I used to find my coworker Elena kind of exhausting. She was the first one in and the last to leave. She volunteered for everything, she followed up on things that didn’t need following up on, and she had this quality of always needing to be the one who handled it. I remember thinking she was one of those people who just had to be the best at everything. The competitive type.
Then I found out, through another person on our team, a few things about how she grew up. And I understood immediately that it wasn’t competitiveness. She hadn’t been trying to beat anyone. She’d been trying to get someone to notice her for the last thirty years, and work was the place where it was still possible.
They didn’t shut down—they got to work
When people imagine what growing up without much affection produces, they usually picture someone who went cold—closed off, emotionally unavailable, hard to reach. That does happen. But there’s another version that’s at least as common and harder to recognize because it looks nothing like damage. Some kids responded to not getting enough warmth by becoming the kind of person who was impossible to overlook. Who made themselves indispensable. Who got so good at so many things that the original need got buried under a pile of evidence about how impressive they were.
It reads as ambition from the outside. Work ethic. Drive. The person first in and last out, who never needs to be asked twice, who takes on more than their share and delivers on it. The thing underneath isn’t confidence—it’s a much older calculation. They learned early that needing things made the adults around them uncomfortable and that doing things made those same adults pay attention. They made the obvious trade and got very good at it, and the trade became so second nature that most of them stopped registering it as a trade at all.
Being capable was the safest way to ask for attention
Asking directly for warmth when you’re a child in a house where it’s scarce doesn’t tend to work well. You try it, and the response is nothing, or impatience, or a parent who is visibly at a loss—and that response is worse in some ways than nothing, because it confirms what you were afraid of. So you find another channel. One that doesn’t expose the need directly.
Achievement works because it’s clean. You do something and someone notices, and nothing vulnerable had to be on the table. You didn’t have to ask for anything—the recognition just arrived, as a natural consequence of the performance. It isn’t the same as being loved, but it functions as a reasonable substitute, and the important thing is it doesn’t require you to be the kind of person who needs things.
Avi Assor and colleagues, whose research on parental conditional regard has been published in the Journal of Personality, found that when parents’ warmth and approval depended on how their children performed, what developed in those children wasn’t genuine motivation—it was compulsion. A sense of internal pressure that never fully turned off. They achieved, but not from confidence. From a question that kept running underneath everything: whether they were worth anything without the achievement to point to.
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Praise from strangers filled something in them
What they figured out, pretty early, was that the warmth unavailable at home was available in other places. Teachers, coaches, managers—people with no particular reason to care about them would respond to what they did, and that response had a quality the home version never had. It felt earned. It arrived without the complicated history attached. When a teacher said you were exceptional or a manager said the team wouldn’t function without you, there was nothing undermining the moment. Just the moment itself.
So they kept going back for it. Not cynically—that’s not how it works. They genuinely wanted to do good work, and the recognition that came with good work genuinely felt good. The problem is that this kind of recognition doesn’t accumulate the way actual affection does. It comes in spikes, and then it’s gone, and between the spikes, there’s restlessness, a need to set up the next instance of being seen. I’ve noticed this in people I know—how some of them are more alive in the moment of acknowledgment than in any of the work leading up to it. The work is how they get there. The moment someone names it is what they were actually after.
They got good at “doing” and worse at being taken care of
The competence built up an identity over time, and the identity had a specific shape: the person who handles it, who doesn’t need much, who is the giver in every exchange. That shape became harder and harder to step out of. Being helped felt genuinely strange—not just uncomfortable but almost categorically wrong, like it didn’t apply to them. Needing something and saying so out loud felt like regressing to the version of themselves they’d worked very hard to leave behind.
Nancy Collins and Brooke Feeney, whose research on attachment and support-seeking has been published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, found that people who developed avoidant attachment—the pattern most closely tied to having emotionally unavailable caregivers—had specific trouble seeking support as adults, even when support was genuinely available. Not because they were incapable, but because they’d had almost no practice. The whole system for asking and receiving had never really developed, because it was never safe to use it when it mattered most.
By the time people were actually willing to show up for them, they’d spent so long not needing anything that accepting help felt like something that happened to other people.
The next thing was always going to be the one that did it
There was always something next. A higher level, a harder project, a milestone that was going to be the one that finally settled something. Not consciously—no one thinks through it this clearly in the moment. But the pattern runs that way. The thing gets accomplished, and there’s a window where something like resolution shows up, and then the window closes faster than expected, and the same feeling returns, and there’s already another thing forming on the horizon.
Achievement is a convincing stand-in for affection because it actually works, in small doses, often enough to maintain the behavior. The recognition is real. The satisfaction after finishing something hard is real. What it can’t do is replace the underlying thing—can’t become a baseline sense of being valued that doesn’t need to be re-earned constantly. So the target keeps moving. Not out of greed or neurosis, but because the thing they’re actually chasing was never on any list of accomplishments. They just don’t always know that yet, and even when they do know it, the habit of chasing is hard to break.
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All that capability, and the original question still wasn’t answered
Nothing about the accomplishments is fake. They worked, and the work produced real things, and none of that is the problem. The problem is that the work was never going to be able to answer what it was being asked to answer—whether they were worth something before they did anything, whether someone would have wanted them around even without the usefulness, whether the kid who needed more than they got was fundamentally okay.
That question doesn’t have an achievement-shaped answer. It gets answered, when it gets answered, in relationships where someone stays without requiring a performance first, which are hard to find, partly because they’ve gotten so good at being the person who handles everything that nobody thinks to check on them. The one who is always fine is the last person anyone asks if they’re fine.
What a lot of them are still after, underneath everything they’ve built, is something they couldn’t have named as a child and can barely name now: the experience of being chosen for no particular reason. They’ve spent a long time making themselves worth choosing. The thing they never got was someone who didn’t need a reason.
