A Letter About How I Actually Set Goals Now.

A psychoeducational essay on a letter about how i actually set goals now, drawn from more than a decade of practice with driven women in relational-trauma recovery.

Vanessa, 44, arrived at her first January session with a leather planner open on her lap, the goals page already filled in, every line printed in the same neat block capitals her father once required on the family chore chart. She’d spent the two weeks around Christmas hosting her parents, mediating between her sister and her husband, running the sign-up sheet for the church potluck, and she couldn’t point to a single line on that page she actually wanted. She could tell me what she should want. She could tell me what would make the year look accountable to God, to her parents, to her own harsh internal ledger. When she read the list aloud, her voice went flat, the way a voice does when someone is reciting rather than choosing.

In my practice, I’ve noticed this in a particular kind of woman: the one who spent December holding the emotional temperature of every room steady, and who arrives at January already exhausted by goals she hasn’t started. She reads that exhaustion as a motivation problem, or a discipline problem, and resolves to push harder. What I’ve come to think of as achievement trauma is something different. It’s what happens when the girl who was the responsible one, the emotional caretaker, the one who kept everyone else regulated, grows into a woman whose drive runs on fear rather than desire. The goals aren’t really hers. They’re performances of safety.

Here’s the pattern I want to name plainly: when striving comes from distress, reaching the goal doesn’t settle anything, because the fear simply moves to the next milestone. The nervous system never receives the news that it’s safe now. I know this clinically, from thousands of hours sitting with women who can’t understand why success feels like nothing, and I know it personally, because for years I set goals exactly this way. That’s why this post is a letter rather than a framework. It’s what I’d say to Vanessa, and to you, about what goal-setting actually looks like in my life now that I’ve stopped building it out of fear.

This article is educational and developmental in nature. It isn’t a substitute for individualized care from a licensed clinician, and reading it doesn’t establish a therapist-client relationship. If you’re in crisis or having thoughts of suicide, in the United States call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Outside the US, visit findahelpline.com for local crisis resources.

Achievement trauma has a texture, and you already know it.

I want to start with the name, because for a long time I didn’t have one for this either. Achievement trauma is the term I use for a pattern in which goal-setting runs on anxiety and the need to prove your worth rather than on wanting. That’s the clinical layer. The analogy layer goes something like this: imagine a girl who learned early that the only reliable way to feel safe in her house was to be useful, to be excellent, to never be the problem. Now imagine she grows up, gets the degree and the title and the mortgage, and keeps running that same program, except there’s no house anymore. There’s just the program. On a Tuesday afternoon it looks like this: you finish a project you’ve been working toward for eight months, you send the final email, and instead of anything resembling satisfaction you feel a flat kind of dread, and by 4pm you’re already sketching the next thing in a notebook because the quiet is unbearable.

That flatness is the tell. When a goal comes from genuine desire, reaching it lands somewhere. You feel it in your chest, your shoulders drop, maybe you pour a glass of something and sit on the porch. When a goal comes from distress, reaching it doesn’t land because the goal was never the point. The point was to outrun the feeling underneath, and the feeling didn’t go anywhere. It just picked a new target.

I’ve sat across from so many driven women who describe this and then apologize for describing it. They’ll say something like, I know this is a good problem to have. I know I should be grateful. And I understand the reflex, because on paper their lives look like what the rest of us are told to want. But I’m not interested in the paper. I’m interested in the fact that she hasn’t wanted anything, really wanted it in her body, in years, and she can’t tell whether that’s burnout or depression or just what adulthood is supposed to feel like.

It isn’t what adulthood is supposed to feel like. It’s what a nervous system feels like when it has been organizing itself around other people’s emotional weather for so long that it lost the signal for its own. Relational trauma, the slow harm that happens in close relationships when your needs go unseen because someone else’s needs always came first, doesn’t only show up in how you love. It shows up in how you plan. In what you write on the first page of a new planner in January. In the goals you set at 11pm because sitting still felt dangerous.

If you’ve never had language for this, I want you to have it now. Not as a diagnosis. As a door.

Your body can’t tell a deadline from a threat.

Here’s the part that changed how I work, and how I live. Stephen Porges, PhD, the psychophysiologist who developed polyvagal theory, described in his 2007 paper on the polyvagal perspective how the autonomic nervous system is constantly scanning for cues of safety and danger beneath conscious awareness, and shifting our physiology accordingly. He calls that scanning neuroception. That’s the clinical layer. The analogy I use with clients is a smoke detector that was installed in a house where things actually caught fire, and now it’s been moved to a house where nothing burns, and it still goes off every time someone makes toast.

What it feels like on a Tuesday: you open your inbox at 8:15 and there’s a message from your director that just says “Can we talk this afternoon?” Nothing else. And your body decides, before you’ve had a single conscious thought, that this is the fire. Heart rate up, breath high in the chest, jaw set. You spend the morning drafting responses to accusations nobody has made. When the meeting turns out to be about a scheduling change, you don’t feel relief. You feel the exhaustion of having run a marathon at your desk.

“The autonomic nervous system responds to the challenges of daily life by telling us not what we are or who we are but how we are.”

Source: Deb Dana, LCSW, The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy: Engaging the Rhythm of Regulation (2018)

Now apply that to goals. If your nervous system reads unfinished as unsafe, then every open goal is a low-grade alarm, and every completed goal is a very brief silence before the next alarm. That’s why the drive can feel so urgent and so alive. Mobilization does feel alive. Sympathetic activation is designed to feel like something is at stake, because historically something was. Many driven women I’ve worked with have mistaken that urgency for passion for their entire adult lives. They’re not lying to themselves. The signal genuinely feels like caring. It’s just that it’s caring with a threat underneath it.

Desire, when it’s actually desire, has a different physiology. It’s slower. There’s curiosity in it, a leaning-toward rather than a bracing-against. You can breathe while you want something. You can put it down and pick it back up. Distress-fueled goals don’t tolerate being put down; the minute you stop, the alarm gets louder, which is why rest feels so intolerable for women with this pattern. Rest isn’t restful. Rest is the sound of the detector re-arming.

I don’t say any of this to make you distrust your drive. I say it so you can start to tell the two states apart in your own body, because that distinction, more than any planner or system, is what actually changes things. Next time you write a goal down, notice your breath while you do it. That’s data.

The emotional caretaker learns early that wanting is dangerous.

Let’s go back further than the inbox. Most of the women I see with achievement trauma were, in one form or another, the emotional regulator of their family of origin. Family systems therapists call this parentification: a child taking on the psychological or practical duties of a parent. Salvador Minuchin, MD, the family therapist, described in his 1975 work on psychosomatic families how enmeshed systems, where the boundaries between members are so thin that a child’s body ends up carrying the family’s stress, shape the children inside them. That’s the clinical layer. The analogy layer: picture a family as a house, and somewhere in that house there’s a thermostat. In a well-functioning family, the adults hold the thermostat. In the families I’m describing, an eight-year-old holds it, and she’s checking the dial every few minutes to see whether her mother’s mood has dropped or her father’s silence has gotten heavier, and adjusting herself to bring the temperature back.

What that feels like at eight: you come home from school with something you’re excited about, and you can tell from the kitchen that today isn’t the day. So you put it away. You ask how everyone else is doing. You become very good at reading a room and very bad at knowing what you feel in it. Over years, the wanting doesn’t just get postponed. It gets edited out at the source, because wanting something the system can’t accommodate is a liability. It’s easier not to want.

What that feels like at forty-two: someone asks what you’d like to do this weekend and you genuinely don’t know. Not because you’re indecisive, but because the part of you that would know went quiet decades ago. What you do have, in abundance, is the ability to identify what would make everyone else’s weekend easier. So you plan that. And when you sit down in January with your goals, the same thing happens. You write down what would make you less of a problem. More credentialed. More financially secure. Less likely to be criticized. Those aren’t desires. Those are thermostat adjustments.

I want to be careful here, because this isn’t an indictment of your parents. Many of them were doing their best inside their own unhealed histories, and the family systems lens is about patterns, not villains. But the child who held the thermostat became a woman who can’t feel the room’s temperature without adjusting herself to it, and her goal list is where that shows up most clearly. Every item on it is, at some level, a way of keeping the house calm.

When I ask a client to tell me what she wanted at seven, before it got edited, the room often goes very quiet. That quiet is where we start.

Vanessa’s goals were a way to end the wait.

Vanessa comes at seven, after the practice closes, in scrubs with a fleece over them and a thermos she fills at the clinic before she drives over. Vanessa is a composite of several clients I’ve worked with; her name and identifying details have been changed to protect confidentiality. She’s 44, a veterinarian, married fifteen years, two teenagers, and she came to me because she’d set and hit every professional goal she’d ever written down and couldn’t understand why she felt like she was still waiting for something. Between the ages of six and seventeen, she grew up in a strict religious household with a particular practice: a child who’d done something wrong was made to wait, sometimes for hours, before being told what would happen next.

“You’d be sent to sit,” she told me in our third session. “On the stairs, usually, and nobody would come, and you did not know if it was ten minutes or three hours and you did not know what was coming at the end of it. And it was never violent. That’s what I have to explain. Nothing ever happened at the end. And I’m forty-four and my practice manager takes about six hours to answer an email and I am not functional in those six hours. Not functional.”

My own breath went shallow at you did not know if it was ten minutes or three hours. Here’s what I understood as she talked. Vanessa’s goals weren’t goals. They were attempts to shorten the wait. If she was board-certified, published, running the busiest practice in the county, then surely the verdict would come faster, or wouldn’t come at all. Eleven years of an unspecified wait with an unspecified ending had taught her nervous system that the only tolerable state was finished, decided, done. So she finished things. Relentlessly. And every unanswered email put her right back on the stairs.

What shifted wasn’t the practice manager’s response time. A veterinary day doesn’t contain a spare hour, so we worked with what it does contain, which is a minute. I call this guerrilla regulation: small, deliberate physical acts that tell the body it’s here and now rather than there and then. Think of it as leaving breadcrumbs back to the present. Wrists under the cold tap at the scrub sink between consults. Weight pressed into both feet while the next chart loads. One breath let all the way down in the car park before she starts the engine. Deliberately small, because her system was trained on a wait with no stated length and no stated outcome, and six unanswered hours arrive on exactly that setting. She still doesn’t love the six hours. But the last time we met, she told me she’d noticed the email sitting there, felt the familiar drop, put her wrists under the tap, and gone back to the dog on her table. Ten minutes later she realized she hadn’t checked her phone.

Both/and: your drive kept you safe, and it’s also what’s exhausting you.

There’s a moment in this work that I’ve come to expect. A woman sees the pattern, sees that her drive has been running on old fear, and immediately swings to the other side. She decides the drive itself was the problem. She thinks about quitting, downsizing, becoming someone who wants less. And I understand the impulse, but I want to slow it down, because it’s the same all-or-nothing reflex that got her here, just pointed in a new direction.

Both things are true. Your drive was intelligent. It got you out of the house, or through the degree, or into a life with more room in it than the one you were born into. The capacity to read a room, anticipate needs, and deliver under pressure is a real skill, and it’s a skill that was forged in conditions that shouldn’t have existed. That doesn’t make it fake. It makes it expensive. And the expense is the other true thing: the same drive that protected you is now costing you sleep, presence, the ability to sit on a porch without your mind drafting emails, and the ability to know what you actually want.

In dialectical terms, this is holding two seemingly opposing truths without collapsing either one. That’s the clinical layer. The analogy I keep coming back to is a winter coat. The coat you wore through a very cold childhood was the right coat. You’d have frozen without it. But you’ve moved somewhere warmer, and you’re still wearing it in July, and you’re sweating, and you keep telling yourself the problem is that you’re not tough enough to handle the heat. The problem isn’t you. The problem is that no one told you it was okay to take the coat off, and honestly, some part of you doesn’t believe the weather has changed.

What this looks like on a Tuesday afternoon: you notice yourself adding a fourth thing to a day that already had three. Instead of either powering through or berating yourself for being unable to stop, you pause and ask a smaller question. Is this the coat, or is this me? Sometimes the answer is the coat, and you take the fourth thing off the list. Sometimes the answer is genuinely me, and the fourth thing stays because you want it, and that wanting is worth protecting. The skill isn’t in always knowing. The skill is in asking.

I don’t want you to lose your drive. I’ve watched women try, and they end up as anxious about not achieving as they used to be about achieving. What I want is for your drive to be able to answer to you, rather than to a household that no longer exists. Both things at once: honor for what it did, and honesty about what it’s costing. Held together, they make something like room.

The Systemic Lens: The world is paying you to keep the pattern going.

I’d be doing you a disservice if I let you believe this is only happening inside your nervous system and your family history. It isn’t. There’s a third layer, and it’s the one that makes the pattern so hard to see: the world rewards it. Every workplace I’ve ever heard about from a client wants the woman who anticipates needs, absorbs stress, stays late, and never makes herself the problem. She gets promoted. She gets called reliable, a rock, the glue. Those words feel like praise and function like a leash.

The systemic lens is the clinical habit of asking what forces outside the person are shaping what looks like a personal pattern. The analogy: if a plant keeps leaning hard to the left, you can spend years working on the plant, or you can notice that the only window in the room is on the left. Both matter. But you can’t understand the lean without looking at the light.

What the light looks like for the women I work with: they’re doing the majority of the emotional and logistical labor at home, regardless of how equitable the partnership looks on paper. They’re doing the unofficial mentoring, the team morale, the remembering of birthdays at work, on top of the actual job. They’re absorbing the anxiety of aging parents. And every January, an entire industry sells them planners and programs and challenges built on the premise that the reason they haven’t gotten what they want is insufficient discipline. The message is relentless: the problem is you, and the solution is more.

So when a woman with a history of emotional caretaking sets goals from fear, she isn’t just replaying her family. She’s responding correctly to an environment that punishes stopping and rewards the exact hypervigilance her childhood installed. That’s why willpower doesn’t fix it. You can’t out-discipline a pattern that your employer, your household, and your culture are all actively reinforcing. The fear-driven goals work, in a narrow sense. They produce outcomes the world applauds. That’s what makes them so sticky.

On a Tuesday afternoon this looks like a text at 9pm from a colleague asking for a small favor, and the reflex to say yes before you’ve registered that you’re already in bed. Not because you’re weak. Because every system you move through has trained you that yes is what keeps you safe and valued, and your body believed it.

I’m not saying quit your job or blow up your marriage. I’m saying that if you’re going to change how you set goals, you’ll need to expect the world to push back, and to understand that the pushback is not proof you were wrong. It’s proof the pattern was load-bearing for more people than just you.

This is how I actually set goals now.

People ask me this, and the honest answer is that I set fewer of them, more slowly, and from a different part of my body. Here’s what that means in practice, and I want to say up front that it isn’t a system. Systems are what I used to hide behind.

The first thing I do is wait. Not for inspiration, but for my nervous system to settle enough that I can tell desire from distress. In the proverbial House of Life™ framework I use with clients, I think of the foundation, the actual felt sense of safety in the body, as the thing everything else rests on. You can’t build a room on a foundation that’s shaking. So before I write anything down, I ask whether I’m regulated or bracing. If I notice the breath is high and the jaw is tight, I don’t set goals that day. I go for a walk, or I sit with my mug on the back step, and I come back when the alarm has quieted. This alone eliminated about half of what I used to put on my list.

Then I ask a question I learned to ask in my own therapy: if no one would ever know I did this, would I still want it? That question is a scalpel. It separates the goals that are about being seen as worthy from the goals that are actually mine. Some of my most impressive-sounding goals died in the presence of that question, and I grieved them a little, and then I noticed I was relieved.

The clinical term for what I’m describing is interoception: the ability to sense what’s happening inside your own body. The analogy is a radio dial that’s been stuck on someone else’s station for so long you forgot there were others. Learning to want again is learning to turn the dial. On a Tuesday afternoon it might look like noticing, while you’re doing dishes, that a certain idea makes your chest open a little. Not a big feeling. A small one. Those small openings are the desire signal, and they’ve been drowned out by the alarm for so long that they feel almost embarrassing when you first catch them.

What I do with those signals is small, too. I don’t turn them into a five-year plan. I take one action in the direction of the opening and see whether the opening gets bigger or closes. If it closes, that’s information, not failure. If it gets bigger, I follow it a little further. Goals set this way don’t feel like performances because there’s no audience. There’s just me, noticing what I lean toward, and letting the leaning matter.

It’s slower than how I used to work. I get less done. And what I do get done, I can actually feel.

Wanting is a skill you can get back.

I want to return to the Estés line I opened with, about women who sneak a life because the real one isn’t given room to thrive. When I first read it, I thought she was describing women whose external circumstances confined them. Now I think she’s also describing women whose internal circumstances do. The woman with achievement trauma sneaks her wanting the same way: a poem before work, a class she doesn’t tell anyone about, a Saturday she guards without knowing why. She sneaks it because some old part of her still believes that wanting openly, in the daylight, will cost her the house.

You don’t have to stop sneaking all at once. In fact, I’d suggest you don’t. The sneaking is evidence that the wanting survived, and the wanting is the thing we’re working with. What changes, slowly, is that you start to notice the sneaking and treat it as a signal rather than a guilty pleasure. You ask the question: what if this were allowed? And you watch what your body does with that.

The Tuesday afternoon version of this looks almost like nothing. You’re at your desk, and you catch yourself opening a browser tab about the thing you’ve been curious about for a year, and instead of closing it and getting back to work, you leave it open. That’s it. That’s the whole intervention. You let a piece of your own desire stay visible on the screen for ten minutes longer than it would have before. It sounds absurdly small, and it is, and small is how a nervous system learns that the weather has changed.

I won’t pretend the January pressure will go away. It’ll arrive every year with its planners and its challenges and its language of discipline, and the old alarm will hear it and offer you a list of ways to be less of a problem. You’ll probably write some of them down. I still do, some years. The difference is that now I recognize the handwriting. I know which goals are the coat and which ones are me, and I’ve learned that I don’t have to throw out the whole page. I just have to circle the ones that make my chest open, and let the rest sit there uncircled.

If you spent December holding everyone together and you’re staring at January wondering why you can’t seem to want anything for yourself, I’d gently offer this: you can. The wanting isn’t gone. It’s on the stairs, waiting to be told it’s allowed to come down. You’re the one who gets to go and get it.

References.