I'm only OK if…

Carl Rogers spent decades listening to people in therapy, and he kept hearing the same thing underneath very different problems. As children, they had learned that they were loved and approved of on conditions: when they were clever, or helpful, or cheerful, or no trouble. Rogers called these conditions of worth.

Children need approval, so they learn the conditions fast, and often stop noticing the parts of themselves that don't fit. By adulthood the conditions no longer sound like rules. They sound like facts about what a person is worth: "I'm only OK if people like me." "If I let anyone down, I'm a bad person." "I'm worth something as long as I'm useful."

Rogers believed people change when they meet the opposite: acceptance with no conditions attached, which he called unconditional positive regard. He tried to offer it in therapy, so that clients could slowly learn to offer it to themselves.

The psychologist Jennifer Crocker has studied what happens when self-worth depends on something, like grades, looks or other people's approval. When she followed students through acceptances and rejections from graduate schools, those whose worth rested on academic success had much bigger swings in how they felt about themselves. Pursuing worth this way, her work suggests, tends to bring anxiety, defensiveness and strained relationships, and not the security it promises.

So the line to draw is not between wanting things and not wanting them. It is between a wish ("I'd like this to go well") and a condition ("if this goes badly, I'm worth less"). A wish can be disappointed. A condition turns every result into a verdict on you.

Expect it to feel wrong at first. A rule you have lived by for years will feel like the truth, and breaking it will set off the old alarm. That alarm is the condition talking. The test is what happens afterwards, not how it feels in the moment.

This isn't about giving up on standards. You can still want to do well and be kind. The difference is that you would be doing it because you want to, not to earn the right to feel OK.

Ellie organizes her office's leaving drinks, covers colleagues' shifts and helps her sister move, all in the same week. She's exhausted. When a friend asks her to dog-sit on the weekend, she says yes before the friend has finished asking. Later she tells her partner: "I couldn't say no. She'd have been disappointed, and I'd have felt awful, like a terrible friend."