These were first words of Miguel, 43, who came to see me. 

— “I don't like to be alone; I try to keep people around all the times, because when I am alone, I start to feel the worst – at my work place, and at night ,when I am trying to fall asleep”.
— “It pisses me off, everything looks good, when I look at my life, why I am depressed?”
— “ I feel guilty, that I am so privileged to have the life thatI do andI can’t just be happy! Why?”
— “ I also feel empty, like some thing is missing in my chest”.

Depression doesn’t give us answers to such questions, or actually does it?

He is the perfect son of his parents: responsible, following the rules and agrees to most things parents tell him to do.

He grew up in the family with 2 more older siblings. He got to see the difficulties his parents had with his older brothers - fights, penalties, time outs. And he wanted none of that, so he always made his bed, did the cleaning, and was home on time.

Diving deeper into his upbringing through the course of our work together, Miguel admitted, that whatenever he tried to please his mom and get her feedback, he failed. He could remember that his mom was always depressed because his father was cheating on her and she felt like she could’t provide for herself and the kids, so she needed to stay in this relationship.

“ You are too loud”, “Why didn’t you clean up your room yesterday?”, would you stop torturing me with all this mess”, “ You are just trying to make my life harder” - this and much more was the main life he got to see from his mom, suffering herself from depression and later destructive copying skills.

The only times he could recall when his dad paid attention at him, was to comment that he is satisfied with his grades at school, or that Miguel needs to work harder and he is being ungrateful for “everything which is done for him”.

Dad couldn’t build his own career the way he wanted, so he had a lot of expectations from his son to complete the work for both of them and had little to zero interest what Miguel wanted for him self.

With these messages of never being enough and having no chance to be worthy except when you achieve. Miguel unconsciously decided to work even harder to prove he was enough and to become independent from his family. He got great GPA score sat school, won multiple sport competitions, but his insides were falling apart.

With these messages of never being enough and having no chance to be worthy except when you achieve. Miguel unconsciously decided to work even harder to prove he was enough and to become independent from his family. He got great GPA score sat school, won multiple sport competitions, but his insides were falling apart.

During last few years of his career, he felt a lot of emptiness and low interest to do his job. He still did it, but started to binge drink, smoke weed and his eating habits collapsed. As a result he gained few dozen of pounds. Living his life in his own home, he would still get comments from his parents, mainly in a teaching tone and pointing out to him for not doing it right or well enough.

He went for a walk that morning, because he had became too heavy to run, so as he was doing his morning walk. He saw a woman with a child, which was misbehaving. He was throwing things, yelling, jumping.

“ You are good boy, you can choose different behavior” - she told to her son. At that moment, Miguel realized, that he never got this type of treatment from either of his parents. Whatever Miguel did, there was always complaints that what he did wrong!

He cried. And he walk lasted longer than usually. Next day he came to my office.

Miguel and I worked on empowering him to break free from his “good boy” conditioning and explored tools to help him design a more purposeful life.

* name changed to protect client confidentiality