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 came into my office the second week of January with a hardcover planner pressed flat against her chest, the way you’d carry something you didn’t want anyone to read. Rain was running down the window behind her chair. She opened it to the first page, twelve goals typed in a clean serif font, and said, “I finished this list on New Year’s Day and I already can’t stand any of them.” She’s 44, raised in a home where wanting something for yourself was called selfish from the pulpit and at the dinner table, and she has spent her adult life meeting every target anyone set for her. The only thing she does purely for herself, she told me later, is sit in her parked car for eleven minutes reading a novel before she walks into the house. Nobody knows about the eleven minutes.

I’ve noticed a version of this in so many of the driven women I work with. The planner is full, the goals are impressive, and the body is exhausted before the first one is even attempted. In my practice I’ve come to think of this as achievement trauma: a pattern where the engine underneath your striving isn’t desire at all. It’s fear. It’s the child who learned that being useful, responsible, and impressive was the price of staying safe in the family, and who kept paying that price long after she left home. When a goal comes from that place, reaching it doesn’t land. The fear just picks a new target.

What I want you to hear is that this isn’t a motivation problem, and it isn’t a discipline problem. It’s a nervous system that never got permission to want. Which is why I stopped setting goals the way I was taught to, and why I wrote the letter below, the one I wish someone had handed me at 26 when my own planner looked a lot like Vanessa’s.

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: the pattern that turns every goal into a performance.

I want to start with the name, because for years I didn’t have one. Achievement trauma is what I call the pattern where a woman’s striving is organized around threat rather than desire. It’s a trauma response, meaning the body learned, somewhere back there, that being impressive kept her safe, and it kept running that program long after the danger passed. The closest analogy I’ve found is a smoke alarm wired to a car’s accelerator: every time the alarm goes off, the car speeds up, and nobody ever checks whether there’s a fire. On a Tuesday afternoon it feels like this. You close the deal, submit the grant, get the text that says the family dinner went fine, and you feel exactly nothing for about four minutes before you open the next tab.

That four minutes is the tell. Goals born from genuine desire produce a landing when you reach them. Goals born from distress don’t, because the fear was never about the goal. It was about your worth, and worth can’t be settled by a milestone, so the fear simply relocates to the next one. I’ve sat with hundreds of women who describe this as being “hard to satisfy” or “just wired for more,” and I’ve come to hear those phrases as descriptions of a nervous system that hasn’t been allowed to stand down.

Something clicked for me when I read a 2016 meta-analysis by psychologists Andrew P. Hill, PhD, and Thomas Curran, PhD, on multidimensional perfectionism and burnout. They separated what they called perfectionistic strivings, the reaching itself, from perfectionistic concerns, the dread about falling short and what others will think, and found that the concerns side was what carried the strongest link to burnout across work, sport, and school. I remember sitting with that on my couch thinking: that’s it. That’s the distinction my clients can’t see from inside. The reaching isn’t the problem. The dread riding on top of the reaching is what’s exhausting them.

So when you look at the list you made for this year and feel tired before you’ve started, I’d ask you not to read that tiredness as laziness or lack of discipline. Read it as information. Some part of you already knows which goals on that list are yours and which are performances staged for an audience that stopped watching a long time ago. We’ll spend the rest of this letter learning to tell them apart, starting with the place the whole pattern actually lives, which isn’t your calendar. It’s your body.

Your body reads a goal the way it once read a room.

Here’s what I wish someone had told me at twenty-five: your nervous system doesn’t know what a goal is. It knows safe and unsafe. When you sit down to plan a year, your body isn’t evaluating the plan. It’s scanning the emotional weather, exactly the way it once scanned the kitchen when you were nine to figure out what kind of night it was going to be. The clinical word for that scanning is neuroception, a term I first encountered in a 2007 paper on the polyvagal perspective by Stephen W. Porges, PhD, a neuroscientist who spent decades studying the vagus nerve. Neuroception is perception without cognition, the body deciding “threat” or “safe” before you’ve had a single thought about it.

The analogy I use in session is a security guard in the basement of a building. He never comes upstairs. He never sees the meeting. He just watches the monitors and, when something matches an old threat pattern, flips a switch that changes the lighting in every room above him. You, upstairs, only notice the light changed. You call it motivation, or urgency, or “I just really care about this.” Porges’s work helped me understand that the guard is often responding to a resemblance, not a reality. Bessel van der Kolk, MD, a psychiatrist and trauma researcher, described the storage side of this in a 1994 paper in Harvard Review of Psychiatry: when declarative memory fails, the experience can get organized on a somatosensory level instead, as images and physical sensations, and those memories are relatively impervious to change. That’s the part my clients find both maddening and clarifying. You can know your history cold and still have a body that files a blank January page under old threat. A blank goals page can resemble a childhood test you weren’t allowed to fail. An unanswered email can resemble a silence that once meant trouble.

What this feels like on a Tuesday afternoon is a specific texture. Distress-fueled goals arrive with a tightening under the sternum, a slightly held breath, jaw engaged, an inner voice that says “should” and “have to” and “by March.” There’s heat in it, but it’s the heat of a stove left on. Desire-fueled goals feel almost suspiciously different. Slower. A little quiet. Curiosity instead of pressure, a loosening in the shoulders, sometimes something close to shyness, as if the wanting itself were a small animal you don’t want to startle. Many of the driven women I work with have never felt the second kind while setting a goal, and so they assume the first kind is what passion is.

It isn’t. It’s protection. And the reason this matters practically is that a goal set from a threat state will be pursued in a threat state, which means every task inside it becomes another small emergency. You can’t rest on the way to a goal your body thinks is a verdict. I’ve watched women reorganize their entire year once they learned to check the guard in the basement before they wrote a single word on the page. The question stops being “what should I achieve” and becomes “what does my body do when I imagine this.” That question, though, has a history, and the history is where we go next.

The emotional caretaker learns early that wanting is a liability.

Nearly every woman I’ve worked with who carries achievement trauma was, in some form, the emotional caretaker of her family of origin. She was the one who read the room, smoothed the fight, translated between parents, kept the younger siblings quiet, brought home the grades that gave the household something to feel good about. In the language of family systems this is parentification, a child taking on the regulating role that belongs to an adult. The analogy I use is a kid who’s handed the steering wheel of a moving car at eight years old. She learns to drive. She gets remarkably good at it. And she never, ever gets to look out the window and wonder where she’d like to go.

Lindsay C. Gibson, PsyD, a clinical psychologist whose 2015 book Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents I’ve handed to more clients than I can count, gave me a frame for what happens to that child’s inner life. She describes how children of emotionally immature parents develop what she calls a role-self, a version of themselves built entirely around what keeps the relationship stable, and a private healing fantasy, a story about what they’d have to become for their parents to finally see them. When I read that, I thought about how many of my clients’ five-year plans read like healing fantasies with a budget attached. Get the title, buy the house, run the marathon, and then, finally, be enough to be noticed.

The Tuesday-afternoon version of this is startlingly ordinary. You can’t answer “what do you want for dinner” without first checking what everyone else wants. You chose a career path because it made your mother relax. You’re forty-one and you’ve never once set a goal that nobody else would have approved of. The wanting muscle didn’t develop, because in your family wanting was a liability. A child who wants something has needs, and needs, in a household where the parents’ emotions took up all the oxygen, were dangerous. So you traded wanting for usefulness. Usefulness got rewarded. Wanting got you a look.

I don’t say this to blame anyone. Most of the parents I hear about in my office were doing the best they could with their own unhealed histories. But the effect on the daughter is real, and it shows up every January when she sits down to plan her year and finds that the only voice in the room is still the one that asks, “Will this keep everyone okay?” She’s not disconnected from her desire because something’s wrong with her. She’s disconnected because the desire got put somewhere for safekeeping when she was very small, and nobody ever came back for it.

More than a child could carry: where the wanting went for safekeeping.

I want to slow down here, because this is the part of achievement trauma that gets missed when we talk about it only as a habit or a mindset. Early relational trauma isn’t primarily about what happened. It’s about the size of what happened relative to the size of the person it happened to. A six-year-old handed the emotional weather of a whole household hasn’t been given a job. She’s been given an experience too large for a six-year-old mind to hold in awareness. The clinical name for what the psyche does with that is dissociation, and I don’t mean the dramatic kind. I mean the quiet, protective kind, the way a circuit breaker trips so the house doesn’t burn.

“Early relational trauma results from the fact that we are often given more to experience in this life than we can bear to experience consciously.”

Source: Donald Kalsched, Ph.D., Jungian Analyst, Trauma and the Soul: A Psycho-Spiritual Approach to Human Development and Its Interruption (2013)

The analogy I come back to is a child’s backpack. You can put a lot in a backpack. You cannot put a refrigerator in it. When a child is given a refrigerator’s worth of experience, the psyche doesn’t refuse it, because refusing wasn’t an option. It splits the load. Some of it stays conscious and gets managed through competence, vigilance, and performance. The rest gets carried underground, where it’s still heavy but no longer visible. And here’s the part that matters for goal-setting: your desire often went underground with it. Wanting was part of the load that was too much to feel, because wanting things you couldn’t have, from people who couldn’t give them, hurt more than not wanting at all.

There’s a sentence I’ve kept taped above my desk for years, because it says this more precisely than I’ve ever managed to.

Once I understood this, I stopped asking my clients what they wanted and started asking what they’d stopped letting themselves want. Different question. Different room in the house. On a Tuesday afternoon this is the woman who tears up unexpectedly when a colleague mentions she’s taking a pottery class, and can’t explain why. It’s the strange grief that shows up after a promotion. It’s the flatness on the far side of every finish line. These aren’t failures of gratitude. They’re the underground load making itself felt, the part of you that was set aside so you could keep carrying everyone else, knocking gently to say it’s still down there.

The good news, and I mean this as a clinician and not a cheerleader, is that what was split off for protection can be retrieved when there’s finally enough safety to feel it. That’s slow work, and it’s real work, and it’s the actual project under the project of “setting better goals.” You don’t need a new planner. You need a way to go back down for what got left behind, at a pace your body can tolerate. Before we get there, though, I want to name what the world around you is doing with this pattern, because you didn’t build it alone, and you’re not maintaining it alone either.

The Systemic Lens: The world is paying you for the wound and calling it excellence.

I’d be doing you a disservice if I left this at the level of your family and your nervous system, because there’s a third layer, and it’s the one nobody in a January productivity webinar is going to mention. The pattern you’re carrying is profitable. Not to you. To the systems around you. A woman who will over-function without being asked, who reads the room for free, who sets goals that make her manager, her partner, and her mother comfortable, is enormously valuable to a workplace and a family. The culture doesn’t experience your achievement trauma as a problem. It experiences it as reliability.

Emily Nagoski, PhD, and Amelia Nagoski, DMA, put language to this in their 2019 book Burnout in a way that made me put the book down and stare at the wall for a while. They describe what they call Human Giver Syndrome, the cultural expectation that some people, mostly women, exist to give their time, attention, and bodies to others, cheerfully and without complaint, and that failing to do so is a moral failure rather than a boundary. Reading it, I recognized every client who’d ever apologized to me for wanting something. They weren’t neurotic. They were living inside a rule they didn’t write.

The analogy I’d offer is a building where the lights only stay on if one person keeps pedaling a bike in the basement. Everyone upstairs enjoys the light. Nobody asks who’s pedaling, and when the pedaler gets tired, the building’s response is to send down a motivational poster. On a Tuesday afternoon this looks like your company celebrating your “ownership mindset” for answering emails at 10pm, your extended family assuming you’ll host again because you’re “so good at it,” and an entire industry of goal-setting apps and vision-board workshops arriving every December to sell you a more efficient way to keep pedaling.

The urgency you feel about your goals isn’t only your history talking. It’s also a real response to a real environment that will, in fact, reward you for self-abandonment and quietly penalize you for stopping. I don’t say this to make you feel trapped. I say it because I’ve watched women blame themselves for a pattern that has three authors, and self-blame is just one more way to carry the load alone. You didn’t invent this. You were trained into it at home, and then you were hired for it.

And yet. The systems are real and the fear is real, and so is the competence you built inside them. Holding all three at once is the work of the next section, because I’m not going to ask you to set your drive on fire. I’m going to ask you to find out what’s actually fueling it.

Both/And: your drive is genuinely yours, and fear has been holding the wheel.

One of the things I try hardest to protect in my work with driven women is their competence. When someone realizes her striving has been running on fear, the first impulse is often to burn it all down: quit the job, drop the goals, declare herself done with achievement. I understand the impulse, and I don’t think it’s the way. Both things are true at once. Your capability is real, earned, and yours. And the engine that’s been running it has been fear. The task isn’t to get rid of the car. It’s to change who’s driving.

Salvador Minuchin, MD, the family therapist whose 1975 conceptual model of psychosomatic illness in children reshaped how I understand my clients’ bodies, described certain family systems as enmeshed, rigid, overprotective, and allergic to open conflict, and he showed how a child’s body can end up expressing what the family can’t say out loud. What struck me reading him was how often achievement functions the same way in the families I hear about. The daughter’s grades, her career, her weight, her calendar become the place where the family’s anxiety gets managed. Her accomplishments aren’t fully hers, because they’re doing a job for the system. And still, the skill she developed doing that job is real. Both.

The analogy I offer is a beautiful house built on a foundation that was poured in a hurry, in the dark, by a child. The house is lovely. The rooms are well made. You don’t demolish it. You get underneath it and repair what it’s standing on, which is exactly the work of the proverbial House of Life™ framework I use with clients. On a Tuesday afternoon, both/and looks like this: you notice your chest clench when your director mentions the Q3 targets, you name it, “that’s the old wait for a verdict,” and then you go do the work anyway, from a slightly different place, because you also happen to be good at it and to find parts of it genuinely interesting.

Where I see people get stuck is in either/or. Either I’m passionate or I’m traumatized. Either my goals are real or they’re performances. But desire and distress can share the same goal. You may genuinely want to write the book, and also be writing it to finally be seen. You may love your field and also be terrified of what happens if you stop being the best in it. The practice isn’t to sort your goals into pure and contaminated piles. It’s to learn, goal by goal, how much of the fuel is fear, and to start, gently, adding a different fuel to the mix.

That’s why I’m not going to hand you a system. I’m going to tell you what I actually do, which begins with what recovery has to give back before any goal can change at all.

Recovery gives back what trauma took: your say and your people.

When a woman first walks me through her goals, I’m listening for two things underneath the content, and neither of them is the goal. I’m listening for whether she experiences herself as the author of her own life, and I’m listening for who’s in it with her. Almost always, in achievement trauma, both are compromised. She’s living inside targets she didn’t choose, and she’s pursuing them alone, in the dark, with a planner open at 11pm and nobody who knows what she actually wants. Those two injuries, the loss of your say and the loss of your people, are the heart of what relational trauma does, and they’re the heart of what recovery has to reverse.

Judith Lewis Herman, MD, the psychiatrist whose 1992 book Trauma and Recovery I read in graduate school and have reread more times than any other clinical text, mapped recovery as unfolding in stages: establishing safety first, then remembrance and mourning, then reconnection with ordinary life. What I didn’t expect, coming to her work as a young therapist focused on technique, was how relational her whole model is. Recovery, in her account, can’t happen in isolation, because the wound didn’t happen in isolation. Reading her, I realized my clients weren’t failing to heal because they lacked the right goal-setting method. They were trying to recover alone from a wound that was, by definition, about being alone.

Picture a woman who’s spent her whole life being handed the script and then performing it in an empty theater. Give her a better script and nothing changes. What has to change is who’s writing, and who’s in the seats. That’s the whole of recovery as I’ve come to understand it, and it’s what I want you to hold in mind as you read the next lines.

That’s why, in my own life, the most important shift in how I set goals wasn’t a new question. It was who I told. Achievement trauma thrives in privacy; the goal stays secret so the failure can stay secret too, and the secrecy itself repeats the original disconnection. On a Tuesday afternoon, the practice looks almost embarrassingly small. You say out loud, to one safe person, “I think I want to do this, and I’m not sure why.” You let them see you want something before you’ve proved you can get it. Your say comes back when you choose the goal yourself, in your own words, for your own reasons. Your people come back when you stop pursuing it in the dark.

I’ve watched this reorganize women’s relationship to their own drive more than any productivity system ever did. Not because connection makes you work harder. Because connection tells the security guard in the basement that the building isn’t empty anymore, and a nervous system that knows it isn’t alone can finally afford to want.

How I actually set goals now: one breath, one small want, no verdict at the end.

Vanessa is a composite of several clients I’ve worked with; her name and identifying details have been changed to protect confidentiality. She comes to my office at seven, after her veterinary practice closes, in scrubs under a fleece, carrying a thermos she fills at the clinic before she leaves. She’s forty-four, married fifteen years, mother of two teenagers, and she came in, ostensibly, because she couldn’t figure out why she’d set the same three professional goals four Januaries running and felt sick every time she looked at them.

It took a few sessions to get to the stairs. Between the ages of six and seventeen, in a strict religious household, Vanessa was subject to a practice where a child who’d done something wrong was sent to sit and wait, sometimes for hours, without being told what would happen next. “You’d be sent to sit on the stairs,” she told me, thermos in both hands, “and nobody would come, and you didn’t know if it was ten minutes or three hours, and you didn’t know what was coming at the end. And it was never violent. That’s what I have to explain to people. 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 didn’t know if it was ten minutes or three hours.” Here’s what I heard as her therapist. Vanessa’s goals weren’t goals. They were stairs. Every target she set became an unspecified wait for an unspecified verdict, and her body, trained for eleven years on exactly that shape, went into the wait the moment she wrote the goal down. Six unanswered hours from her practice manager arrive on the same setting. The email isn’t the threat. The open-ended wait is, and a year-long goal is the longest open-ended wait a person can design.

What shifted wasn’t dramatic. A veterinary day doesn’t contain a spare hour, so we worked with minutes, the approach I call guerrilla regulation: nervous-system care small enough to smuggle into a life that has no room for it. Cold water over her wrists at the scrub sink between consults. Weight into both feet while the next chart loads. One full exhale in the car park before she starts the engine. And then, from that slightly settled place, one goal that didn’t look like a verdict. She told me one evening, almost sheepishly, that she wanted to learn to ride again, something she’d loved at twelve and stopped when it was deemed frivolous. Not a certification. Not a revenue target. A want, spoken out loud to one person, with no stairs at the end of it.

That’s how I set goals now, too. I check my body before I check my calendar. I ask what I’d still want if no one ever knew I did it. I make the goal small enough that my system doesn’t read it as a wait, and I tell someone who can hold it with me. Some years the list is short. Some years it isn’t a list at all. But nothing on it is sitting on the stairs, and when I look at it, I can breathe all the way down.

References.