6 Signs You May Have Golden Child Syndrome

Golden Child Syndrome, have you heard of it? If you're like me, this may be a topic that you're more recently becoming familiar with. Today you're going to learn about Golden Child Syndrome and I'm going to share with you six signs that you may actually be struggling with or have experienced Golden Child Syndrome. So when it comes to developing and attachment and the way that we feel in our own skin, so much of that is impacted by our caretakers. And the conversation often will focus around neglect and it will often focus around feeling, feeling like we aren't getting our needs met by our caretakers. Where there's a discrepancy between my needs and what my caretakers are giving or outputting. Right? But Golden Child Syndrome is a little bit different and it's under recognized and it is a problem for a lot of individuals. Golden Child Syndrome is where your value has contingency. Golden Child Syndrome is where you get love as a result of your productivity, your accomplishments, your performance. What you do is what brings you value. I know a little boy, and he's the sweetest little guy. And I've known him since he was a baby. And early on his family would say things like, oh, little Bobby is so smart. He started talking and using three letter sentences way before all of his little peers did. And then he got older and oh, Bobby is so talented. Listen to him hum that melody. He is so much more talented than any other little boy I've ever heard. And as he grew, he heard these messages. He heard about how his value was based on his ability to excel in certain areas. And it was an innocent attempt to build him up and encourage him, but it ended up backfiring. And so what ended up happening to this little boy and is that he became incredibly perfectionistic. In fact, one day we gave him a backpack and it was filled with art supplies. There were notebooks and crayons and watercolors and coloring books and all sorts of fun things. And we were thinking, oh, he's going to love this. And he opened the backpack and he took one look inside and he burst into tears and said, I don't want this. And we're like, why? You love art, you love being creative. And he said, but I'm not an artist. And he's eight years old at this time. He said, I'm not an artist, I don't want this. Take it away. And so we took the backpack back. And this was the beginning of my awareness of the way that he was experiencing, being told that he was great and excelled and was perfect because as we learned more about his experience on receiving the backpack is that he felt that if he wasn't an artist, then he shouldn't be making art and coloring. Suddenly it was unachievable for him to have value. He was the golden child. So as I'm explaining this to you, I'm curious if anyone is resonating with this. Where your caretakers did give you attention, you weren't necessarily neglected, but there were contingencies. There were stories, strings attached, right? So there are six key signs that you are dealing with Golden Child Syndrome. And I have them in writing here, so we don't miss a single one. And we're going to go through them together and then I'll make sure to include them in the comments. And so if you're wondering if your symptoms could be coming from Golden Child Syndrome, we'll have those answers for you here by the end of this conversation. But I want to talk with you first about the effects of Golden Child Syndrome. So it may look good on the outside where you see people who are, they're striving to achieve, they're trying to perform. They're the people that want to get straight A's. They're the people that want to be in the top of their class. Whether or not they actually achieve that, that is their driving factor, right? It's about what drives them. We talk about this a lot with the Enneagram. Are you familiar with the Enneagram? I think about enneagram type 3. The type 3 is the Achiever. And you who know me know that I am an enneagram type 3. And the achiever is motivated by achievements, right? My value comes from what I achieve. And this is because the reinforcement and love and care that I got growing up was very much based on what I did, what I achieved, as opposed to my failures, my weaknesses, my vulnerabilities, my heart. Right? And so when we think about that, when we think about the signs of being a golden child, it can be this need, this hedonic treadmill to produce. It's like Sisyphus. And the story of Sisyphus is that this being was relegated to a life of pushing a rock up a never ending mountain. Or you push the rock up the mountain, then it rolls back down, you push it up again. Whichever, you resonate more in this mythological story, right? And so you're working and working and you're pushing this boulder up the mountain, but there's no top. Or the top just gets higher and higher, or you just roll back Down. And so it feels like you never arrive. It's. Do you ever feel that way where you feel like I'm a failure, I'm an imposter, I'm inadequate, I'm not even going to try unless it's going to be perfect, it's not worth it, I'm not valuable unless I am better than I am or maybe even the best. Has anyone ever accused you of being a perfectionist, being competitive? Do you deal with self esteem that is based on what you're able to do, your skill set, your talents, what you've learned, the number of letters after your name, the amount of dollars in your bank account, the amount of friends in your social media, the hearts and likes and shares that your posts get, the number of text messages that are unread in your inbox. Do, do you feel that you are valued based on these external factors and what you do? These are signs that you may be struggling with child syndrome. So what are the six signs? Right, so those are the symptoms, those are the experiences that you may have. But let's just break it down into six signs. And so listen to this as I read them to you and then just kind of make a mental checklist and then at the end I'm going to share with you. Well, what do we golden children do? What's the answer? What do we do about this? So number one is you feel like you are worthless unless you are achieving something. Is your value just as much if you try and you are not successful versus if you try and you are successful? Is there a difference in your value or your sense of value or how people perceive you? Right, that's number one. Number two, growing up, love and acceptance from your caretakers was contingent upon your accomplishments and skills. Your accomplishments and skills were what gave you love and acceptance. That's number two. Okay, Number three is you feel like an imposter. We've talked a lot about imposter syndrome here. I feel like I am a fraud and people are going to figure it out. So you try to hide it, you try to overachieve, you try to over accomplish so that people don't figure out that you're actually not as worthy as they are saying that you are based on your achievements. Right? So that's number three. Number four, as a child you felt like it was your responsibility to hold the weight of your caretaker's world on your shoulders. Let's try saying that again. You felt it was your job to manage, to hold, to be responsible for, to be taking care of the feelings of your caretakers. It was your job to make them happy. It was your job to. To be successful so that they could celebrate their joy in your success instead of your own deep self. And so by saying yes to, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna become an attorney, because that's what would make my father proud. And really what you wanna be as a bowling athlete, Are you saying yes to them and no to yourself? Are you compromising yourself? Is your golden child syndrome creating the Sisyphus need to push that ball up the hill when really you wanna go into the meadow? Are you denying yourself? Right. You feel suffocated. This is number five. You feel suffocated by the pressure and expectations on your shoulders. I'm reading the book by Matthew McConaughey and I was thinking about his story about being in Australia and how he made a commitment to go to Australia. It was man's handshake and he made a commitment to go to Australia, and he was doing it to honor his father's name. But there, while he was there, he lost a bunch of weight, he was miserable. He was developing kind of some obsessive manic type symptoms. He was very isolated. But he was saying yes to that experience to fulfill the needs and expectations his father had of him. And he turns it into a very powerful, life changing experience. But what we're talking about here is the motivation behind it. Are you saying yes for you or are you being suffocated by other people's expectations of you? Okay, and number six, all you want is to be loved and accepted for who you are. Loved for your imperfections, loved for your flaws, loved for your faults, loved for your mistakes. Loved with no regard to what you've been achieving, just loved. You want to be appreciated and you want to be cared for, despite how you contribute to the world, that you as a being is worth living. And we don't all get that, do we? We don't get that from our caretakers. Oftentimes we grow up and we may be the golden child. We may on the outside look like, oh, little Billy, little Susie, you are the smartest little girl in the world. And you are the most amazing tree climber we have ever seen. And, oh, you have perfect pitch. You may be getting all of that reinforcement and it may be leaving you feeling empty. And we don't talk about that. Right? Because how dare you not be grateful for being given all of these accolades. But it's really, really important to know that your life has value because it's you not because of what you do. And those messages have been put on you by a narrative created by somebody else's experience. And I know that that's hard to swallow because we live in a culture where it's the opposite. Right. But that is the antidote to the suffering of the Golden Child Syndrome is realizing that you can be loved, that you are valuable, that you can make mistakes and you can be cared for in your failures and in your imperfections. And that freedom is in knowing who you are outside of what you do, that you are valuable because of who you are, because of your heart. Right. So Golden Child Syndrome. Do you suffer from Golden Child Syndrome? And what do you need to do to reclaim the value that is what is not gold? We know that other metals are valuable. Silver, iron, copper. Maybe you're not gold. I'm not gold either. I'm a mishmash of all of them. And I've had to learn, and I'm still learning, that value can come from things that aren't gold, that you can be loved even if you're not perfect. This has been Dr. Nicole, and today we've been talking about Golden Child Syndrome. And so we went through a list of six signs, and we went through symptoms and we went through strategy that if you're dealing with Golden Child Syndrome, what it might be like and what you can do about it, and if this has been valuable for you, it helps me to know. So send some love. Maybe leave a comment or a heart or share it. And if you're not following this page, I'm here for you every week. And a lot of the topics that we share come from our listeners, come from our family, and so let us know if there's anything you'd love to learn about. All right. If you want to learn more, check out the link in the bio. We have all sorts of good stuff. Freebies, lots of love. All right, see you guys later. Thanks for being on the live.