Moving the Goalposts: When Nothing You Do Is Enough

By Todd Doyle, author of Healing the Shattered: Surviving Narcissistic Abuse

Moving the goalposts is when meeting one expectation does not satisfy the person who set it. It just reveals a new one. You finally do the thing they asked for, and instead of acknowledgment, you get a new complaint, a new standard, a new reason it was not quite right.

What This Looks Like

You stay home more, and now you are “boring.” You go out more, and now you are “never around.” You apologize, and the apology “does not sound sincere enough.” The specific complaint keeps changing, but the underlying message, that you are failing somehow, stays constant.

Why It Is Disorienting

When expectations keep shifting, it becomes impossible to actually succeed, which can make you feel like the problem is always you, rather than a standard that was never meant to be met. That exhausting, always-falling-short feeling is a clue, not a sign you need to try harder. Over time, this can produce a specific kind of chronic self-doubt: a sense that you are perpetually, vaguely inadequate, without being able to point to anything concrete you’d need to change to fix it.

A Way to Check

Look back at the last several specific complaints. Did meeting one lead to real satisfaction, or to a new complaint? A pattern of the second is worth naming to yourself, even if you do not say it out loud yet. Keeping a brief, private record, even mentally, of what was asked for versus what happened after you provided it, can make the pattern visible in a way that’s hard to see while living inside each individual incident.

How This Differs From Reasonable, Evolving Expectations

Expectations in a healthy relationship do sometimes genuinely change as circumstances change, and that’s normal, not manipulative. The difference is whether the new expectation is explained honestly and applies consistently going forward, versus whether it’s simply the next in an endless series, with no version of your behavior ever actually being enough. If meeting a request is ever met with something close to genuine satisfaction, even once, that’s meaningfully different from a pattern where satisfaction never actually arrives.

What Can Help

Focus on whether your own actions are reasonable, rather than whether they have finally earned approval that may not be available regardless of what you do. See Manipulation in Abusive Relationships: A Guide to Recognizing the Tactics for related patterns.

This article provides general education and a survivor’s perspective. It does not diagnose another person or replace individualized mental health care or safety planning.