Most of us live in a state where we are fully convinced that who and what we are right now isn’t good enough.
This isn’t because we don’t ‘love’ ourselves enough. This isn’t because we have chosen to feel inadequate or because we aren’t using our positive thinking techniques enough.
This isn’t because of some failing on our part - and a lot of the time it’s not even something we are consciously aware of enough to QUESTION, because it’s such a deeply held, main-stay in our lives.
You see, we live in a culture that has normalized this constant sense of ‘not enough’ to the point where it’s an assumed way of being.
It’s deeply painful, and it drives us to live lives where we are on a constant quest of seeking - seeking self improvement, healing, growth, achievement and external validation - with an underlying feeling that no matter what happens, it’s never enough to make us feel fully safe.
For the most part, we all have those areas of our lives that we ‘scapegoat’ as being the REASON we can’t love ourselves how we are and can’t feel good enough - our bodies aren’t the right shape/size, our careers aren’t impressive enough, we aren’t in the right kind of relationship, we aren’t spiritual enough, we don’t have the right kind of personality - and we are convinced that if we could just improve these parts of ourselves THEN we would be worthy of love and THEN our lives would feel how we want them to feel.
We are convinced that if we just fix what we perceive to be the ‘broken’ or ‘lacking’ part ourselves that in doing so we will finally be set free from the feelings we don’t know how to process or that we may not even be fully aware of.
For most of us, it’s just a foregone conclusion that we aren’t happy because we are flawed in ‘x’ or ‘y’ way, we have all this evidence from our past experiences and from culture that reinforce that we aren’t getting what we want because of ‘x’ and ‘y’, and we are being sold solutions for how to fix ‘x’ or ‘y’ about ourselves all day long every day, adding to the conditioning that it’s true - we are right about what’s wrong with us and right about what we need to fix in order to feel better.
Do you resonate with this?
Then from here, when we start to become aware of this lack of feeling good enough, so much of the time we venture into self help, spirituality and personal growth work - and then trying to become someone who ‘loves themselves’ becomes the new thing we are trying to achieve.
Rather than finding tools that actually help us discover the roots of WHY we feel so inadequate and like we must be in a constant state of fixing and changing ourselves, we instead get a bunch of messages about how our lack of self love is the reason we can’t find good relationships, it’s the reason we don’t know what our purpose is, it’s the reason we have poor boundaries and the reason we can’t ‘get our lives together’ in whatever area we feel like we’re failing most.
We’re told that our lack of self love is the new ‘problem’ we must ‘fix’ in ourselves - leading us to carry the same energy of constant self rejection into this practice of ‘self love’.
With all of this, we have to recognize that at the end of the day, we aren’t actually seeing the REAL issue, and we are trying to solve our problem with tools that will never work.
We are trying to fix ourselves, to improve ourselves and to change the externalities of our reality, in an attempt to remedy an internal state that we don’t know how to process, and that we don’t know how to regulate.
We aren’t seeing the ROOT of what’s happening, so no matter what we try to do to fix the problem, we are going to be stuck cutting branches that simply grow back in the exact way and form as the previous branches.
Why Don’t We Love Ourselves?
What we first need to understand before we try to address this issue, is that this issue isn’t a ‘flaw’ in us, a new thing we have to work to ‘fix’ so that we can feel good enough and self assured - and thus like we are doing the ‘right thing.’
For most of us, the ROOT of this continual dissatisfaction is found in the fact that we don’t feel fundamentally SAFE in life.
We live in a state where the world is constantly telling us that who and what we are in this moment isn’t accomplished enough, isn’t attractive enough, isn’t successful enough, isn’t healed enough, isn’t spiritual enough - and we deeply believe these messages because they are the messages we have been getting from culture for our entire lives.
For most of us, this pattern of feeling that we are inadequate and that’s why we are suffering started in our childhoods. Many of us grew up in situations where we weren’t fully safe to be ourselves.
We weren’t safe to go through our learning, growing and developmental phases. We weren’t safe to express and just BE.
Many of us experienced feeling rejected, abandoned, left out, or outright shamed by our caregivers who are projecting their own fear/cultural indoctrination onto us - or they were not able to provide safety and provision for us due to simply not having the resources to do so - and in our childhood minds we took this to mean that there was something wrong with us that must be fixed, in order to get that love and safety.
From our childhood perspectives we learned to blame, shame and reject ourselves whenever we didn’t feel safe and connected - because that was our single point of agency.
We couldn’t control or even really understand our actual circumstances, and we couldn’t perceive our caregivers as flawed humans who may not be right about us or about what is truly ‘good and bad’ - all we knew is that we needed them for everything and that their rejection or abandonment meant that we weren’t safe. Which to us meant that we were flawed, and that we needed to change in order to get that love and provision.
This was then reinforced by the culture around us - this idea that our pain is coming from us failing to be what we ‘should be’ is the water we are swimming in all the time.
We were born into a world that has a very specific set of values - and those values are that life is only as worthy of provision and safety as it is able to keep up with and work within the system.
The system that says that production and consumption are the MOST important things - that what has value is the ever increasing profit margins of those who create the goods and services we want and need.
We live in a system that perpetually tells us that life is not what is valuable.
We are taught to believe that in order to be ‘good enough’ we must be in a perpetual state of productivity and consumption - making the right things, doing the right things and consuming the right things - and if we CAN’T do that that this is a justification for us to then not have our needs met, to not be safe, to not be taken care of, to be marginalized, rejected and left in a state where we aren’t going to be ok.
We are taught to believe that those who are struggling, suffering or who are existing in a way that has them not able to provide for themselves, not able to be ‘normal’ or in any way not willing to participate in culture as it is, as being DESERVING of not having their needs met, DESERVING of not being safe and DESERVING of rejection, ridicule and ostracism.
We are conditioned to believe the narrative that if you can’t keep up, you’re flawed and that you should be doing whatever you need to do to fix yourself so that you CAN keep up.
We blame ourselves, we blame one another and we feel a sense of impending doom because again, we are living in a culture that is set up to make us feel perpetually insecure.
Then on top of that, we are trained to see one another as competition, as a threat and as beings that are either going to help us gain more for ourselves, or beings that are going to get in the way of that end.
We are separated from true community, from care, from the safety and connection we deeply want and need, because we are taught to deny our true selves and to conform to ‘fit in’, while also again, never being able to see others as family but rather as competition for resources and safety.
We are conditioned to reject and deny our emotions, our bodies, our true wants and needs in order to try to be what the world tells us we need to be in order to be good enough - and this puts us in a perpetual state of stress and inner turmoil and chaos.
It means that we are always going to feel insecure because culture teaches us to feel that way - that no matter what we do we can’t ever be enough and it teaches us to be so disconnected from one another that we never feel that safety of community - and then rather than us being able to see this for what it is, we are trained to feel that pain and to blame ourselves for it.
We are trained to see the fear and stress and constant feeling of lack as being a ‘flaw’ that we must fix - and culture then sells us never ending self help, spirituality, personal growth and all other forms of changing yourself so that you will be more liked, more approved of and more ‘acceptable’ by culture.
We live in a world that from the very beginning teaches us to hate ourselves and to fear one another.
To try to fix ourselves when we don’t feel safe instead of looking for what our actual needs are and why we feel so insecure.
THIS is the root of all this self hate.
The idea that we are only worthy of love after we have improved ourselves enough to be able to keep up with culture - a culture that we can NEVER keep up with, because it is designed that way.
We can never be enough in our culture, because there will always be more to achieve. More to do in your career. A better relationship to have. More money to make. More goods to consume. More, more, more. No matter what you do, it will never be enough - and thus we will always feel insecure, alone and vulnerable in our system, and so long as we continue to believe that this is because we are flawed in some way, we will be stuck in the torture of it all.
Coming Out Of The Conditioning
The antidote to all of this pain and struggle isn’t more self help.
It’s not more self improvement.
It’s not more questing to fix ourselves or make ourselves better.
Rather, the actual antidote to all of this is to learn to live from a place of feeling worthy, good enough and like we are deserving of love and support, just as we are.
The antidote is to start to shift our personal value system from valuing the system and judging life based on its capacity to live within that system, to valuing life and judging the system based on how well it supports life.
When we can actively shift ourselves from a state of believing that all of our pain and struggle is coming from a ‘lack’ of something in us, when we can shift out of believing that if we were to be loved, accepted and approved of by culture and shift out of the idea that the solution to all of our discomfort is to produce or consume something - we can start to unravel the programming we’ve been handed, we can start to process our past emotions and experiences, and we can start to come into contact with real reality.
You see, the constant trying to ‘fix’ ourselves, really just DISTRACTS us from what’s REALLY happening within us, and from finding the actual steps we need to take in order to feel better in life.
Because the truth is, we aren’t hurting because we aren’t good enough. We aren’t struggling because we are unworthy of love.
It’s possible that there ARE things in our external reality that DO need to shift that will make us feel better - this can still be true - but when we make these shifts from a place of self love and support vs. saying we will ONLY love and support ourselves WHEN we have made the changes we are going to find that finding supportive steps actually becomes possible.
You see, when we start to shift into a state of loving and approving of who and what we are in this moment, we are FIRST going to experience a phase of having to GRIEVE all the pressure, blame, shame and guilt that we’ve been living under.
We are going to go through a phase of having to realize just how HEAVY it is to walk around believing that all of our pain is our fault, and grieving how destabilizing and pressure-filled our lives have been as we’ve been running around chasing becoming our ‘perfect’ self all in the hopes that this would one day ‘fix’ our lives.
We are going to realize just how STRESSED we’ve been, how anxious this has made us, how it may have caused us to live in a state of ‘fight’ where we are CONSTANTLY pushing ourselves past our capacity and into burnout, or ‘flight’ where we are always looking to escape our lives with coping mechanisms and numbing agents.
We are going to realize just how ineffective trying to fix ourselves has been in terms of getting us the love, support and feelings of safety we have been chasing - and all of this is going to be challenging to work through.
Learning to NOT believe that all of our discomfort could be solved by ‘fixing’ ourselves is hard.
But the more we start to practice showing up with love and compassion vs. ‘what’s wrong with me’ energy, the more the fatigue, stress and trauma of all of this will start to come to the surface.
What if you were to start telling yourself that your pain isn’t your fault?
That perfecting yourself isn’t required for being happy?
What if you were to consider that all of the things you think you need to ‘fix’ about you aren’t actually broken, but are in fact parts of yourself that need love, compassion and support?
Next, we will have to start getting curious about what we are ACTUALLY feeling, thinking and experiencing, if we AREN’T busying ourselves with all of our self improvement/being stuck in escape mode.
When we start to notice ourselves going into our familiar loops of thinking that we are struggling because we are bad, thinking that we need to fix this or that about ourselves or believing that when we ‘get over there’ (wherever ‘there’ is to you) that life will be perfect, if we are not blaming, shaming or guilting ourselves - what are we ACTUALLY experiencing?
If we were to let ourselves SLOW DOWN when we feel that urgency to fix ourselves or escape our lives, if we were to SLOW DOWN when we feel that sense of wanting to change and fix our lives and finding that instead we get ‘stuck’ and frozen and aren’t able to motivate ourselves to do anything - and rather than repeating our patterns we instead ask ourselves:
- What am I FEELING right now in my body?
- Where do I feel it?
- What does it feel like?
- What am I hoping will change about this feeling if I were to fix myself?
- What is this feeling telling me?
- What am I needing/wanting right now?
- What’s hurting?
- What do I wish was different about my life?
- What do I NOT want right now, that I don’t know how to get rid of?
- What do I wish I could express that I’m not feeling safe to express?
- What do I wish others understood about me?
- What do I wish I had right now that I don’t have?
By getting curious about what we ACTUALLY feel and what we ACTUALLY want, we are going to start to realize that ‘self improvement’ isn’t actually what we’re looking for.
We’re going to start to realize that our pain isn’t the result of us failing, not being good enough, not producing or achieving enough - but rather that we are being bothered by our circumstances in some way, or we are feeling disconnected, unloved and therefore unsafe - and we are hoping that the self improvement will lead to us getting that love we never got.
We’re going to start to see that what we ACTUALLY want is safety, security and connection - and that we just really believe that we aren’t allowed to have those things until we are perfected.
From here, we want to start to work from our adult perspective.
We want to start to work from a place of self SUPPORT vs. self FIXING.
We want to start to look at our coping mechanisms, the ways we numb and check out, the ways we self sabotage and start saying ‘what do I need right now to feel supported?’
We want to start to look at all those things we want to ‘fix’ about ourselves and ask “what do I think will change about my experience if I were to fix these things? What would I get? What would go away? What do I ACTUALLY want when I say I want to fix or change this or that about myself or my life?’
We can then start to ask ourselves what we can do in REAL REALITY to get those DEEPER needs met.
- Where do we need to communicate?
- Where do we need to set a boundary?
- Where do we need to express something that we’ve felt we aren’t allowed to express?
- Where do we want to say no to something?
- Where do we want to say yes to something?
- Where do we need to FEEL and EXPRESS our emotions in some way?
- How can we start to proactively make changes to our lives that will feel SUPPORTIVE for us?
You see, as we shift into this deeper awareness of what we actually want and don’t want, and start to move from a place of being curious about how we can SUPPORT ourselves vs. working from a place of trying to FIX ourselves - we are going to find that some really important things happen.
- We learn to stop pushing ourselves to burnout. As we do this work we are going to start to realize where we have been working WAY too hard for approval, achievement and questing to become ‘good enough’ - and we’re going to start to have the tools we need to pull back and figure out what actually needs to be done for us to feel safe, seen, heard and validated.
- We are going to realize that all of our coping mechanisms are there for a reason, they are trying to help us, and that we can start to support ourselves in different ways so that we rely on our coping mechanisms less. We will make changes to our lives that are actually MEANINGFUL (setting boundaries, saying no, expressing ourselves, trying new ways of finding fun, relaxation and enjoyment and so on) and in THIS we are going to see that our need for our coping mechanisms decreases naturally over time
- We are going to come out of freeze mode and start to be able to take steps towards the life improvements that actually WILL make us feel better. We will come out of that state of fear that we are not good enough, not loved and not safe that PUSHES us into those states of being stuck and frozen, and in that we will start to actually be able to take steps.
This shift from fixing to supporting will radically shift how you see yourself, how you understand what’s happening with you and it will move you into a place where you can actually take PROACTIVE steps in your life.
It will help you feel less afraid and stressed all the time - shifting you into a better, more stable state of mind which will then facilitate you making clear, conscious choices in your life.
THIS Is how we get out of the self improvement spiral that never leads us to peace.
This is how we figure out what we actually want and need.
We START with the assumption that we are good enough, worthy and safe.
THEN we move into action.
Not the other way around.
<3
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