It was a Tuesday afternoon in a seminar room at the University of Sydney, and my supervisor had just handed back a draft without a single comment. Not criticism. Not praise. Nothing. I stood in the corridor afterward, holding the unmarked pages, and felt something I couldn’t name at the time but can now: the particular desperation of performing for someone who isn’t watching. That was the moment the pattern became visible, though it would take another decade to understand what I was looking at. I was 22, and I had organized my entire emotional life around earning approval from people who didn’t have the equipment to give it.
The pattern didn’t start in that corridor. It started much earlier, with my father, a GP in a small town in rural New South Wales. He was excellent at his job. Patients loved him. He could read a room, defuse anxiety, deliver bad news with steadiness. But at home, he was quieter. More contained. For years, I interpreted that containment as a kind of verdict on me. I thought if I could just be smarter, funnier, more accomplished, the warmth would come. I chased his approval the way you chase a bus that’s already left the stop, running harder precisely because it was pulling away. I wrote about this recently, about finally understanding that my father didn’t withhold affection because he didn’t feel it. He withheld it because in his world, showing how much someone meant to you was a vulnerability he couldn’t afford. That piece opened something in me. But the thing I want to talk about today is what happens when you take that pattern, the one formed in childhood, and carry it unknowingly into every relationship, every workplace, every friendship in your adult life.
Conventional wisdom says we chase approval because we want to be liked. We want to belong. That framing is generous, and it’s incomplete. What I’ve come to understand, at 33, is something less comfortable: the people I was most desperate to impress were almost always the ones least equipped to see me clearly. And the reason I chose them wasn’t random. It was strategic, in the way that unconscious patterns always are.
The familiar shape of unavailability
At 22, I was finishing my undergraduate degree in exercise physiology at the University of Sydney. I had a supervisor who was brilliant, well-published, and emotionally remote. He rarely offered praise. When he did, it felt like sunlight breaking through clouds. I worked harder for him than I’d worked for anyone. Not because he demanded it, but because his approval felt scarce, and scarcity made it feel valuable.
I was drawn to him because his emotional signature was one I already knew.
Attachment theory, initially developed by John Bowlby in the 1950s and later expanded by Mary Ainsworth, Cindy Hazan, and Phillip Shaver, describes how the bonds we form with early caregivers shape our emotional development and future relationships. The central insight is deceptively simple: we learn what love looks like before we have words for it. And then we spend the rest of our lives seeking out that shape, even when the shape is one that hurts us.
People aren’t always drawn to what’s emotionally safe. They’re drawn to what feels emotionally familiar. As psychologist Mark Travers writes for Forbes, if someone grew up in an environment where connection was conditional or intermittent, they often start to equate uncertainty with love. When a partner pulls away, you cling harder. When they go silent, you double your efforts. When they offer crumbs, it feels like something real.
That was me. Not just in romantic relationships, but everywhere. I selected, over and over, the people whose approval would be hardest to get.
Why we choose the hardest audience
This is the part that took me years to see. I told myself I was drawn to these people because they were impressive, discerning, high-calibre. And sometimes they were. But the real reason was less flattering.
If someone emotionally unavailable finally approved of me, it would mean something that ordinary approval never could. It would mean I was enough. It would retroactively heal the original wound, the one where love was present but never quite expressed, where affection was real but withheld.
Travers describes this as a core belief that drives the pattern: the conviction that if you can get the distant, inconsistent, emotionally walled-off person to love you, then maybe you’ll finally be enough. He’s careful to note this isn’t a conscious pursuit. It’s deeply embedded, traceable to childhood, and it runs in the background like software you forgot you installed.
The trap is elegant. You pick someone who can’t give you what you need. You work extraordinarily hard to earn it anyway. When it doesn’t come, you don’t question the selection. You question yourself. And the cycle starts again.
The feedback loop between self-worth and who we choose
During my postdoc years at UCL, I spent a lot of time reading papers on cognitive decline. But the research that changed me personally was never in my own field. Research suggests that how we feel about ourselves shapes the relationships we pursue and tolerate, and that the quality of those relationships either reinforces or erodes that self-worth. It’s circular, and it doesn’t resolve itself with age.
Think about what that means in practice. If you consistently choose people who can’t see you, who are too guarded or too preoccupied to reflect your value back to you, the absence of recognition doesn’t just hurt in the moment. It quietly reshapes what you believe you deserve. And that revised belief sends you back to the same kind of person.
I lived in this loop for most of my twenties. It showed up in friendships, in academic mentorships, in who I wanted to be close to. The people who offered warmth easily, I took for granted. The ones who withheld it, I orbited.
What it actually looks like to break the cycle
I left academia at 33. There were many reasons for that, most of them professional. But one of the quieter reasons was personal. I was tired of organizing my emotional life around people who couldn’t give me what I was looking for. The academic hierarchy, with its delayed recognition, conditional praise, and emotional austerity, fit the old template perfectly. Too perfectly.
Breaking the cycle doesn’t start with choosing different people. It starts with noticing the pull toward the familiar ones.
Research on attachment suggests that early experiences don’t seal our fate. Bowlby and Ainsworth’s work showed us how patterns form, but subsequent research has shown that individuals can experience growth and change in their attachment patterns through supportive and understanding relationships. A partner’s consistent responsiveness can help an anxious individual feel more secure. An avoidant person can gradually learn to trust and open up. The patterns are stubborn, but they’re not permanent.
For me, the shift started when I began paying attention to a simple question: does this person have the capacity to actually see me? Not the theoretical capacity. The demonstrated capacity. Are they emotionally present, or am I projecting presence onto them because I want it to be there?
The answer was uncomfortable more often than I expected.
The difference between privacy and hiding
One of the complications of growing up around emotional unavailability is that you can become very good at performing openness while actually revealing nothing important. You share strategically. You’re warm on the surface. But the things that make you feel most exposed, the needs, the fears, the soft underbelly of who you actually are, those stay locked away.
In my recent piece on why some people keep their personal lives private, I wrote about the difference between guardedness and a learned adjustment. Some people shared openly once, watched it become currency in someone else’s conversation, and simply narrowed the distribution list. That’s reasonable. But there’s another version of privacy that’s less adaptive: the version where you hide because you’ve learned that being truly known is dangerous.
Travers makes a related point when he writes about the difference between believing you’re emotionally available and actually being so. Real emotional availability runs deeper than talking about feelings. It means tolerating the discomfort of being genuinely known by someone who has the power to disappoint you.
I spent years performing openness while chasing people who wouldn’t test that performance. If you seek approval from someone who can’t give it, you never actually have to face what would happen if they could. There’s a kind of safety in the impossible pursuit. It keeps you busy without ever requiring you to be vulnerable in a way that counts.
There’s a conversation on Silicon Canals about how a generation of people were taught to apologize for their needs so thoroughly that wanting something now feels like an act of aggression. That resonated with me. When you’ve spent years chasing approval from people who can’t offer it, your needs start to feel illegitimate. You stop asking.
What changes when you stop chasing
I walk about 10km a day with my border collie along the paths near our flat in Edinburgh. It’s the closest thing I have to a meditation practice. And somewhere on one of those walks, a few years ago, a thought landed that hasn’t left: the approval I’d been chasing my entire life was never actually about the people I was chasing it from. It was about a younger version of me who decided, at some very early age, that love had to be earned and that the earning was the point.
When you stop chasing, the first thing you feel isn’t relief. It’s grief.
You grieve the years spent performing for the wrong audience. You grieve the relationships with people who were actually present, the ones you undervalued because their warmth came too easily. And you grieve the version of yourself who believed the story, the kid who thought that if they could just try harder, the bus would stop.
But after the grief, something else opens up. You start to notice who actually sees you. Not who you wish could see you, or who you’ve been auditioning for, but who, without prompting, reflects back something that feels accurate. Those people were often there all along. You just couldn’t recognise their value because their approval didn’t trigger the same neurochemical response. It didn’t feel like winning. It felt like peace. And peace, when you’ve been conditioned for the chase, can feel like nothing at all.
The emotional equipment problem
I want to be clear about something. The people I chased weren’t bad people. My father wasn’t a bad person. Most of them were doing the best they could with what they had. But understanding the difference between what someone can offer and what we actually need is often a key insight that comes with maturity, and recognising that distinction was the most important thing I’ve learned in my thirties.
Some people don’t have the emotional equipment to give you what you’re looking for. That’s not a judgement. It’s an observation. And once you accept it, you stop standing in front of a hardware store asking for bread.
Emotionally focused therapy, rooted in attachment theory, works from the premise that our interactions with early caregivers create templates for how we relate in adult relationships. The work isn’t about blaming those caregivers. It’s about recognising the template so you can start to update it.
Updating it doesn’t mean you stop loving the people who couldn’t give you what you needed. It means you stop expecting them to become something they’re not, and you redirect your energy toward people who can actually meet you where you are.
That sounds simple. It took me about ten years.
What I’d tell my 22-year-old self
I wouldn’t tell him to stop caring what people think. He wouldn’t have listened, and the advice wouldn’t have been precise enough anyway. Caring what people think is human. The problem was never the caring.
The problem was the selection criteria.
I’d tell him: pay attention to who you’re performing for. Notice which audiences make you work hardest. And ask yourself whether the intensity of that effort is about them being worth it, or about the approval feeling scarce enough to be valuable.
Because scarcity isn’t value. Scarcity is just scarcity. And the approval that changes your life doesn’t come from people who can barely give it. It comes from people who offer it freely, and from the quiet, difficult work of learning to offer it to yourself.
I know this now. I can say it clearly, write it down, mean it. But last month I caught myself drafting an email to someone whose opinion I’ve been chasing for years, someone I respect enormously, someone who has never once given me what I was looking for. I rewrote it three times before I noticed what I was doing. The pattern is visible to me now, which is different from it being gone. Some mornings I’m not sure those are as far apart as I’d like them to be.
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