A child depends on other people for care. When expressing a wish, disagreeing, or showing anger threatens that care, being good can become a way of staying safe.
The arrangement is simple: I will do what you want. I will remain harmless. You will take care of me.
In If I am only nice enough… — my story, I describe what happened when I recognised this arrangement in my own life. Here, the question is how it sustains itself—and what happens when whole collectives participate in it.
Being good at the cost of being yourself
The child learns to attend to what is expected. What will make the adults happy? What can be justified? What will keep trouble away?
A wish becomes something to check against other people’s approval before it can be expressed. Anger becomes dangerous because it might produce a clear disagreement.
This strategy does not disappear simply because the child becomes an adult. It can continue in relationships and at work: accepting what is assigned, appearing willing, and leaving one’s own wishes unspoken.
But our wishes don’t disappear because we haven’t communicated them.
We agree to things we don’t really want to do. Then we don’t fulfil what we promised. We delay, withdraw, or sabotage. The disagreement we cannot express directly comes out through our actions.
We pay the cost of being good instead of being ourselves, and resentment grows.
But saying “I don’t want to do this” threatens the arrangement that promises us care. We have learned to remain good, agreeable, and harmless. A clear no puts that at risk.
So when resistance appears, we don’t recognise it as disagreement. We question it. Do I really not want this? Am I being selfish? Why can’t I just do what I promised?
We keep trying to make ourselves want what we have already agreed to. We find reasons why we should be happy with it. The wish is still there, but we can no longer clearly distinguish it from what we think we should want.
Now we are confused. We have said yes, something in us says no, and we cannot let that no become clear.
Why confusion matters
Clarity would expose the contradiction: I promised to do what you want, but I don’t want to do it.
That would require a conversation. Perhaps a refusal. Perhaps admitting that the promise of compliance carried an expectation of care that was never spoken or agreed upon.
Confusion allows all of this to remain unresolved.
Confusion keeps us from having to state clearly what we want and what we are doing.
A direct question gets an indirect answer. A conversation moves away from the point where a decision could be made. The other person becomes occupied with trying to understand, help, or rescue us.
Meanwhile, the original question remains unanswered: what do we actually want, and what are we willing to do?
We live in this soup of unclarity, where the only way for this arrangement to survive is for that unclarity to exist. Then we can be nice, and people can love us and pat us on our heads, and we have someone to take care of us.
Harmless does not mean without consequences
There is no clear disagreement, but the disagreement still acts.
It acts through the promise that is not fulfilled, the decision that is never made, the anger that comes out sideways. Other people carry the consequences without being able to address what is happening.
Relationships become organised around trying to resolve the confusion. Work gets held up. Resentment accumulates on both sides.
The person maintaining the arrangement can remain unaware of how much they are participating in it. That is part of what makes the structure so difficult to confront: even naming it can lead to more confusion.
This structure keeps us from perceiving the very things that would allow us to recognise it and leave it: our wishes, our anger, and our clarity.
To recognise the arrangement, we would need to notice: I don’t actually want what I have agreed to. I am angry. There is something I need to say or change.
But these are exactly the things we have learned to suppress in order to remain harmless and be taken care of. When a wish or a disagreement appears, we question it, explain it away, or turn our attention back to what is expected of us.
So we don’t clearly recognise that we are maintaining an arrangement we don’t want. We experience confusion instead—and then try to solve the confusion without letting ourselves know what we want.
The arrangement continues because it prevents us from recognising why we would want to leave it.
If we cannot perceive what we want, we cannot communicate it or act towards it. If we cannot feel our anger, we cannot recognise where we disagree or express a boundary.
Remaining nice and compliant is the only option left. This is what the structure works towards: closing off the other possibilities.
Working on ourselves inside the same arrangement
We become confused, and more confused, and more confused. Then we occupy ourselves with why we are confused and keep trying to sort it out.
Even sincere spiritual or inner work can become part of that occupation. We can feel that we are working towards change while the underlying arrangement stays intact.
Understanding our childhood does not, by itself, change the promise we are making in a relationship today. We can explain where our fear came from and still say yes when we mean no.
We can spend so much time working on ourselves without recognising the structure that keeps us confused.
The question becomes concrete: what am I agreeing to? What do I expect in return? What am I not saying?
Finding the way out
The way out has a lot to do with anger. Owning anger, feeling anger, and learning to work with it.
If anger has threatened our connection to the people who take care of us, even feeling it can be frightening. Before we can recognise a clear disagreement, fear comes up. We feel guilty, question ourselves, or turn the anger against ourselves. We become confused again.
So working with anger also means working with the emotions that make it difficult to access. The fear we have been afraid to feel. The sadness and pain we still carry. All the layers that come up when we begin to say: I don’t want this. I disagree. Something needs to change.
Coming back into the body means encountering what staying outside it has kept us from feeling. It means encountering what feels like frozen fear, allowing ourselves to feel what has been held there. This takes space and support; we don’t have to force our way through it.
The work is to bring anger into its highest potential: clarity, boundaries, decision, and action.
Feeling anger does not require hurting someone. We can learn to feel its intensity and choose how to express it. Instead of coming out sideways through resentment or sabotage, it becomes available for saying what is true and acting on it.
A wish needs to be perceived before it can be communicated. Disagreement needs to become speakable. A promise that cannot be kept needs to be addressed.
That can mean saying: I agreed to this, but I don’t want it. I have not been clear with you. This is what I can offer. This is what I am asking for.
The adult position is the one from which we acknowledge what we want, communicate it, and act towards it. From which we take responsibility for our participation, including the consequences of our actions.
Growing up does not mean becoming better at living by the rules we learned as children.
We can stop promising compliance as the price of care. We can ask for care directly and allow the other person to answer.
When whole collectives participate
Unrecognised, hurt inner children can dominate and take over whole rooms of people.
In a group, the same arrangement can become a shared rule: do what is assigned, remain agreeable, and leave the decisions to someone else. Anyone who names the contradiction disturbs the peace everyone is maintaining.
Responsibility becomes difficult to locate. Each person has followed instructions. Each person can point elsewhere. Yet together, they have produced the outcome.
We want to be taken care of without seeing what sustains us and what it costs.
The people in the driving seats have their own inner children, hungry for what they never received. When those unmet needs govern their decisions, power gives them the means to act them out over other people’s lives.
We have people who want someone to take care of them, and people in the driving seats who themselves still want to receive what they never got.
At the scale of institutions and nations, the consequences extend far beyond the original relationships. Decisions about work, resources, land, and whose suffering can be ignored affect people who never agreed to the arrangement.
Remaining nice does not remove our participation. Leaving the decision to someone else does not remove its consequences.
What responsibility opens our eyes to
As I stop asking only who will take care of me, I begin to notice what already sustains me—and what my receiving asks of me.
There is a difference between a prayer before you eat your food and the realisation that an animal had to die for you to eat this piece of salmon.
Taking responsibility means coming out of the fog of confusion, so that we can actually look at the whole chain of events in which we participate. What has been given to us. What needed to happen. The consequences of what we do.
Our own pain is still there, but it no longer keeps us from seeing beyond it.