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Creating a highly successful, perfect-seeming life can also serve as distraction from or camouflage for pain.

The compartmentalization of emotions that can't be experienced in a certain moment is healthy skill.

It can however easily become rigidly protective and create a fear of emotional transparency or vulnerability.

When a child or young adult experiences their world as unsafe, full of conflict or trauma, harshly governed by exacting parents, or empty of any measure of emotional security, they can escape through working toward a world where safety is discovered in accomplishment. Constant accomplishment. Seeming perfect, being the highest achiever while in tight emotional control, may create an effective and intricate camouflage.

The camouflage you wear every day keeps you undetected. That's its purpose. You can go about your life without anyone knowing what you're truly feeling—and that can feel very safe.

Yet despair and loneliness can lie underneath, silently growing more potent. And the camouflage that hides you can become its own prison. You must constantly guard against any pain from showing or escaping. It's not that the pain isn't there. It's there all right. But it's shoved........

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