I'm not good enough belief Archives - Baggage Reclaim by Natalie Lue

This isn’t love: You’re in pattern, they’re in pattern

May 16, 2016 By NATALIE Reading Time: 5 Minutes

It’s so hard when I witness someone who keeps throwing themselves in the front line of pain by repeatedly returning to a toxic relationship or not leaving it. It’s not just because I’ve done it myself and it felt like a gradual exorcism of the past I’d veered between burying and blaming me for; it’s because of what it means when you’re in this situation:

That you just don’t love or like yourself that much.

The amount that you don’t like and love you is directly proportionate to how much you claim to like and love the other party.

Everything is riding on this person and it’s a vicious cycle of, “Yes, treat me this badly because I’m worthless and deserve it [because of everything I believed about myself even before you came along]”, and “No, treat me better. Change for me so that I stop being in pain from what you’re doing to me and from what I’m doing to myself by being with you. You can’t just up and leave and be with someone else after everything I’ve sacrificed and after everything you’ve put me through”, and so the pain continues.

The thing is, this just isn’t what a relationship or love for that matter, is all about. Pain, sure, but definitely not love.

You need to part ways.

It is painful, horrific actually in some ways, and downright ‘inconvenient’ when you consider everything you’ve done, everything you’ve suffered through, and the ‘dream’ you have for this person, this relationship, and you, but you need to part ways.

It doesn’t matter who does it but please, whoever does, grab the exit. No, you don’t know what’s in front of you (us humans never do anyway) but better to be experiencing the clean pain of grieving the loss and recalibrating so that you heal and become more of who you are, than the ‘dirty’ pain of remaining in the toxic relationship.

You each represent something to the other that neither of you can really be around. It reflects what remains unresolved from your pasts.

The mistake is assuming that what someone is doing to you is because of you (something about you or something you said or did), and while there’s no doubt that not liking and loving you and the consequences of that (lack of boundaries) provides a fertile ground for this type of relationship, it’s not the cause of the effect (their behaviour and the totality of the relationship).

Sure, you have little or no boundaries but even if you had The Best Boundaries Ever TM, they would be who they are, just not with you.

Advice Wednesday #4: My Ex Exacerbated My Insecurities By Objectifying Other Women–How Do I Move On?

February 17, 2016 By NATALIE Reading Time: 7 Minutes

Insecurity is exacerbated by trying to control the uncontrollable. When you become less self-critical and more certain about you, you don't have to seek validation or fear uncertainty anymore

The tricky situation: In my last relationship, the problem of emotional cheating was a really big insecurity of mine. After reading your blog and starting a Feelings Diary, I came to understand why I was insecure about it and it boiled down to me not being happy in the relationship and me projecting. That said, my ex also gave me reason to worry including talking about other women in sexually fetishistic ways–it made me uncomfortable and was a constant source of insecurity. I understand that this should have been a code red alert for me that we were incompatible (and immature) and that I had fear of “not being good enough”, but unfortunately this experience tinted how I feel about possible future relationships.

Where do you draw the line? I hear about people in mutually fulfilling healthy relationships, such as my mother and her husband, where the partners still talk about other people as being “attractive” and that bothers and worries me due to my own experience with my ex. Is it something I need to sanity check? Is it normal that even in healthy relationships people are still going off being attracted to others? Normally, due to my experience with a Mr Unavailable, I would have chalked that up to being dissatisfied with your own relationship/partner, but this seems to be something most of my close friends do and normalise.

The other thing I hear a lot about from friends in relationships (though not necessarily healthy ones) is this idea of “crushes”. Similarly, this idea about having a crush on someone while in a relationship seems to go into emotional affair territory for me, even if it is superficial. I think it makes me uncomfortable because I find it sort of juvenile really and the people who talk about it are people who tend to be more illusions-driven types.

I understand there is a healthy difference between thinking someone is handsome and then straight out emotional affairs or being actively attracted to another person while in a relationship. To me, however, just the word “attraction” implies an active process, not to mention a “single” mentality. I’m beginning to wonder if this is something that is a personal boundary of mine (emotional and physical monogamy) or if it’s just an insecurity I need to work on and sanity check?

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You’re mixing up a number of issues and using generalisations and judgements that chime with your own narrative to justify your position and reinforce an underlying insecurity and wall that you have about relationships. Let’s take it from the top:

Emotional cheating is an inappropriate emotional liaison with another person, so think of it is an affair sans sex. Often regarded as being worse than if a partner had actually had sex, emotional affairs involve secrecy, lies, and thinking about, talking with, and confiding in another person in a way that isn’t happening within the existing relationship–it’s betrayal.

I’ll tell you what emotional cheating isn’t: acknowledging that a person of the opposite or same sex is attractive.

While a sexual fetish isn’t a crime (depending on what it is of course), objectifying people, whether it’s in front of a partner or not, and being sexually inappropriate in behaviour or language, is a problem. One ex had poor sexual boundaries and was described by my friends as “deviant”–he constantly talked about other women, he made invitations dressed as wisecracks to my friends about threesomes, and degraded me with his behaviour to name but a few. When he came to visit me in the U.S. (this is after spending weeks emailing me about all the “young fillies” that were apparently eyeing him up in a club back home in Dublin), we joined a group of my friends for dinner on the first night and he said to my best pal, “I’m like a fire engine ready to spray you with my hose!”. I ended it with him shortly after, although I internalised his behaviour for quite some time.

Are you making you ‘special’ by being mean about you?

December 14, 2015 By NATALIE Reading Time: 4 Minutes

Stop telling you that you're not good enough. Why do you have to be perfect in a world where that's impossible and no one else is? One of the things that we need to acknowledge when we insist on telling ourselves that we’re “not good enough”, is that coming up with reasons is ironically a way of making us ‘super special’ albeit we’re not exactly going about it in a loving way. The most negative narratives are all tales and reasonings based around us being singled out in some way. It’s the ‘inverted narcissism’ where we imagine that we have far greater powers than we do and continuously take the blame for other people’s feelings and behaviour (or feel as if it’s our duty to please them). We block ourselves to the truth because we only see things with the low self-esteem lens which provides a very narrow view.

When, for instance, we don’t feel too good about ourselves and we’re in a family with another couple of siblings, it is easier for us to say horrible things about us than it is to put ourselves in what we feel is a vulnerable position by standing next to them, so we accept failure from the outset and decide that they are “better than” us or “more loved than” us, so now we’re the odd one out, the one who always messes up, the ______ one, or the one who isn’t loved. We might talk about our family as if we’re the only one who struggled with, for instance, a parent, forgetting that our siblings or the other parent may have gone through their own experiences. Or, even if we acknowledge that we are not the only person who experienced problems, we just can’t help but try to make us extra responsible for how we were treated.

We’ve then carved out our own special space and we end dining off of these feelings and the injustice of it all.

When we spend time trying to uncover the origins of our beliefs or we start to question the authenticity and accuracy of them, we can encounter a surprising amount of inner resistance. We are attached to the security blanket of feeling inferior. We are attached to the story. As a result, when someone points out that we wouldn’t deride another child or person for the same thing, or that parents are not infallible, or we look at reframing that story with some perspective and truth, we can suddenly find that we’re digging our heels in, in subtle and not so subtle ways. It’s like, How will I be special if I don’t tell the story in this way anymore? How will I be special if I don’t make me out to be unworthy in the some way?

When you consciously want a relationship but subconsciously feel bad about you & relationships, it’s a recipe for unavailability

December 7, 2015 By NATALIE Reading Time: 6 Minutes

For a long time, I blamed bad luck, not exactly having any examples of healthy relationships, and the parade of men that I’d dated or gone out with, for why I couldn’t sustain a relationship and why they were always unhealthy. Deep down I felt that all of my experiences confirmed that I truly was “worthless and good for nothing”. I had little sense of self and it was as if I was engulfed in this chasm of cyclical pain due to abandonment, shame, anger and loss. I could never forge anything too deep in case I got ‘found out’ but also because life had taught me that people hurt you, people go away, and that the moment you ever relax, something goes wrong.

My frustrations caused me to frequently ponder if I had a homing device implanted that was sending out signals to emotionally unavailable men, typically ones with mother issues, but what I never really asked myself was: If I believe all of this stuff about myself, love and relationships, how is this playing out in my life? I never gave any deep thought to the connection between what I’d observed and learned early in life and how I was thinking, acting and choosing in the present.

Calling out a Mr Unavailable on his ambivalence gave me a lightbulb moment that sparked a powerful awakening:

I was and am the common denominator to all of my experiences. I am the only person who shows up to every scene and act plus each and every one of these relationships reflect how I felt about me at the time and also what I thought relationships were about. If I truly wanted to feel better and enjoy healthier relationships, I had to be honest with myself in a straight no chaser way. I had to take responsibility for me otherwise, what hope did I have if my life was going to rest on external factors? If I keep putting it on everything and everyone else to change, I am never going to account for my part no matter how small.

Sure, these guys had their issues but what was I bringing to the table that I might actually think that an unavailable relationship was a viable option?

You see— one of the things I’ve noticed is that our past provides a great deal of insight into why we’re repeatedly finding ourselves in variations of the same situation, and because of the lessons and beliefs that we’ve inferred from certain experiences, we are making choices based around those beliefs.

We say that we want certain things but the result is very different. What we don’t always acknowledge are the thoughts and actions that occur between these.

Testing People Out Always Leads To Setting Ourselves Up To Fail

October 13, 2015 By NATALIE Reading Time: 5 Minutes

When you have low self-worth, you don’t treat and regard you as a worthwhile and valuable person, which in turn makes it difficult to comprehend, enjoy and in fact, trust a person’s interest in you. The way it works with negative beliefs is that you’re biased to look for evidence that supports the belief plus how you think affects what you say and do, otherwise you would have to change your beliefs. This results in a self-fulfilling prophecy.

What we don’t often admit to when we struggle with low self-worth, is that we have consciously and subconsciously developed ways of testing people out and proving our theories. A part of us gets to feel vindicated and “right” but then an even bigger part of us gets to feel wounded and stuck in the past.

As a young girl growing up in Dublin, Ireland, there weren’t many other black people about at the time (very different now!) and so I stood out and got noticed. For somebody who felt as if she had so little control and worth in her life, discovering that I could attract boys was at once a delicious boost of [pseudo] power and worth and at the same time, as the years went on, me who expected to be abandoned and who didn’t have very much self-belief, became increasingly suspicious of why somebody might want me. Ever since my teens I’d believed that the only reasons someone had to be interested in me was because of how I looked (and so who they assumed that I would be) and wanting to get into my pants, and various painful experiences acted as supporting evidence. It had become clear to me that I could certainly ‘get’ attention from guys but I couldn’t ‘hold’ them or ‘hold’ them and be treated decently and feel good about myself at the same time.

If there were 99 reasonably healthy relationship partners in a room and 1 shady/unhealthy one, I’d find that one.

It’s not as if someone who didn’t seem to match my belief alleviated my concerns– I just switched to being suspicious of why they were behaving that way or ruled them out as “too nice”. It’s as if I felt that they were too good for a “girl like me” and that it was only a matter of time until they discovered how rejectionable I was. I’d be a ‘nice icing girl’ covering up the ugliness of who I was. What I also didn’t acknowledge is that if I didn’t feel that I had any worth and only focused on, for instance, appearance, then of course I was also going to see and choose things in those terms.

My old secret test rolled out in a few different ways and was based on the premise: If a guy makes my physical attributes or his desire to bed me his primary focus via words or actions, things are doomed.

I decided that they didn’t want to truly get to know or value me.

Our “I can” and “I can’t” isn’t always accurate

September 8, 2015 By NATALIE Reading Time: 5 Minutes

For several months after I passed my driving test last October, each time I had to drive somewhere new or that in my mind was a “scary place” (Clapham Junction, the winding country roads near me and the M25 spring to mind), I’d quietly worry about the journey and anticipate drama – in my mind, I’ve been in many crashes! Clearly, I am fine, so when the same ‘ole thought pattern started several weeks back, I halted it in its tracks, laughing to myself as previous journeys flashed through my mind. My perception of where I can drive and what I can handle, clearly needed to catch up with reality.

It reminded me that before my ego, or inner critic, or inner child, or Debbie Downer and Doubting Dick, or Penny the Pleaser or whoever else chips in their two cents and rains on my parade, I might as well give things a try and pay attention to what happens, how I feel and what I learn as opposed to whipping me up into anxiety or curtailing me.

Clearly, what I think that I can or cannot do is inaccurate. This is true for a lot of us.

We don’t spend enough time in the present and either live in the past and use it as a predictor of the future (and tend to use dodgy reasoning rather than helpful lessons and insights) or we try to anticipate what’s next (and predict doom or over-egg it).

It’s interesting that despite us often convincing ourselves that something will be impossible or very difficult, when we do it anyway or it happens, we are slow to notice and accept this. We look for the catch.

We can be so entrenched in stressing ourselves out and focused on the story of our eff-ups and so-called imperfections, that we don’t internalise our accomplishments and achievements never mind the good stuff as it’s happening.

We convince ourselves that we’re a fraud and even if we do something a thousand times, we’re carrying on as if it’s a fluke or a con and that any minute now we’re going to be found out— Imposter Syndrome.

Do You Have A Circular Issue?

April 28, 2014 By NATALIE Reading Time: 5 Minutes

Do you ever find that you’re circling back to the same core issue(s) time and again, even though on the surface, they seem different and even unrelated? How the hell did I wind up back here again?, you wonder.

Sometimes we have an idea of what’s needed or even know the solution to a particular issue, but because we don’t like what that solution looks like and represents in terms of the decision or the actions we’ll have to undertake, we decide to do something else, likely whatever creates the least discomfort or certainly a lot less than what the alternative involves.

We’ll make these tweaks and they may provide some temporary relief but then soon enough, we’re complaining about that same person’s inconsiderateness or we’ve substituted one worry or even drama for a fresh worry or drama, as if we feel most at ease when we’re wondering what we’ve done wrong ‘now’.

One friend, after telling me about how nothing is ever good enough for her mother, the boss who doesn’t praise her enough, her boyfriend’s ex who is “amazing” (she looked her up on Facebook) and a threat, the very quiet coworker that keeps to himself and yet she’s taking it personally, the frenemy who is behaving badly and the worry list goes on, asked if I could spot the problem:

There’s a theme. Several different situations over a period of time with people who are unconnected. No, it’s not that she’s not “good enough” or that these are all her fault – the theme is that she thinks that there’s something wrong with her and sees her worth at the centre of other people’s behaviour and ends up people-pleasing to compensate and validate. It doesn’t mean that some of these issues aren’t issues but they would be less of an issue or certainly an issue put into perspective, if she wasn’t riding what little self-esteem she has like Zorro and struggling with a long, drawn-out Worry and Imagination hangover.

How our perceived entitlement to what we want is keeping us stuck and why we need to challenge what we believe we’re owed

April 21, 2014 By NATALIE Reading Time: 5 Minutes

I find with Baggage Reclaim, that there becomes a theme to the types of stories that people are sharing with me or a common thread in what it is that keeps each person stuck with their thinking and behaviour, and so far this year, that theme is obligation and entitlement. We’re either feeling duty bound even when we’re not, or we’re cycling through a thought process that rests on this sense that we’ve been and done all of the things that we feel that we’re ‘supposed’ to in order to have got what we desire and it hasn’t worked out, hence we conclude that we’ve either been robbed or that it must be due to us not being “good enough” in some way.

Due to having an overactive guilt thyroid, many of us end up being burdened with duties and this perennial sense of obligation to be and do the things that will ‘please’ others, often at our own expense. This in itself actually taps into the issue of entitlement, what we believe certain things that we are or do give us a right to receive or do. For instance, when we’re a pleaser, there is at the bare minimum, an underlying expectation that in exchange for suppressing ourselves and catering to other people’s needs, expectations, feelings, opinions, and wishes, that in turn, we will receive validation, attention, love etc, or we’ll at the very least minimise or outright avoid conflict, criticism, disappointment, and rejection. We spend our time being and doing the things that we feel constitute a “good person” or a “good girlfriend/boyfriend”, even if some of those things involve us not having boundaries, and then we feel cheated that we’ve gone to these lengths and that people haven’t reciprocated to the same degree.

Many of us carry the belief that if we love someone, that it entitles us to their reciprocation, especially in situations where our lack of boundaries is causing us to effectively punch below our weight with someone who doesn’t treat and regard us as the worthwhile and valuable person that we are. That’s why, when they move on, it’s, What the what now? I can’t believe that you don’t want me! There’s also the belief that love gives us the power to change a person or that if a person claims to have feelings for us, that this ‘should’ give us the right to change them too.

We self-sabotage our efforts to do better by us, because we’re afraid

March 10, 2014 By NATALIE Reading Time: 5 Minutes

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned about life, is that despite how much we may want something and know in theory how good committing to that something might be for our lives and wellbeing, we can still end up backtracking on doing the necessaries to make it happen. We may recognise that we’ve been accepting crumbs, or that a situation is toxic, or that we’ve not been stepping up for and representing our own needs, expectations, wishes, feelings, and opinions, and then feel temporarily galvanised to do something about it. We make some decisions and initial changes with gusto, possibly make some big announcements, and then next thing you know, we’re back up to our old habits.

The reason why we undermine our own efforts is fear.

While fear is an emotional response to a perceived threat, that doesn’t mean that the fact that we feel afraid is representative of the existence of an actual danger or that what we’re being and doing is wrong. We feel afraid when we have to get out of our comfort zone, even though that comfort zone may actually be an uncomfortable ‘comfort’ zone and the unfamiliar that we’re stepping into could actually hold something so much more befitting of us.

Sometimes we are our own threat and we use the fact that we experience discomfort at having to break habits, at having to get closer to ourselves and learn and grow, as an indicator that there must be something ‘wrong’ with our choice.

Our feelings are instinctive responses, as in, they happen without reasoning and knowledge – it is up to us to listen to ourselves and to be willing to reflect, and to also get a sense of what is going on outside of us, so that the reasoning and knowledge can be provided. Feelings aren’t facts.

We must distinguish between real and imagined threats. It’s the whole internal versus external fear thang.

It’s also important to note that instincts rely heavily on intuition and instincts get out of whack when we habitually ignore ourselves and rely too much on external validation and dodgy assumptions. This is why it’s important to build a relationship with us before we devote a significant amount of energy to trying to build a relationship with someone else, because if we don’t, we will get into relationships for the wrong reasons and possibly with the wrong people, which will only take us even further away from our true selves and have the undesired side effect of pain, which will only exacerbate the fear.

When the way we do things doesn’t produce the desired & predicted results, it’s not about whether we’re “good enough”

February 26, 2014 By NATALIE Reading Time: 4 Minutes

When we’re of the inclination to wonder what’s wrong with us and to blame an undesired outcome on not being “good enough”, we act as if the process (the way in which we went about it in terms of mentality and actions) was and still is ‘right’. We’re invested in the predicted result that ‘should’ have happened and actually, we’re very heavily invested in the process. This isn’t just due to the beliefs that we attach to our actions, choices, and the outcomes that we experience, but also because the alternative to that investment is change, and that may put us in the unfamiliar unknown instead of us being able to remain in the uncomfortable yet familiar comfort zone where we get to give ourselves a hard time with a narrative about everything that’s wrong with us or even life.

Sometimes it’s about the process, sometimes it’s about the result, and sometimes it’s about both, but what it’s never about is our ‘worth’. It’s not that a “more worthwhile, valuable and good enough” person could have pulled off the process and the desired result even if one or both aspects were unhealthy and patently wrong.

If we say that the result is wrong but at the same time we also state or imply through our reluctance to adapt our thinking and behaviour, that our process was right, we’re effectively saying that life, people, our past or other factors, conspired against us and/or that we’re not good enough to get the desired result for our process, even if the two aren’t a match.

Sometimes the ‘wrong’ result may be the right one. We often conveniently forget about how sometimes what feels so ‘right’ can actually prove to be wrong and if that’s the case, we can extend a bit of faith and know that while what’s happened may not make sense right now, the blessing in disguise will become clear further down the line.

Carting excess baggage around puts the past on repeat. Offload, repack, reclaim.

February 7, 2014 By NATALIE Reading Time: 4 Minutes

Before I faced up to how I felt about my childhood, my relationships, and ultimately the way I truly felt about me as a result of these and any choices I was making in adulthood, I’d be asked about what I was looking for in a relationship and respond with wisecracks, regaling whoever it was with tales of shadiness and unavailability. My past was very much in my present and because I didn’t really know who I was and what I ultimately needed, wanted, and expected within a relationship, instead of articulating who I was and my hopes and aspirations, I would speak about what really represented my pain and in some respects, my nightmares. And really, how could I expect to move forward when I was so immersed in my past – living it, thinking about it, going out with variations of my parents, trying to right the wrongs of the past, holding onto hurt and even grudges plus believing that I was experiencing an extended run of bad luck and that something ‘about me’ was provoking everything that wasn’t right about my life?

If the past keeps calling your attentions and efforts, it prevents you from enjoying the present and moving forward.

You don’t experience ‘now’ and the future isn’t something that’s regarded as unwritten because you veer between predicting doom based on the past or speculating about whether you can make the past different in the future. The past dominates. Until it’s put into a healthy perspective where you can live in your present, you just end up feeling disappointed because the past keeps showing up in your thoughts and actions which of course affects your beliefs and your choices and so round and round you go on The Disappointment Cycle. Let’s also not forget that life keeps throwing similar lessons your way via your experiences, if you’re using the same thinking and actions. You move on from a lesson when you truly learn and heed it.

My takeaway lessons tended to be centered on my worth (‘I’m not good enough’) and homing in on a few things in the relationship, which looking back, while there’s no doubt that these were factors, my focusing on these, distorted the thinking behind subsequent choices especially because focusing on certain points about a person whether they’re good or bad reduces a person from being a whole while also giving the impression that these points tell the whole story.

If I thought that I’d been ‘too outgoing’ in one relationship, the next time I’d try to water me down… only I wouldn’t recognise me anymore. The net result was the same – I wasn’t being myself in either of these relationships. I felt controlled in one relationship with a big age gap so next time I went out with someone who was younger and seemingly passive but who was actually quite passive aggressive so the net result was the same – jealousy, possessiveness, and actually, Yet Another Toxic Relationship.

It’s The (Polar) Opposites Game. You try to escape the thing you focus on and wind up with the same thing or even worse even if it feels as if you chose someone really different. Different qualities and characteristics (or assumed there were), similar dynamic.