Should

Forget about the disgraceful creature you actually are; this is how you should be; and to be this idealized self is all that matters. You should be able to endure everything, to understand everything, to like everybody, to be always productive.
— Karen Horney, Neurosis and Human Growth (1950)

Some of us might recognize this inner voice. It arrives without announcement, in the middle of the night, in the wake of a small failure, sometimes for no reason at all. It does not ask. It convicts. It speaks with the confidence of a judge who has already reviewed the evidence and reached a verdict.

Karen Horney called this the tyranny of the should. We develop an idealized self, a flawless version of who we are supposed to be, and set it in authority over the actual self. The gap between the two is not experienced as distance to be travelled, but as failure already confirmed.

The inner dictates run long. We should be able to endure everything. We should like everybody. We should never feel hurt. We should always be productive, always be understanding, always be serene and unruffled. Taken together they describe not a human being but a weather system that never changes. And when told we expect too much of ourselves, many of us will defend the demands. It is better to expect too much than too little. What we rarely notice is that the shoulds operate with complete disregard for actual conditions. They do not adjust for circumstance or exhaustion. A person feels they should have resolved a friend’s complicated marriage after a single conversation, or produced serious work alongside a nine-hour day. The standards don’t bend. So when we fall short, the response arrives with a force entirely out of proportion to what happened, because we believed, until that moment, that we should have managed it.

But something else is operating beneath all this. The “should” is not merely demanding. It is backed by self-hate. Behind every unfulfilled inner dictate waits a punishment: not disappointment, not gentle correction, but contempt. It is the threat of punitive self-hate that lurks behind the shoulds that truly makes them a regime of terror. The idealized self is a prosecutor with no interest in acquittal.

When we cannot comply, we rebel. But rebellion accomplishes nothing. The inner dictate remains in force even when we defy it. Compliance produces chronic strain, the feeling of standing on tiptoe indefinitely. Rebellion produces its own guilt. There is no freedom in either direction, only two ways of registering the same coercion. A person caught between two contradictory shoulds—I should be completely dedicated to my work, I should give everything to my family—cannot make a rational decision between them because the opposing demands are equally absolute. The question of what we actually want does not enter the picture at all.

Over time the tyranny reaches something deeper than behaviour. The shoulds begin to replace genuine feeling with a convincing imitation. We become so thoroughly trained in how we should feel that we lose access to what we actually feel. One patient described what remained when she finally saw through it: “All was negative, reactive, compulsive, imposed from without. Inside, there was absolutely nothing of mine.” These are pseudofeelings, not felt experience but a performance of it, run by the regime.

Genuine ideals behave differently. They have obligating power but leave us free. We pursue them because they are ours, because they reflect something we actually believe. The “should” cannot offer this. It can only demand compliance or punish its absence. The work of recognizing that difference, between a value we hold and a verdict we have been living under, is slow. But it is the only direction in which something genuinely ours waits to be recovered.