The ‘Hero Child’ and the Achievement Obsessed Adult

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In families, there tend to be prescribed roles for family members. In a healthy family unit, these roles are flexible and likely based on differences in personality, interests, or behaviors. In dysfunctional families, these roles serve a different purpose, to help restore balance within a family unit that is in chaos.

One of these roles, the ‘hero child’, is the high-performing member who uses their achievement and ideally success to hold the family together. The hero is motivated by external reward, usually praise from parents or others, and achieving whatever they perceive success to look like. You might be thinking, ‘Well, what’s wrong with success? That doesn’t sound so bad….’ True, the hero child role may be less associated with later depressive symptoms than some other dysfunctional family roles, including the ‘scapegoat’ and the ‘lost child.’ ^1,2 However, the role of the hero comes with its own pitfalls and struggles that often persist into adulthood and shape personality in ways that can be maladaptive.

One such struggle is the tendency towards perfectionism as a means of feeling in control. If the hero can just be the best and achieve their goals, then they will finally be happy, in control, and most importantly, feel loved. This thought process feeds a constant cycle of chasing achievement to feel worthy, loved, or enough. Often the hero child’s efforts are not acknowledged or rewarded, in fact, they are often taken as a given, making the need to achieve in order to receive praise or recognition like an unattainable high that they keep chasing, the one that will balance things out and bring everything back to its emotional center, causing the family to return to a sense of stability.

As adults, hero children tend of be high achieving to a fault, often confusing their own self-worth with what they have accomplished, accepting nothing less than perfection from themselves (and sometimes others), and tend to be more anxious, Type A people (and in my experiences, mostly women, though women are over represented in treatment in general, so men can certainly play this role too). Employers love them because they get the job done, and friends value them because they always have an answer or a plan. But what’s underneath this seemingly enviable exterior may be a body and mind wracked with panic, self-loathing, and exhaustion at never being enough for themselves or anyone else.

When your self-worth is defined by whether or not you are successful, you are doomed to miss out on the life lessons of some really pivotal failures, failures that we all need in order to learn and grow. How many times has the loss of one opportunity led to the opening up of another? What scenery do we miss when we are achievement obsessed?

If this applies to you, here are some questions to ask yourself in order to better understand what your need to achieve might say about you and whether you might be obsessed with reaching that next milestone:

1. Do you base your inner value on whether or not you are the best at something?
2. How do you measure success in your world? Where did that view originate?
3. What is your tolerance for failure? When was the last time you failed at something?
4. Are you constantly needing to move on to the next goal, the next trophy, the next race? Do you get bored without this challenge?

As you examine your answers, think about the messaging you received growing up about what success looked and felt like, as well as what is meant in the larger scheme of what your family valued (or didn’t). Consider your tolerance for making mistakes. Recognize, too, that wanting to achieve isn’t a bad thing, but when we are disconnected from the origins of this desire, or if this desire has gotten bigger than us, it’s important to take a step back and reevaluate our priorities. In other words, if achievement is important to you, take a moment to ask yourself why. And if you were the hero child in your home growing up, remember this: You are enough.