Performing for the Father
Definition
You learned, early, what got his attention. What made him proud, what made him smile, what made him look at you the way you needed to be looked at. You learned to produce those things. The good grades, the achievement, the personality that was easy and charming and no trouble. The daughter who performed for the father shaped herself to the specifications of his approval long before she had any sense of what she might have been without those specifications. The performance became the self. Or it seemed to. The self that was not performing is still there. It has been waiting for a long time.
Origins & Context
Alice Miller in The Drama of the Gifted Child identifies the gifted, high-achieving child as often the child who was most shaped to the parent's needs. The child's sensitivity, which could have been a gift, became the instrument of her own accommodation. She felt what the parent needed and she provided it. She excelled in service of the parent's emotional requirements, not her own development.
Held Gottlieb in Body Sense and Clarissa Pinkola Estes in Women Who Run With the Wolves both trace the loss of the instinctual self: the woman who has been performing since childhood loses access to her own preferences, desires, and responses. She knows what is expected. She does not always know what she wants.
Linda Schierse Leonard in The Wounded Woman describes the armored Amazon daughter: the daughter who performs competence and achievement as a response to the father's unavailability or conditional love. She becomes extraordinary on the outside. The inside is still waiting for the original approval that the performance was always in pursuit of.
The performance became so practiced that it began to feel like a self. The self that was not performing is still there. It has been waiting.— Nikita Datar
How It Shows Up
It shows up as the achievement that never feels like enough. She finishes the thing and immediately looks for the next thing to prove, because the approval she is actually looking for is not responsive to external success.
It shows up in the relationships with men who require performance: the boss whose approval must be earned and re-earned, the partner whose attention is contingent on her being a particular way. The replication of the original dynamic.
It shows up as the difficulty knowing what she actually wants, separate from what would be impressive or approved of. The question what do you want is harder to answer than what would make someone else pleased.
It shows up as exhaustion. The performance never stops. Even when no one is watching, the internal audience is watching. The father's eyes are still there, evaluating, and she is still arranging herself for his approval.
Generational Transmission
Through the paternal line: The father who required performance of his daughter was often performing for his own father. The man who could only give conditional love had learned to receive conditional love. Achievement, compliance, and performance were the currencies of affection in his family of origin, and he transmitted that economy to his daughter without question. The performance the daughter offered was accepted in the same spirit it was demanded: as evidence of worth rather than as expression of self.
Through the maternal line: The mother's role in the performance economy matters enormously. The mother who coached the daughter in what the father would approve of, who translated his requirements and prepared the daughter to meet them, was protecting her daughter and also deepening the wound. The mother who offered a separate relational space, one in which the daughter did not have to perform, gave her daughter a model of receiving that was not conditional. The mother who was also performing for the father left the daughter with no room in the family system where she did not have to be something specific.
Nikita's Note
The question I return to for the woman who has spent her life performing for the father is this: what do you do when no one is watching?
Not what do you produce. What do you do. What do you enjoy. What do you think, when no one needs your thinking to prove anything. What do you want, when you are not calculating what wanting will cost you in someone's approval.
Those questions are not small. They are the beginning of the recovery of the self that was performing all along.
From the work
The performance became so practiced that it began to feel like a self. The self that was not performing is still there. It has been waiting.From Healing the Father Wound by Nikita DatarAbout this book
Related Concepts
More in The Daughter's Lexicon
See all in The Daughter's Lexicon →I wrote about this in Healing the Father Wound — available on Amazon.