The moving goalpost problem

What it looks like

I'd meet a specific request and a new one would appear behind it, and I started to suspect there was no version of me that would ever be sufficient. That suspicion made me quietly stop trying, which is its own kind of confession.

When I was the injured one later in life, I understood the other side of it too — something gets granted, technically completed, and it just doesn't land, so you ask for more, hoping the next thing finally produces the feeling you're actually missing.

Why it happens

Behavioral requests get used as a stand-in for a feeling — safety — that no behavior can deliver on demand. A password or a check-in is measurable. The sense of security it's supposed to produce is not, and I confused the two constantly.

Sometimes the goalposts move because the original story was incomplete, and the instinct that something's still missing is accurate. I have to be honest that this was true of me more than once. That has to be ruled out before anyone calls the pattern unfair.

How the loop feeds itself

I started complying resentfully, doing the minimum, and that read as insincerity, which produced a new requirement on top of the last one.

Compliance without warmth never produces the safety someone's actually looking for, so the requirements just kept climbing.

The mirror

• If you're setting the requirements — what would 'enough' actually look like, and can you describe it? If you can't, you owe both of you that honesty. I couldn't, for a long time.
• If you're meeting them — are you doing this to rebuild something, or just to end the discomfort as fast as possible? I know which one I was usually doing.

How to break the pattern

• Name the feeling underneath the request instead of only the behavior. 'I need to stop being the last person to know' opens something a password change never will.
• Set a small number of concrete, durable commitments with a review date instead of an open-ended stream of demands.
• If the honest answer is that nothing could ever be enough, say it. That's a different conversation, and it needs a qualified professional in the room, not two exhausted people guessing.