Never Good Enough? Avoid Making it Your Problem

The disappointment of not feeling good enough is something we will all experience at some point in our lives.

But when we are trying to gain love, affection and approval in families where there is a fair degree of dysfunction (abuse, violence, addiction) - adults often do not take responsibility for their own behaviour or take in account the effect their behaviour has on their children.

As a result children often try to fix the problem of the adults around them in order to put things right.

BUT FIXING AN ADULT'S PROBLEMS IS NOT THE JOB OF A CHILD.

Sadly a child may come to see this very failure of not being good enough as their fault because they can never fix this problem no matter how hard they try.

When any of us feels not good enough we face the challenge of moving away from the self-hatred this can generate. The goal is to leave behind the need to control our lives by striving to be the best, and to give up being the 'good' one all the time, to stop pleasing others at the expense of our own true feelings and to stop trying to save the family from past and future pain.

So how can we stop this self-sabotage? We do have a choice. We can contribute to believe that we cannot get past our early conditioning or we can question what we have been taught, especially if it bring ongoing unhappiness.

BECAUSE SOMEONE CREATES AN EXPECTATION FOR US THIS DOES NOT MAKE IT RIGHT OR TRUE.

If we want to counter what others think of us, we can make a list of things in which we excel. Ask yourself this: why haven't these areas of your life been recognised by others? Are we hiding them away? Or have we noticed just how good we are in various areas of our lives?

It is important to watch our thoughts. Stop feeding negative thoughts. This only allows our unhappiness to continue.

When we find what is important to us on a personal level we can then detach from pre-conceived ideas and begin to recognise the person we want to be.