“Why do I always screw up?!”
I can’t begin to count how many times I’ve asked- yelled, this to myself. So miserable and so desperate to not feel that way.
Why do I feel I’m never enough?
I absorbed the feeling from my childhood of not being good enough. No one told me I wasn’t good enough, but I felt it all the time.
I decided results fell into two categories, Perfect and Failure. I also picked up the lie that I was my behavior. Therefore I fell into those two categories as well.
Perfect or Failure.
I’ve recently seen that Perfect was never defined. If it wasn’t defined I could never know if I achieved it. Therefore I was always a failure. Always.
Excellence was held up as the standard but it was code for Perfect. There was also a strange sense of being no learning curve. I thought I was just supposed to be able to do something and of course, do it perfectly.
Totally unattainable, totally below the surface creating messes all over the place.
I was never smart enough, good enough, organized enough, thoughtful enough, on and on and on. Never enough.
Simply identifying this once doesn’t fix it because it touches so many things in so many ways. The process continues. It’s easier now because I’m aware of it.
Sometimes there are specific events we can remember. Other times there is more of an impression we’re not sure where it came from. We absorb messages from the environment. Messages don’t have to be spoken to become ingrained in our thinking.
One of those messages for me was “not enough”. It looks like “I’m not good enough”, “I don’t do enough.”, “I’m not trained enough.”, I can’t communicate well enough.”
