‘Pedestalling’ is the act of placing someone or something on a pedestal. Figuratively, it means to idealise, glorify, or treat a person as unrealistically flawless. In dating or personal relationships, it refers to putting a partner on such a high standard that their human flaws are ignored.

So yeah, not actual pedestals, although I do have room to appreciate a good old Greek column. I mean the emotional ones. The ones we place people on when we need them to be more than human. The ones where someone becomes not just a person we admire, or love, or respect, but someone who somehow holds the answer to who we are, whether we are safe, whether we are acceptable, whether we are doing life properly.

Pedestalling can look like love, admiration, devotion, loyalty, even good old-fashioned respect. It can feel warm and noble from the inside, which is why it is so hard to spot. We might not think, ‘I have made this person responsible for my sense of self.’ We might simply think, ‘They are amazing, and if they approve of me, perhaps I will finally feel okay.’

Underneath, I think pedestalling is often a search for certainty.

It can carry a very particular kind of longing. You know. I don’t. You are solid. I am not. If you approve of me, I must be okay. If I can become chosen by you, perhaps I will finally stop feeling so unsure of myself. It is less about admiration itself, and more about trying to borrow someone else’s solidity when we don’t yet feel able to trust our own.

And this is where it becomes tricky, because of course we are supposed to look up to people. As children, we need our adults to feel bigger than us. Parents are supposed to be on a pedestal, to some extent. We need them to know what they are doing, even when they absolutely do not, and are secretly making dinner out of toast, panic and a mouldy bit of cheddar. It is developmentally appropriate to believe that our caregivers are giants. They are meant to be the people who know where the clean socks are, how to cross the road, and what to do when the boiler makes a noise like a haunted trombone.

But some of us don’t quite get to climb down from that model. Or perhaps we do climb down, then immediately build another pedestal for someone else. It is a model after all. And our brains are ALL about model and pattern learning.

A kind teacher, a good friend, a nice boss, a supportive partner, a sibling, a therapist, a coach, a writer who captures your feelings in so many words, a musician whose songs seem to see right through your heart. Someone clever. Someone charismatic. Someone who seems to move through the world with the kind of confidence we imagine would solve everything, if only we could borrow it for a weekend.

There is always something seductive about that. Believing that someone else has the map can feel like rest. For a moment, we can stop trying to know. We can place our uncertainty into someone else’s hands and hope they will carry it for us.

The problem is that pedestalling makes us small.

Not immediately nor obviously. At first, it can feel expansive, even exciting. We feel inspired. We feel connected. We feel like we have found a person who sees through the fog. But slowly, without quite noticing, we may start shrinking ourselves around them. Their opinion starts to matter more than our own. Their approval becomes oxygen. Their disappointment becomes catastrophe. Their attention becomes proof that we exist.

And that is an awful lot to put on another human being, especially as humans are notoriously human. Very inconvenient species, honestly. Leaky, inconsistent, tired, defensive, weird about WhatsApp replies, frequently hungry.

Eventually, the pressure usually shows itself somewhere. The person on the pedestal may sense the weight of being turned into someone else’s emotional cathedral and back away. They may not really see us, because from that far above us, human-to-human contact becomes almost impossible. Or they may simply do something ordinary and disappointing, and suddenly the pedestal cracks.

The result is often the same. We are crushed.

Not just disappointed. Crushed.

Because when someone falls from a pedestal, it does not feel like a person has behaved badly, or failed us, or shown a limitation. It feels as though reality itself has betrayed us. The person who was supposed to hold the certainty has become uncertain. The person who was supposed to protect us from ambiguity has become ambiguous. The knight in shining armour has taken his helmet off and, annoyingly, he has pores.

This is often the moment where the brain wants to revert to splitting. Splitting is that black-and-white movement where someone goes from ‘wonderful’ to ‘terrible’, from ‘safe’ to ‘dangerous’, from ‘my person’ to ‘dead to me’, from ‘I adore you’ to ‘how dare you exist near me with that face’. It can feel powerful because it creates a kind of certainty. Painful certainty, but certainty all the same.

If I can make them all bad, I don’t have to feel the grief of losing the fantasy quite so sharply. I don’t have to hold the complexity of what was good, what was painful, what was real, what was imagined, what belonged to them, what belonged to me, and what still matters. Black-and-white thinking can feel like emotional tidying up, but life is very rarely that clean.

I’ve never much liked the phrase ‘there is a lot of grey between black and white’. It sounds so dreary, like emotional drizzle. I think there is a whole rainbow between black and white. Every other colour lives there. The difficult colours. The beautiful ones. The muddy and the bright ones.

People live there too.

The same person may love us and hurt us, be generous in one moment and controlling in another, frightened and frightening, deeply important to us and still no longer good for us in the same way. Someone can be a bit of a dickhead and still be someone we love. That last one is especially important, because when we stop pedestalling someone, we may worry that we are becoming cruel. We may worry that if we let ourselves see their flaws, we will lose empathy. We may worry that calling something unacceptable means we are dehumanising them.

But often it is the opposite.

Pedestalling is not really humanising. It turns a person into an authority, a symbol, a saviour, a tyrant, an answer. It removes them from the messy category of ‘person’ and places them into the much more dangerous category of ‘the one who decides whether I am okay’.

When we let them come down from the pedestal, we may actually be returning them to their humanity. They stop being the judge of our worth, the keeper of all answers, the sacred figure whose mood controls the weather. They become a person again.

A flawed person. A loved person, perhaps. A person with history, wounds, habits, gifts, blind spots, tenderness, nonsense, timing issues and probably at least one deeply annoying way of loading a dishwasher.

And we are a person too.

That is the bit we often miss. The pedestal does not only distort them. It distorts us. It asks us to relate from below, to look up, to wait, to hope, to be chosen. Coming out of pedestalling is not just about seeing the other person more clearly. It is about standing at our full height.

Which can feel terrifying.

Because if they no longer have the answer, then maybe no one does. If they are not the certainty, then we have to live without certainty. If they cannot tell us who we are, then we have to begin the much more frightening, much more adult work of trusting ourselves.

Not perfectly. Not arrogantly. Not with a grand declaration and a wind machine. Just enough to know that we can love someone without handing them the keys to our wellbeing. Their opinion can matter without becoming our oxygen. We can see the whole rainbow, even if part of us would rather have the brutal simplicity of black and white.

That, I think, is what happens when the pedestal breaks.

We do lose something. The fantasy of being saved. The borrowed certainty. The delicious, dangerous idea that someone else might know how to be us better than we do. There can be real grief in that, because the pedestal was not stupid. It was trying to protect us. It was trying to give us something to believe in when uncertainty felt too much.

But what comes afterwards may be more useful and simply more human. Proportion. Reality. Love without worship. Boundaries without dehumanising. The possibility of standing beside someone, instead of beneath them.

And perhaps that is another kind of safety.

No knight in shining armour. No plinth. No chosen-one glow.

Just two humans, complicated and colourful, standing on the same ground, seeing each other on the same level, and being ok with that. Safe in our shared humanity.

Now that’s the kind of art I can truly step up to.