Dominica May

As a teenager, I felt like getting my mum’s approval was the most important thing for me. It didn’t feel automatic or unconditional, but I loved making her feel proud. I felt like she had certain expectations of me, and if I didn’t live up to them, I wouldn’t be “good enough.” She was a pioneer for women in engineering, the only woman in her classes, and consistently smarter than the men she went to university with. It was a lot to live up to. This, unfortunately, laid the groundwork for me experiencing C-PTSD. C-PTSD, or complex post traumatic stress disorder, is not an official diagnosis in the DSM, but my current therapist confirmed I have it when I started seeing her last year, based on all the traumatic experiences I’ve been through in my life.

Now, don’t get me wrong – my mum loved me, and she did the best she could with the tools she had. She wanted what was best for me. But that doesn’t mean she always had the best method to support what my actual needs were. There are a lot of shades of grey. I don’t think she’d have supported me by taking me to the Melbourne International Comedy Festival when I was 16, and taken me to stand-up comedy open mics to perform at bars when I was under 18, if she didn’t love me. She even came to watch my first improv show when she was in a wheelchair and dying of pancreatic cancer when I was 21. Having a comedy career wasn’t what she wanted for me – I distinctly felt like she’d wanted me to be an engineer like her – but she still tried to support my interest in it while trying to get me to look for a more realistic career that would pay me better.

Years ago, when my daughter had expressed that she was scared of how I’d react when she hadn’t been doing her homework, I worried I was following in my mum’s footsteps. I didn’t want my reactions to be the reason she was motivated to do or not do a particular thing. I wanted her to feel like I was a safe person she could talk to whenever she encountered a challenge rather than feeling like she had to cover up a problem. This hadn’t actually started with me – I think it also stemmed from the strict educational routines she began when she started school in Malaysia – but that didn’t mean she wasn’t also externally motivated to try and make me proud.

I changed my parenting after that, and worked toward fostering an environment where my kids could be internally motivated to set and meet their own goals rather than because they wanted to make me proud. I wasn’t going to always be around to show interest in everything they did, so it felt more important to me that as long as my kids were proud of themselves, I’d be happy. A couple of months ago I had a conversation with my son along those lines, to see how that had progressed. I show a lot of interest in the projects he works on, but there is one project he’s been developing that I haven’t made the time to invest in recently, and that’s been his writing. Though it has seemed he’s been disappointed that I haven’t read the books he’s been working on, it hasn’t stopped him from pursuing this passion, which has shown me that he is much more internally motivated than I have been, especially at that age (he’s 14). When we discussed his motivation vs my external validation, my son likened my approval to being more like the “cherry on top” – it was a nice to have, but he didn’t need it. I told him I wished I’d learned that when I was his age.

As an undiagnosed autistic kid, I never fit in with the kids I went to school with. I craved acceptance, but after getting teased in school for liking the popular music of the day that I thought would help me fit in, I gave up wanting to be like everyone else. It wasn’t long after that that I’d started getting interested in stand-up comedy and found more like-minded folks online, because I got the Internet at home for Christmas in 1998. I was 15, then.

It was easier for me to get approval from the adults around me than it was my own peers. After getting super into Good News Week and the guests that appeared on the show, I recorded two CDs worth of comedy I wrote and then burned them onto CD-Rs from my home computer. I designed the covers and labels, and printed them myself, even purchasing a CD stomper so I could add my label to the top of the CD. In my external validation seeking, I sold copies of these CDs to some of my teachers. Heck, a couple of my teachers even came to watch me perform stand-up comedy the following year.

When I haven’t gotten the external validation I’ve sought, that has tended to be when some of my interests have waned. I can pinpoint my giving up stand-up comedy when I was 18 being because a guy I was meant to get together with during the Melbourne International Comedy Festival that year didn’t end up getting together with me at that time (we hooked up a couple of years later, but that’s another story). It made me feel sour about the whole comedy scene. Similarly, I gave up performing stand-up comedy when I moved to California because I was no longer getting the validation I sought from the guy I’d been seeing before I moved here. His validation got me back into performing stand-up. Losing it meant I no longer had that external motivator.

My parents’ judgements were a huge influencing factor in my decisions, but especially my mum’s. When I came home from a 7-month round-the-world trip in 2004-05, despite me being old enough to legally drink alcohol in the US so I was an adult fully capable of making my own decisions and mistakes, one of my aunts had threatened to tell my parents I’d been getting together with a couple of guys on that trip if I didn’t tell them first. I was twenty-one! It shouldn’t have been any of their business! I was so scared of how my mum would react, terrified of her disapproval, that I told my dad the story of my losing my virginity on that trip first. Then I came clean to my mum. I honestly don’t even remember how she reacted, but that could be because my brain has a tendency to wipe traumatic memories from my mind until something triggers them.

I can guarantee these were all factors in why I wound up marrying the wrong person about a year later. My mum died shortly after, but I still wanted to make her proud. And since she wasn’t around for me to seek approval from, I ended up in a relationship with a man who love bombed me and made me feel special – someone I wanted to impress. I sought validation from him. I didn’t put the right kind of thought into whether or not he was the right person for me. He gave me the attention I desired, and made me feel like I impressed him, so I fell for it. I had no idea how much that was going to set me up for more validation seeking behaviours throughout so much of the rest of my life.

Since getting back into stand-up this year, I’ve made jokes on stage about my approval seeking behaviour, even going as far as saying my therapist is now my stand-in mother I’m trying to make proud of me. The truth is, after my divorce in 2020, I worked hard to find self-validation. I successfully managed to avoid seeking external validation as a primary motivator for a couple of years after my divorce. Until… I found myself involved with someone I didn’t realise I still wanted validation from.

I’m not sure if I would’ve figured this out about myself if not for some out of character actions I took last month, when I found myself on the receiving end of validation I didn’t think I was looking for. After being told I was a cool mum, I found myself going back, seeking similar compliments, until I came to my senses and saw how reminiscent the compliments were of love bombing by someone who didn’t really know me that well. The way the compliments had blown up, I felt like they hadn’t been earned, and I realised I didn’t actually need such compliments that came to feel inauthentic to me. Not when I was, for all intents and purposes, a stranger to this person in this scenario.

I wondered why I’d gotten caught up in it. Why did it matter to have someone else tell me I was a cool mum? Because my ex-husband disparaged my parenting so much when we were together, maybe? Probably. But I’d long stopped caring about how he judged my parenting, since I’d given myself a whole lot of self-validation on my parenting skills by seeing how my kids are with me, and how they appreciate my support. I already know I’m a cool mum because my kids actually enjoy spending time with me, whether it’s because we’re playing a JRPG together like Tales of Berseria, watching anime with them (my daughter and I have been bingeing Ghost in the Shell, Demon Slayer, and Death Note since I lost my job, and I watched My Neighbor Totoro with both of my kids recently), playing tabletop games together, or finding my son enjoying deep heart-to-heart conversations with me when we walk somewhere together. I’ll also be taking my son to see Hamilton just before Thanksgiving because he got really into it through school a few years ago. So, I really don’t need other people telling me I’m cool with my kids.

Once I processed this, it allowed me to take a step back and further understand why I’d been so cut up by my ex-situationship ghosting me in January, and subsequently telling me he wanted nothing else to do with me, even as friends, back in June. I’d thought it had been the loss of a friendship I’d held so dear to me, but I don’t think that’s entirely true. I’d moved past not having him as a friend in my life in the past and found other friends who could be there for me in ways he never was. I mean, yeah, losing his friendship still sucks, but once I figured out what parts of his friendship I was missing, I was able to find other people who actually wanted to make time for me to talk about those same interests.

So the reality is, what it comes down to is trauma. My ex-situationship may have had different motivations and reasons behind his behaviour than my ex-husband had, but the fact is, he still put me on a pedestal and described me as perfect, thereby feeding that validation seeking part of my brain that got me addicted to him. I felt chosen by someone. I felt worthy of the attention I secretly craved from someone I was attracted to. As I described in my Baby Reindeer livestream conversation with friends last month, I fell in love with him because he saw me the way I wanted to be seen. The subsequent intermittent reinforcement of validation I received from him kept me hooked, and then the abrupt absence of that validation led to crazymaking behaviours from me, aka trauma responses, in an effort to try and get that validation back.

I’d sworn to myself I was never going to try and chase someone who didn’t want to be with me again, or didn’t respect me enough to have an open conversation with me, but when you’re in that trauma addiction headspace, it can be very hard to pull yourself out of it. At this point, I don’t really care what his reasons were, or the way he explained his behaviour as being caused by my apparent hurting him – my ex-situationship disappearing on me without an explanation was cruel. Especially considering he’d done it before, and I’d told him the impact that silence had on me. If I had hurt him the way he said I did, and I actually mattered to him, he could’ve chosen to discuss that with me so I could learn to do better in the future. Instead, he chose to sever whatever trust I had in him and our connection. As much as I’ve desired his friendship back, I don’t know how it could recover from that. If recovery were possible, it would take both of us to want to work at it to make it happen, and that seems unlikely.

What I have learned from this whole thing, however, is that I can’t allow myself to be so desperate for external validation that I wind up losing myself to try and keep it. I had fallen into the trap of putting this ex into the role my mother played in my life – wanting to keep him/her believing the best in me so I held back from saying anything that I feared wouldn’t get a response I desired. I needed to be willing to risk losing that external validation in order to continue showing up as my authentic self. If I can do that in friendships, then I should be capable of that in a romantic capacity, too.

I need to listen to my son, and the lessons I’ve taught him – I need to be internally motivated first. Any external validation is just a cherry on top. And the wrong kind of external validation leads to trauma responses in an effort to keep it.

I am able to recognise when I’m not addicted to seeking external validation. My lack of live performances over the past several years is a testament to my not using public performance as validation seeking behaviour like I might have in the past. I’m sure one of the reasons I did so many shows when I started doing improv in California was because I got a lot of external validation from it – validation I wasn’t getting from my then-husband. Once I reached a point of believing in myself how good I was, I was fine with sitting back and just performing when I felt like it. I enjoy the audience response, but I don’t need it. If I did, I’m sure I’d be going to more open mics and trying to get paid stand-up performances. I was also internally motivated to succeed in my career – no one else was pushing me or complimenting me as hard as I was.

So now that I can identify the pattens that cause me to seek validation in a romantic connection (e.g. receiving intermittent and/or excessive compliments, especially if they don’t feel earned, and being on the receiving end of silence, ghosting, silent treatment, or stonewalling), I hope I can prevent myself from falling into that trap in the future. The right person will accept me as I am, flaws and all. I won’t have to fear that they’ll run away or treat me poorly when I don’t live up to their expectations or perception. They’ll be willing to have open communication on difficult topics so I don’t have to be scared of sharing my own vulnerable thoughts.

As long as I can answer the question, “Did I behave in a manner that aligns with my own personal integrity?” with “Yes,” then I’ll know I’ve created a safe space of self-validation. Then it won’t matter how someone else responds (or doesn’t respond) to my behaviour. If the answer, on the other hand, is “No,” then I can still seek to follow the path I believe I need to take to return to that place of integrity, letting go of any fears I have about how someone else might interpret my choices.