DEAR REALITY TV LOVER · REALITY CASE STUDIES The Valley: Persian Style · MJ Javid and Tommy Feight
- Stephanie Buckley
- Jul 31
- 9 min read
Why Is She Still Seeking Their Approval?
The Approval Blueprint and How One Woman Inherits It, Marries It, and Passes It Down
Stephanie Buckley, AMFT #147538 · ADHD & OCD Specialist · Family Systems Coach
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Why Is She Still Seeking Their Approval?
One of the reasons I created Reality Case Studies is that psychology becomes easier to understand when we can watch relational patterns unfold in real time. Reality television gives us visible examples of attachment, family systems, emotional regulation, communication, parenting, and the unconscious roles people carry from one generation into the next. My goal is never to diagnose the people we watch. I use publicly presented stories as educational case studies so that we can recognize the emotional patterns operating within our own families.
In this episode, Mercedes “MJ” Javid’s publicly shared story becomes a doorway into one of the most persistent patterns in family psychology: the approval blueprint. An approval blueprint is the learned belief that love, acceptance, or emotional safety must be earned through performance, loyalty, caretaking, achievement, or repeated attempts to satisfy someone who remains difficult to satisfy.
THE QUESTION BENEATH THE QUESTION
When a person keeps seeking approval from someone who repeatedly withholds it, the nervous system may not be chasing praise. It may be trying to complete an attachment task that never felt finished.
This blueprint does not remain confined to childhood. It can influence whom we choose, what treatment we tolerate, how quickly we assume responsibility for other people’s emotions, how we interpret criticism, and how we parent when the next generation begins testing the limits of our authority. The pattern can be inherited, married, and passed down without anyone consciously choosing it.
A Necessary Clinical Disclaimer
I have never evaluated, diagnosed, or treated MJ Javid, Tommy Feight, Vida Javid, or any other person discussed in this article. I do not have access to their complete histories, private conversations, or internal experiences, and reality television is edited for storytelling. This discussion is based on publicly presented statements and scenes and is offered for educational purposes. It is a teaching mirror for our own lives not gossip, diagnosis, or a substitute for professional mental health care.
The Approval Blueprint: When Love Feels Like Something You Must Earn
Children do not begin life asking whether a caregiver’s emotional limitations are about the caregiver. They personalize the relationship. When warmth is inconsistent, criticism is frequent, or approval arrives primarily after achievement or compliance, a child may conclude: If I can become impressive enough, agreeable enough, useful enough, or loyal enough, I can finally secure the connection I need.
Psychology calls this conditional regard: affection or approval feels contingent upon meeting another person’s expectations. The child becomes highly attuned to tone, facial expression, criticism, and shifts in emotional availability. That sensitivity can later look like ambition, humor, charisma, caretaking, conflict avoidance, or relentless efforts to repair relationships that have never offered reliable reciprocity.
THE INTERNAL RULE
If love must be earned, rest can feel dangerous, boundaries can feel selfish, and another person’s disappointment can feel like evidence that you have failed.
The approval-seeking adult may intellectually understand that the parent or partner is unlikely to change. Yet the emotional system continues returning to the same relationship, hoping that a different performance will produce a different ending. This is not weakness. It is repetition organized around attachment hope.
Attachment Theory: Why Inconsistent Love Creates Persistent Pursuit
Attachment theory examines how early relationships shape expectations about closeness, safety, and responsiveness. Anxious attachment can develop when care is meaningful but inconsistent available enough to keep hope alive and unpredictable enough to keep the nervous system monitoring the relationship.
The adult may become exquisitely sensitive to signs of rejection. A delayed response, critical comment, public dismissal, or emotionally flat reaction can activate an attachment alarm. That alarm may lead to reassurance seeking, overexplaining, anger, repeated attempts to obtain an apology, or renewed efforts to win the person over.
ANXIOUS ATTACHMENT IN PLAIN LANGUAGEI
do not know when closeness will be available, so I must work harder, watch more closely, and try again before the connection disappears.
The central problem is not that the person wants love. The problem is that the nervous system may confuse uncertainty with intimacy. Stable affection can initially feel unfamiliar, while emotionally inconsistent relationships feel compelling because they reproduce the original attachment problem the person is still trying to solve.
Bowen Family Systems Theory: How a Pattern Travels Across Generations
Bowen Family Systems Theory views the family as an emotional unit in which anxiety, roles, expectations, and coping strategies travel through generations. The multigenerational transmission process describes how families pass down ways of relating often without anyone intending to repeat them.
A critical parent may have been shaped by criticism. A child who learns to seek approval may later choose a partner whose emotional intensity, inconsistency, or defensiveness recreates a familiar relational position. The next generation then grows up inside a system already organized around who pursues, who withholds, who explodes, who repairs, and who carries the emotional weight of the room.
Differentiation of self is Bowen’s term for remaining emotionally connected while preserving a clear sense of one’s own values, perceptions, and boundaries. A differentiated position does not require cutting off the family or winning its agreement. It sounds like: I love you. I understand that you see this differently. I am still responsible for the decision I believe is healthiest.
THE INTERRUPTION
Healing does not require the previous generation to understand the pattern. It begins when one person stops organizing present-day choices around earning yesterday’s approval.
The Missing Apology: Why Waiting Can Keep the Injury Active
An apology can be profoundly reparative when it includes recognition, responsibility, empathy, and changed behavior. The difficulty arises when emotional recovery becomes dependent upon receiving an apology from someone who has repeatedly shown little capacity for self-reflection.
Waiting for the perfect acknowledgment can preserve an invisible emotional contract: I cannot move forward until you finally confirm that my pain was real. Yet the injury was real before the other person admitted it. The absence of an apology may describe that person’s capacity; it does not determine whether the injured person is permitted to heal.
Acceptance does not mean approving what happened. It means updating expectations according to the evidence. Grief often begins where fantasy ends: when we stop waiting for someone to become the parent, partner, or co-parent we repeatedly hoped they would be.
Narcissistic Traits: Using the Language Carefully
The word narcissist is often used as a shortcut for selfishness, conflict, or emotional harm. Clinically, narcissism exists on a spectrum. Traits can include entitlement, a strong need for admiration, difficulty tolerating criticism, limited empathy during moments of threat, and an intense effort to protect self-image. A personality-disorder diagnosis requires a comprehensive evaluation and cannot ethically be made from television.
Grandiose presentations may appear dominant, superior, or attention seeking. Vulnerable presentations may appear injured, resentful, easily slighted, or preoccupied with being misunderstood. Both can be organized around a fragile self-concept that depends heavily upon external validation.
A narcissistic injury occurs when criticism, rejection, or lost status threatens that self-image. The resulting response may involve rage, withdrawal, blame, contempt, or recruiting another person to confirm the preferred narrative. Understanding this cycle can clarify behavior without excusing its impact.
THE FREEING QUESTION
You do not need to diagnose someone in order to respond to what they have repeatedly shown you.
Triangulation: When a Child Is Recruited into Adult Anxiety
Bowen described the triangle as the smallest stable relationship system. When tension rises between two people, a third person is often pulled in to reduce the pressure. In families, that third person is frequently a child.
Triangulation occurs when a child becomes the messenger, confidant, ally, emotional referee, or proof that one adult is right. The child may learn that connection with one person requires disloyalty to another. Even subtle comments can create a loyalty bind: the feeling that loving both adults is somehow a betrayal.
Children should not be asked to validate a parent’s pain, carry adult information, or choose which version of the family story is correct. The healthiest boundary is simple but demanding: adult conflict remains with the adults, while the child remains free to love each caregiver without emotional taxation.
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Triangulation Explained
When the Approval Blueprint Enters the Marriage
We often choose partners through a mixture of conscious preference and unconscious familiarity. The nervous system recognizes relational rhythms long before the intellect explains them. A partner’s intensity, unpredictability, criticism, charm, or emotional distance may feel unusually compelling when it resembles an earlier attachment environment.
This does not mean people intentionally marry a parent. It means familiar patterns can be misread as chemistry. The adult may continue trying to earn from the partner what could not be secured from the parent: reliable approval, emotional safety, accountability, or the long-awaited experience of finally being chosen without conditions.
Marriage then becomes another arena in which the approval blueprint rehearses itself. One partner pursues recognition. The other becomes defensive, dismissive, or emotionally unavailable. Conflict escalates because the present disagreement carries the emotional weight of an older relationship.
Parenting: How the Pattern Tries to Make Its Next Jump
Intergenerational patterns become especially visible when a child begins developing independence. Disrespect, refusal, bedtime resistance, school avoidance, or inconsistent follow-through can activate a parent’s unresolved fear of rejection. The parent may become overly permissive to preserve closeness or overly reactive because the child’s resistance feels like personal disapproval.
Authoritative parenting offers a healthier middle path. Authoritative parenting combines high warmth with high structure. The parent remains emotionally connected while holding a calm, predictable limit. For example: I understand that you are angry. You may be angry, and you may not speak to me that way. We can try the conversation again when your voice is respectful.
A limit is not a withdrawal of love. Chores, routines, bedtime expectations, school responsibilities, and age-appropriate contributions help children develop executive functioning, self-efficacy, and frustration tolerance. Self-efficacy is the belief that one’s actions can produce meaningful results. Children build it through participation, not rescue.
The 4 Parenting Styles Explained: Which On Is Running Your Home?
THE PARENTING SHIFT
Connection says, “Your feelings belong here.” Structure says, “Your feelings do not remove the boundary.” Children need both.
Teach Him to Fish: Competence as an Antidote to Inherited Anxiety
When adults carry an approval blueprint, they may overfunction for children because competence feels risky. It can be faster to remind, rescue, organize, negotiate, or complete the task. Yet repeated rescue can unintentionally teach the child that adults are responsible for creating success.
Teaching a child to fish means breaking a complex demand into visible, repeatable steps and then allowing the child to experience effort, frustration, correction, and completion. A morning routine might use a written checklist. A school task might begin with a five-minute launch beside the parent. A household responsibility might be modeled once, practiced together, and then transferred to the child.
Movement and team sports can also support regulation by providing structure, feedback, physical exertion, social learning, and opportunities to recover after mistakes. The psychological goal is not simply compliance. It is agency: I can tolerate discomfort, complete a responsibility, repair a mistake, and remain loved while learning.
What Interrupting the Approval Blueprint Looks Like
Notice whose disappointment immediately changes your behavior.
Separate another person’s emotional reaction from your responsibility.
Replace repeated persuasion with a clear boundary and consistent follow-through.
Stop requiring an apology before validating your own experience.
Keep children outside adult triangles and loyalty conflicts.
Offer children warmth and structure instead of rescuing them from every discomfort.
Choose relationships according to reciprocity and emotional safety not familiarity alone.
Pattern interruption initially creates anxiety because the family system is accustomed to the old roles. The approval seeker may feel guilty. The critical person may intensify criticism. The child may test whether the new boundary is real. Discomfort does not necessarily mean the boundary is wrong; it may mean the emotional system has noticed that the choreography is changing.
The Path to Peace Pause
Whose approval were you originally trying to earn, and can you hear that person’s echo in the way you love today?
What pattern in your family is trying to make its next jump and do you want to pass it forward or interrupt it?
Where are you saying the right words without building the calm, consistent structure that would make those words true?
Where have you been trying to diagnose someone when the more freeing question is: What have they shown me, and what will I do with that information?
What would change if another person’s disappointment were information rather than an instruction?
The psychology does not excuse the behavior. Hopefully, it explains the behavior. You cannot change what you do not understand. When understanding creates new choices, choices create new patterns and new patterns can change a family’s trajectory.
Continue Learning
The Narcissistic Mother: Understanding the Invisible Wounds She Left Behind:
Walking on Eggshells: How Narcissistic Abuse Rewires Your Nervous System: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2tmSbhh7BBMqgzhCmndx1P
Dark Psychology and Manipulation: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3iehfgUXX2SVmwmMVmfIsq
Understanding the Roles of Family Members:
Contagious Emotions:
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About Stephanie Buckley
Stephanie Buckley, AMFT #147538, is an ADHD and OCD Specialist, Family Systems Coach, Integrative Mental Health Practitioner, and Sports-Psychology Practitioner. She is a neurotypical wife, the mother of a thriving 23-year-old neurodivergent son, and has been married for more than 34 years.
Through The Path to Peace Therapy Podcast, more than 170 episodes, and over 15,000 downloads, Stephanie helps individuals, parents, couples, educators, and coaches understand the why behind behavior so that change becomes more compassionate, practical, and sustainable.
Website and blog: https://www.thepathtopeacetherapy.com
Book a session: https://www.thepathtopeacetherapy.com/book-online
A FINAL REMINDER
You are not too late for the life that’s meant for you.
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