The tyranny of the should

"I should be further along by now." "I should be a better parent." "I should not need help." If you listen for it, there's a voice in most of us that speaks almost entirely in shoulds, and Karen Horney was the first person to give it a name.

She was a German physician, one of the first women to train in psychoanalysis, who came to New York in 1932 and spent the next twenty years quietly taking apart the theory she'd been taught. Where Freud saw instinct, she saw culture and childhood: a child who doesn't feel safe builds strategies to cope, moving toward people, against them, or away from them, and carries the strategy into adult life long after the danger is gone. In 1950, two years before she died, she published her last book, Neurosis and Human Growth, and in it she described what she called the tyranny of the should.

Here's the idea. Somewhere early, a person who felt they weren't enough builds an idealized picture of who they ought to be: flawless, tireless, always generous, never afraid. Then they spend their life trying to live up to a picture no one could live up to, and they punish themselves, in a steady inner commentary of shoulds, every time they fall short. The real self, the one with limits and wants and a tired Tuesday, gets no say. Horney's work was helping people hear the difference between the two voices, and choosing the real one. She called that self-realization, and she believed it was what every person is built to grow toward, the way an acorn grows toward an oak, if the shoulds get out of the way.

It belongs in the Healing month because the should is one of the quietest wounds we carry, and one of the oldest. Vault Human coaches, and doesn't treat; a therapist who works with the inner critic is a good door if the voice is loud. What anyone can do is catch the word. Every should is a demand pretending to be a fact. Underneath it there is nearly always a want, and a want can be chosen, or not, like a free person.