parents can take things away from them any time.

Thus, having the approval of those around you naturally causes a feeling of security and power. When a person doesn’t have direct access to the things they want, as infants lack direct access to the refrigerator, the person has to get others to help them. They have to learn to ‘control’ others so the others will feed them. As a child, the ability to do something physically didn’t mean that you could have your way or meet your own needs. You learned that you must have permission and approval to act.If you are dependent on others for approval now, you may not really believe that your life has changed since you were a child. As an adult, you may feel you are still dependent on the approval of others, but that feeling may not be realistic. Others may tell you that you need their approval, but in fact, you probably don’t need their approval to act. People often believe that they have no choice in what they do because they believe that someone else “won’t let them.” They behave as though they are children and need the permission of a parent before doing what they want. This need for approval is a major barrier to happiness because:

Sometimes people confuse the ability to act with the willingness of someone else to give permission. Perhaps you believe that you need approval (permission) from someone else when all you really need is your own approval.

Sometimes people confuse the ability to act with the need to pay a price for the action. Perhaps you believe that acting without approval is going to cost you too much or that you’d lose too many other things you want.

Sometimes people confuse their ability to act as an adult with the dependency they learned as a child. If you were taught that you weren’t competent to achieve your goals, and that you needed to depend on others to achieve them for you, then even the approval of others won’t help you to your goals since you need others to do the work as well as give you permission.

In our younger years, all of us had the experience of having no real power because we had nothing to offer our parents. We couldn’t control adults with anything other than our love. If our parents wanted to please us, we got what we wanted. If they didn’t want to please us, we didn’t get our way. Life was that simple. Many adults never get beyond this experience, and continue to act as though the only control they have over others is through pleasing them. As a result, those adults don’t recognize their own rights and privileges as an adult. If you’re one of those adults, it will be difficult for you to tell the difference between your own ability to act and your ability to control the actions of others. You’ll have trouble seeing your own ability to act without looking through others’ eyes. If you believe that you can’t achieve your goals alone or that you can’t act without approval from someone else, you are very likely to tolerate bad treatment from others. You need to decide what you own and what the limits of those territories are (your boundaries) and then you need to set an example for others of recognizing your own boundaries. You must recognize and defend your boundaries in order to teach others where they are. Of course others won’t recognize or respect any boundary that you don’t recognize, or defend. If you see yourself as powerless without someone else, you’ll give him that message, and he’ll likely take advantage of you. If you see yourself as powerless without approval, others will withhold approval from you in order to achieve their own goals. It stands to reason that if you hand control to others, they will accept it. Realistically, can others prevent you from acting by withholding approval? The short answer to this is, ‘no.’ When I was a child, my mother tried to teach me the difference between asking the question, “Can I” and “May I.” I remember being baffled by her explanation. ‘Can I’ means ‘Would it be physically possible’ to do something such as open the refrigerator door, and “May I” means ‘Would I have your permission’ to do something. I think my mother was trying to teach me manners at the time so that I could phrase a request to someone in authority in a genteel way, but I can still remember struggling to understand. The fact that I could do something didn’t mean that I had permission to do that thing. It’s very clear to me now that when someone tells me, “You can’t do that!” they are often wrong. They often mean, “You shouldn’t do that.” Or “I won’t like it if you do that.” Or “I will punish you if you do that.” But they most likely have no choice and no control about my physical abilities to accomplish an action. If a mugger holds a gun to your head and says, “Your money or your life!” it may seem to you that you have no choice but to hand over your wallet, but that is not true. The mugger can take your wallet away from you and the mugger can take your life. The mugger may even physically put your hand on your wallet and guide your hand and the wallet over to his own pocket, but the mugger cannot make you hand over your wallet. The mugger can disapprove of you refusing to hand over the wallet and the mugger can charge you a high price (your life) for refusing to hand over the wallet, but even in this extreme situation, the mugger is not really able to make you hand over the wallet. Please don’t misunderstand here. Given these choices, give the mugger your wallet! The price is too high for you to keep your wallet in that situation. But there are very few situations in this life in which the price tag for doing as you choose is so high.

In a typical argument in a bad marriage, the wife says she wants a divorce and the husband responds, “If you even try to divorce me, I’ll quit my job. But I’ll get custody of the kids and you’ll end up with nothing.” This response is scary enough to make many women reconsider whether they want to end the marriage because they don’t want to lose custody of their children and they want a share of the assets of the marriage to live on. But consider this: The laws of your state dictate who gets what out of a marriage. If you have an attorney, your attorney will make the case for you to get custody and get a share of the assets of the marriage. It won’t be your job to convince your husband to hand over assets or custody. The judge decides. You probably don’t need your husband’s approval to end the marriage, and it is the judge you need to convince about custody and division of the assets. Only when you’re married to a man does his approval matter to you very much. State law is never as biased and unforgiving as some marital partners are. Others may confuse you by telling you that you cannot do what it takes to get what you want. But, this does not take away your choices and your ability to act. If you can physically do something, you can do it whether you have someone else’s permission or not. Others may confuse you by telling you that your true goal is or should be to get their approval rather than to get what you want. But, this does not take away your choices and your ability to act. If your true goal is to get what you want and you can act to accomplish that, it is still within your power to get what you want. If someone acknowledges that you have a choice, you may feel that you have their approval. But having someone’s approval doesn’t increase your ability to act, only your ability to act with their approval. Even if you are acting with their approval, you will still need to act. If you are acting without their approval, you still can act and you still may choose to act to accomplish your goal. Others really control only their own behavior. They don’t control your behavior, no matter what they say. They control their approval of you, but it’s your choice if their approval controls your behavior. You’re the one who has to decide whether the cost of their disapproval is anything you need to fear or heed. Sometimes others offer to give you their approval for doing what they want, but that may not be your goal. When you are in a relationship with someone, you’ll often have a choice between doing as you choose, doing the things that are in your own power to accomplish, and the other alternative, doing what the other wants you to do. That is really a choice between doing things with the other’s approval or doing things without the other’s approval. It’s not really a choice between doing things or not doing things. If the other withholds approval from you, and you are dependent on the other’s approval, then you may not see all the other choices you have as possible choices that you can make on your own. You still can do all the same things with or without the other’s approval, but if you won’t choose to do them without the other’s approval, then you are a prisoner. You are acting as though you were a part of the body of the other. But you’re acting that way by your choice and you’re a captive of the other as a result of the decisions that you yourself have made. If you decide to do only those behaviors that have someone else’s approval, then you live within the boundaries the other sets for you, rather than your own boundaries. When someone gives you an order or a command, that doesn’t mean you have fewer choices. If you remember, on your own, that you still have available all of your choices, then the other has failed to control you. So let’s return to that verbal abuser above who tells his wife, “If you even try to divorce me, I’ll quit my job. But I’ll get custody of the kids and you’ll end up with nothing.” This is a guy who is trying to tell her that she must get his approval before she divorces him, and without his approval, she will not have any money, from him, because he will quit his job and she won’t have custody of the children, because he will get the custody. In order to make this strategy work, his wife has to believe that he controls the judge who will decide the custody of the children, that he would be able to survive without any money himself, since he will quit his job, and that the judge will give him custody when he can’t support the kids, or himself. He’s telling her that he can make her life miserable even if he’s not married to her, because he’s still going to control her, and the children. That’s a pretty tall order for a wife to believe.

There are abusers who will try to make your life miserable if you don’t get approval for the things you do, but realistically, can that husband accomplish the things he says? It’s unlikely. He can say that he will quit his job, but he’d have to be willing to go into the underground economy and live hand-to-mouth if he quits his job. State Departments of Social and Health Services are pretty good at finding men who do things like that and pretty good at getting money out of them. And the Departments are pretty motivated to find them and collect the child support because they don’t want you to end up on welfare, even if he does. If the man isn’t the primary parent now, and you spend more time looking after the kids than he does, you’re very likely to get custody of the kids after a divorce. And if he tries to snatch them when he doesn’t have custody, he’ll most likely end up in jail and won’t get further visitations with the kids without being supervised by an agency that he has to pay. Depending on the state you’re living in, you’re very likely to get a fair share of the marital assets. And he can’t prevent you from earning money that he can’t control after a separation and divorce. In other words, telling you that you’ll pay this high a price not to have his approval is extremely unrealistic. And you’ll find that out as soon as you hire an attorney. You can look up your state laws on the Internet and hire an attorney to make your case to the court. The judge will decide custody and division of the assets, not this husband.
So, how much power will you give up to have someone else’s approval? Ask yourself these questions:

Can I even get the other’s approval, or will they simply withhold approval on something else so that I always feel disapproval? Is he so inconsistent that I can’t please him two days in a row because he changes his mind?

In those cases, don’t bother trying to get the approval and just get what you want, if it’s in your power. As long as you keep yourself safe from a physical or sexual batterer, his approval won’t matter anyway because you can’t get his approval no matter what you do.

Right now, when that person disapproves of you, what is the most it has cost you? Does the other scream at you? Hit you? Shake his head disapprovingly? Go silent for minutes or hours or days?

Be aware that someone who hits you is not safe to be around even if you’re trying hard to get approval. Someone who batters you, batters you for control. Be sure to read the article “Is He a Batterer or Just a Verbal Abuser?” on this site. If you don’t risk the man battering you, what is the realistic cost of going without his approval? Why is the cost important if he screams at you, shakes his head disapprovingly, or gives you the silent treatment? I’m not saying there won’t be a cost, but you’re probably saying the cost will be the equivalent of a million dollar loss when it’s more likely a loss of $4.98. It’s your own approval that’s important, not the approval of the other person. If it’s in your power to do, go ahead. He’s probably giving you plenty of disapproval now, so you might as well get what you want.

And what is your approval worth?

Even if the other person hasn’t seemed to pay attention to what you wanted in the past, is that because you try so hard to please the abuser that you actually aren’t withholding your approval no matter what he does? If he gives you the silent treatment for three days, what will he do if you give him the silent treatment for the next three days after he’s ready to talk again? Isn’t your approval worth something to him? He may threaten to divorce you, but he’ll stop threatening it instantly if he’s just saying it to punish you. If you make him work for your approval, that will change a lot of things in the relationship. (see the article “The Two Dimensions of a Relationship)

What does the other person have to lose if you leave the relationship?

Do you provide money, housework, emotional support, parenting of his/her children, sexual intimacy, logistical support for his/her work, or a sense of comfort and familiarity after many years together? If you left the other, what would the other lose? Don’t just think about what the other person says about you, but think about what you actually offer that the person would lose if you left. Would he willingly let you go, even if he is always criticizing you?

Has the other actually ended the relationship , or threatened to?

Has the abuser ever shown evidence of being prepared to leave the relationship, like talking to a lawyer, moving out, getting a lease on a new apartment? Anyone can treat you badly during the relationship, but that’s not a sign he wants the relationship to be over. It’s only a sign that the other thinks he doesn’t have to earn your good will by his own good behavior. Abusers rarely leave a relationship, unless they’ve got another woman on a string ready to go to. It’s generally the targets that have the motivation and the will to leave!

What are the practical ways you might benefit from the relationship being over?

Would you have more spending money? More free time? More autonomy with your children? More peace of mind? Think about how your life would change for the better if you were not in the relationship with him. How could you–and would you–make your own life better if not for the other?

What other sources of approval do you have in your life, starting with yourself?

Do you have friends and family members you can talk to? A member of the clergy? A therapist? Will your children still love you and support you, even if your significant other is angry at you? Who can you depend on to be there for you? Even if your significant other is mad at you, you have many other sources of approval, including yourself. When you’re in a situation of conflict with the abuser, go back and think about your answers to these questions. Will it really be devastating for you if your partner disapproves of you? Or will it be equally devastating for him? Does he think that you would leave him if you chose? Does he really want to end the relationship with you? It is not better to be abused than abandoned. As an adult, you have lots of opportunities to get assistance and approval from others. You are not dependent on the approval of your partner, even though you may think you are. If you give yourself approval, in time that will be the most important approval that you can get.