I could be wrong, but I believe that one point or another in all of our lives, we have felt that we weren’t good enough. Not sure about psychopaths and narcissists, but possibly even them. And the measuring stick that we beat ourselves with seems to be, “Everyone else is better than me, even the people I don’t like that aren’t better than me.” We sometimes wrap the barbed wire of, “why can’t I be more like them even though I can’t stand them and I don’t like what they do” around the stick for added emphasis during beatings. And we are talented when it comes to beatings. We don’t take breaks, we don’t stop while driving heavy equipment, we don’t let anything get in our way of beating ourselves up every chance we get because we are not good enough.
The question is “why”? Why are we not good enough because we don’t do what other people do? For me the answer is that we’re asking the wrong question and we’re expending heaps of energy doing something that keeps us from asking the question. Because if we asked the right question we would get an answer and that would lead us to do something about it and, in reality, who we are in this moment, beatings and all, is where we want to be. Sick, huh? Yeah, but humans are odd creatures who don’t often do what is in their best interest. Go figure.
The real question you should be asking is “what do you want?” What is it about those other people that you do like and don’t already have? Skills, money, friends, opportunities…..Next question: “why don’t you have those things?” (You can fill in the blank here. Too many answers and most of them will be wrong if not outright deceitful.) This is the point that is scary for most people. Where we have set arbitrary limits on ourselves, set up defenses, made up excuses that have become laws and character traits, and built armor so think we don’t see past it any more. All to keep us the way we are so we can beat ourselves up about it. So if your to the last question had anything to do with I Can’t, I don’t have the ability, I’m not like that, I’m not able, I can’t figure out how, then congratulations. you have once again described your armor in detail. Now what? Well, that’s up to you. Until you remove the armor there’s not much you can do because there’s not a lot of maneuvering to be done in hundreds of pounds of metal. If you want to stop the beatings, start with getting a can opener and ask someone to help you get out of this contraption. Because until you can truly see yourself, there’s no way you can accept yourself. And one of the key ingredients of happiness, besides a lack of beatings, is self acceptance.