Feeling Inadequate In A Relationship Quotes

Our society doesn’t promote self-acceptance and it never will. First of all, self-acceptance doesn’t sell products. Capitalism would fall if we liked ourselves the way we are now. Also, people who feel shamed and inadequate themselves tend to pass it on. I’m sure you’ve noticed that many individuals and groups try to enhance their self-esteem by diminishing others.

When you’re young and in love you think the difficult part of being in a relationship is admitting when you need help, but when you’ve been married for half your life you know that the hardest thing is admitting that you really don’t: you don’t need anyone’s help to feel inadequate and a failure and worthless.

Another step is that daughters can learn to monitor their own feelings and instincts by saying, "I feel uncomfortable (angry, dominated, usurped, inadequate, guilty, furious) with my mother more often than I do not. I have to pay attention to that, because it shows in how I treat my friends (lover, spouse, kids, colleagues). There is validity here. I don't have to blame or excuse my mother-I just have to see her so I can see myself.

Emotional abusers condition their victims to feel ashamed, inadequate, and unstable. This is because they are cowards, incapable of healthy relationships with strong and self-respecting individuals. Oftentimes, they choose targets who are unusually successful and idealistic, because these people have more to lose. But abusers cannot control someone with such qualities, and so they break down the target’s self-esteem through belittling, teasing, and manufactured jealousy. The target may have perfectionist tendencies, striving to meet the abuser’s impossible standards. This results in a strange dynamic where the abuser is idealized, despite being lazy, dishonest, and unfaithful, while the victim is devalued, despite putting more effort into this relationship than ever before.

A fixation on happiness inevitably amounts to a never-ending pursuit of “something else”—a new house, a new relationship, another child, another pay raise. And despite all of our sweat and strain, we end up feeling eerily similar to how we started: inadequate. Psychologists sometimes refer to this concept as the “hedonic treadmill”: the idea that we’re always working hard to change our life situation, but we actually never feel very different.

Blame your body. The whole biological purpose of existence is to mate, so from the time we hit puberty, our hormones are demanding us to couple up. Maybe it’s basic instinct to feel inadequate if you’re single." "That’s what sucks. There’s so many more interesting things than guys, but guys are what we spend most of our time talking about." "I think that’s just the way it is, though. No matter what we do, it’s always more special if there’s a boyfriend to share it with." "Or a best friend.

SHE WAS MEETING a man she had recently and abruptly fallen in love with. She was in a state of ghastly anxiety. He was married, for one thing, to a Korean woman whom he described as the embodiment of all that was feminine and elegant. Not only that, but a psychic had told her that a relationship with him could cripple her emotionally for the rest of her life. On top of this, she was tormented by the feeling that she looked inadequate.

Jealousy may be an expression of insecurity, fear of rejection, fear of abandonment, or feeling left out, not good enough, inadequate, or awful.

When a relationship is in free fall, men typically talk of feeling rejected, inadequate, and a failure; women of feeling abandoned and unconnected.

Emotional abusers condition their victims to feel ashamed, inadequate, and unstable. This is because they are cowards, incapable of healthy relationships with strong and self-respecting individuals.

The most important relationship in the world is the bond that you share with your own self. Are you comfortable being you or you’re always trying to be someone else? Are you able to live up to your own expectations or often end up feeling inadequate and incomplete? Are you being true to yourself and your dreams or you’re trying to live someone else’s definition of success? Those are some vital questions you’d have to answer to determine how you feel about yourself and your life. We often see the world as a reflection of who we are. When you’re cool and tranquil on the inside, you will echo the same peace in all your relationships. When you’re all messed up inside, your actions and reactions too will resonate your inner chaos. To have beautiful and worthy relationships, begin by having an honest and fulfilling relationship with yourself.

Everyone has an Everest. Whether it’s a climb you chose, or a circumstance you find yourself in, you’re in the middle of an important journey. Can you imagine a climber scaling the wall of ice at Everest’s Lhotse Face and saying, “This is such a hassle”? Or spending the first night in the mountain’s “death zone” and thinking, “I don’t need this stress”? The climber knows the context of his stress. It has personal meaning to him; he has chosen it. You are most liable to feel like a victim of the stress in your life when you forget the context the stress is unfolding in. “Just another cold, dark night on the side of Everest” is a way to remember the paradox of stress. The most meaningful challenges in your life will come with a few dark nights. The biggest problem with trying to avoid stress is how it changes the way we view our lives, and ourselves. Anything in life that causes stress starts to look like a problem. If you experience stress at work, you think there’s something wrong with your job. If you experience stress in your marriage, you think there’s something wrong with your relationship. If you experience stress as a parent, you think there’s something wrong with your parenting (or your kids). If trying to make a change is stressful, you think there’s something wrong with your goal. When you think life should be less stressful, feeling stressed can also seem like a sign that you are inadequate: If you were strong enough, smart enough, or good enough, then you wouldn’t be stressed. Stress becomes a sign of personal failure rather than evidence that you are human. This kind of thinking explains, in part, why viewing stress as harmful increases the risk of depression. When you’re in this mindset, you’re more likely to feel overwhelmed and hopeless. Choosing to see the connection between stress and meaning can free you from the nagging sense that there is something wrong with your life or that you are inadequate to the challenges you face. Even if not every frustrating moment feels full of purpose, stress and meaning are inextricably connected in the larger context of your life. When you take this view, life doesn’t become less stressful, but it can become more meaningful.

Regardless of age, Connection types, at some level, often feel like frightened children in an adult world. Because of their inadequate sense of self, they often try to anchor themselves in their roles as scientist, judge, doctor, father, mother, etc.

Exploring Self-Compassion Through Letter Writing PART ONE Everybody has something about themselves that they don’t like; something that causes them to feel shame, to feel insecure or not “good enough.” It is the human condition to be imperfect, and feelings of failure and inadequacy are part of the experience of living. Try thinking about an issue that tends to make you feel inadequate or bad about yourself (physical appearance, work or relationship issues, etc.). How does this aspect of yourself make you feel inside—scared, sad, depressed, insecure, angry? What emotions come up for you when you think about this aspect of yourself? Please try to be as emotionally honest as possible and to avoid repressing any feelings, while at the same time not being melodramatic. Try to just feel your emotions exactly as they are—no more, no less. PART TWO Now think about an imaginary friend who is unconditionally loving, accepting, kind, and compassionate. Imagine that this friend can see all your strengths and all your weaknesses, including the aspect of yourself you have just been thinking about. Reflect upon what this friend feels toward you, and how you are loved and accepted exactly as you are, with all your very human imperfections. This friend recognizes the limits of human nature and is kind and forgiving toward you. In his/her great wisdom this friend understands your life history and the millions of things that have happened in your life to create you as you are in this moment. Your particular inadequacy is connected to so many things you didn’t necessarily choose: your genes, your family history, life circumstances—things that were outside of your control. Write a letter to yourself from the perspective of this imaginary friend—focusing on the perceived inadequacy you tend to judge yourself for. What would this friend say to you about your “flaw” from the perspective of unlimited compassion? How would this friend convey the deep compassion he/she feels for you, especially for the discomfort you feel when you judge yourself so harshly? What would this friend write in order to remind you that you are only human, that all people have both strengths and weaknesses? And if you think this friend would suggest possible changes you should make, how would these suggestions embody feelings of unconditional understanding and compassion? As you write to yourself from the perspective of this imaginary friend, try to infuse your letter with a strong sense of the person’s acceptance, kindness, caring, and desire for your health and happiness. After writing the letter, put it down for a little while. Then come back and read it again, really letting the words sink in. Feel the compassion as it pours into you, soothing and comforting you like a cool breeze on a hot day. Love, connection, and acceptance are your birthright. To claim them you need only look within yourself.

Some of us come from families where we were not taught healthy emotional language and habits. We did not get a balanced perspective of the world and relationships, and some of us got a distorted view of where we stood in relation to the rest of the world. We felt (and many of us still do) less than. In order to make up for that, we learned to exaggerate and lie and blow our accomplishments way out of proportion in order to feel of some value. To succeed, we have to stop thinking we are less than other people. We tell ourselves we are not unworthy, inadequate, or unable to cope fully with life’s problems. We begin to see the glass as half full instead of half empty. We have to get rid of feelings of inability before we can make progress. As we learn more about how false pride has held us back from our full potential, we remember, “If we change our thoughts, we can change ourselves.

And the more sexual images men and women absorb, the more they move from "subjective attraction," colored by love and the emotions, to "objective attraction," determined by an expertise in the human body that is rarely healthy to acquire. How many women begin to feel that their bodies are inadequate not intrinsically but in comparison to others? Too many.

And even though body has entwined with body, vows have been whispered into the lover’s ears in the throes of unimaginable passion, there’s a pang still. One has not felt understood by the lover. And that is a different quality of loneliness. A constant dull hammering. Like static hum. Dissonance. Ultimately it translates into a plain inability to see the other’s view. We shout betrayal. We shift blame. We feel inadequate. When it is plain inability. So their intimacy has a narrow gap running across, like a rift between two continents and it’s only when you examine it from above, do you really see it. You realize that the gap could be the breadth of a hairline but it is deep. It’s darkness stretches all the way down into a free falling abyss.

Feeling and talking through the pain--the humiliation of being an unloved child, the anger toward the cold mother, the anxiety of turning into her, the fear of maternal retribution for hating her--became the healing salve. Where therapy was successful, these women came to understand that their mothers, who were unfortunate, inadequate, insecure people, did not have the power to hurt them anymore. If their mothers continued to act destructively, they could walk away from them.

I asked him what he thought would happen if he were to honestly tell Kayla about the strain he felt, and he said, “She would be devastated and furious if I tried to talk to her about it.” I believed sharing his honest feelings might have enraged someone in his past, but it didn’t sound like how Kayla would respond. It sounded more like what he had told me about his angry mother, who was quick to blow up if people didn’t do what she wanted. When I told Jake that maybe this safe new relationship was giving him a chance to finally be loved for himself, he was uncomfortable with the reference to his emotional needs. He looked embarrassed and said, “When you say it like that, I sound pitiful and needy.” During childhood, Jake had gotten the message from his mother that showing any emotional needs meant he was weak. Further, if he didn’t act how she wanted him to, he felt inadequate and unlovable.

Suppose your partner has deep-seated fears of abandonment: afraid that you will leave her for someone “better.” Or suppose she fears becoming trapped, controlled, or “smothered.” Then when you fight, these fears will well up inside her; she may not even be aware of them because they very quickly get buried under blame or resentment. Or suppose deep inside your partner feels deeply unworthy: that he is inadequate, unlovable, not good enough. This is painful in itself, but when people feel this way inside, they often act in ways that strain the relationship. Your partner may continually seek approval, demand recognition for what he achieves or contributes, ask for reassurance that you love or admire him, or become quite jealous and possessive. If you then react with frustration, scorn, criticism, impatience, or boredom, you will reinforce his deep-seated sense of unworthiness. And this then gives rise to even more pain.

As children, Other-blamers were likely exposed to developmental or attachment trauma, such as abusive, shaming, rejecting, or neglectful parenting. Parents who are substance abusers or psychologically troubled often underfocus on a child’s needs. Parents may have exhibited narcissistic or Other-blaming behaviors that the child models. Another possible cause is parents who were permissive or conflict avoiding and did not hold the child accountable. Parents who overfocus on achievement or behavioral compliance can also encourage a fear of failure that may bring on Other-blaming tendencies. These experiences can cause children to feel unloved, unprotected, and inadequate. They may struggle to experience empathy for others and may develop an unhealthy hypersensitivity and overreaction to shaming experiences. While Other-blaming as a shame-management strategy may be adaptive in childhood, it causes difficulties for adult relationships at all levels, from presidential to personal.

Like addiction itself, anxiety will always find a target, but exists independently of its targets. Only when we become aware of it does it wrap itself in identifiable colours. More often we repress it, bury it under ideas, identifications, deeds, beliefs and relationships. We build above it a mound of activities and attributes that we mistake for our true selves. We then expend our energies trying to convince the world that our self-made fiction is reality. As genuine as our strengths and achievements may be, they cannot but feel hollow until we acknowledge the anxiety they cover up. Incompleteness is the baseline state of the addict. The addict believes — either with full awareness or unconsciously — that he is “not enough.” As he is, he is inadequate to face life’s demands or to present an acceptable face to the world. He is unable to tolerate his own emotions without artificial supports. He must escape the painful experience of the void within through any activity that fills his mind with even temporary purpose, be it work, gambling, shopping, eating or sexual seeking.

Also bearing witness to the unbearable nature of the vulnerability experienced by peer-oriented kids is the preponderance of vulnerability-quelling drugs. Peer-oriented kids will do anything to avoid the human feelings of aloneness, suffering, and pain, and to escape feeling hurt, exposed, alarmed, insecure, inadequate, or self-conscious. The older and more peer-oriented the kids, the more drugs seem to be an inherent part of their lifestyle. Peer orientation creates an appetite for anything that would reduce vulnerability. Drugs are emotional painkillers. And, in another way, they help young people escape from the benumbed state imposed by their defensive emotional detachment. With the shutdown of emotions come boredom and alienation. Drugs provide an artificial stimulation to the emotionally jaded. They heighten sensation and provide a false sense of engagement without incurring the risks of genuine openness. In fact, the same drug can play seemingly opposite functions in an individual. Alcohol and marijuana, for example, can numb or, on the other hand, free the brain and mind from social inhibitions. Other drugs are stimulants — cocaine, amphetamines, and ecstasy; the very name of the latter speaks volumes about exactly what is missing in the psychic life of our emotionally incapacitated young people. The psychological function served by these drugs is often overlooked by well-meaning adults who perceive the problem to be coming from outside the individual, through peer pressure and youth culture mores. It is not just a matter of getting our children to say no. The problem lies much deeper. As long as we do not confront and reverse peer orientation among our children, we are creating an insatiable appetite for these drugs. The affinity for vulnerability-reducing drugs originates from deep within the defended soul. Our children's emotional safety can come only from us: then they will not be driven to escape their feelings and to rely on the anesthetic effects of drugs. Their need to feel alive and excited can and should arise from within themselves, from their own innately limitless capacity to be engaged with the universe. This brings us back to the essential hierarchical nature of attachment. The more the child needs attachment to function, the more important it is that she attaches to those responsible for her. Only then can the vulnerability that is inherent in emotional attachment be endured. Children don't need friends, they need parents, grandparents, adults who will assume the responsibility to hold on to them. The more children are attached to caring adults, the more they are able to interact with peers without being overwhelmed by the vulnerability involved. The less peers matter, the more the vulnerability of peer relationships can be endured. It is exactly those children who don't need friends who are more capable of having friends without losing their ability to feel deeply and vulnerably. But why should we want our children to remain open to their own vulnerability? What is amiss when detachment freezes the emotions in order to protect the child?

This is how you lose her. You lose her when you forget to remember the little things that mean the world to her: the sincerity in a stranger’s voice during a trip to the grocery store, the delight of finding something lost or forgotten like a sticker from when she was five, the selflessness of a child giving a part of his meal to another, the scent of new books in the store, the surprise short but honest notes she tucks in her journal and others you could only see if you look closely. You must remember when she forgets. You lose her when you don’t notice that she notices everything about you: your use of the proper punctuation that tells her continuation rather than finality, your silence when you’re about to ask a question but you think anything you’re about to say to her would be silly, your mindless humming when it is too quiet, your handwriting when you sign your name on blank sheets of paper, your muted laughter when you are trying to be polite, and more and more of what you are, which you don’t even know about yourself, because she pays attention. She remembers when you forget. You lose her for every second you make her feel less and less of the beauty that she is. When you make her feel that she is replaceable. She wants to feel cherished. When you make her feel that you are fleeting. She wants you to stay. When you make her feel inadequate. She wants to know that she is enough and she does not need to change for you, nor for anyone else because she is she and she is beautiful, kind and good. You must learn her. You must know the reason why she is silent. You must trace her weakest spots. You must write to her. You must remind her that you are there. You must know how long it takes for her to give up. You must be there to hold her when she is about to. You must love her because many have tried and failed. And she wants to know that she is worthy to be loved, that she is worthy to be kept. And, this is how you keep her.

Kathy’s teachers view her as a good student who always does her homework but rarely participates in class. Her close friends see her as a loyal and trustworthy person who is a lot of fun once you get to know her. The other students in school think she is shy and very quiet. None of them realize how much Kathy struggles with everyday life. When teachers call on her in class, her heart races, her face gets red and hot, and she forgets what she wants to say. Kathy believes that people think she is stupid and inadequate. She imagines that classmates and teachers talk behind her back about the silly things she says. She makes excuses not to go to social events because she is terrified she will do something awkward. Staying home while her friends are out having a good time also upsets her. “Why can’t I just act like other people?” she often thinks. Although Kathy feels isolated, she has a very common problem--social anxiety. Literally millions of people are so affected by self-consciousness that they have difficulties in social situations. For some, the anxiety occurs during very specific events, such as giving a speech or eating in public. For others, like Kathy, social anxiety is part of everyday life. Unfortunately, social anxiety is not an easily diagnosed condition. Instead, it is often viewed as the far edge of a continuum of behaviors and feelings that occur during social situations. Although you may not have as much difficulty as Kathy, shyness may still be causing you distress, affecting your relationships, or making you act in ways with which you are not happy. If this is the case, you will benefit from the advice and techniques provided in this book. The good news is that it is possible to change your thinking and behavior. However, there are no easy solutions. It takes strong motivation and time to overcome social anxiety. It might even be necessary to see a professional therapist or take medication. Eventually, becoming free of your anxiety will make the hard work well worth the effort. This book will help you understand social anxiety and the impact it can have on your life, now and in the future. You will find out how the disorder is diagnosed, you will receive information on professional guidance, and you will learn ways to cope with and manage the symptoms. Becoming an extroverted person is probably unlikely, but you can become more confident in social situations and increase your self-esteem.

It has been said that if you want the truth you should ask someone with Asperger syndrome. The only way he could understand the pain he had caused was to relate it back to something that might have made him feel inadequate and inferior. This was the only way he could comprehend what effect his words had had on her. As a consequence of this incident he became very careful about what he said in the future.

The wrong lover will always make your love feel inadequate.

An obsession and overinvestment in emotion fails us for the simple reason that emotions never last. Whatever makes us happy today will no longer make us happy tomorrow, because our biology always needs something more. A fixation on happiness inevitably amounts to a never-ending pursuit of “something else”—a new house, a new relationship, another child, another pay raise. And despite all of our sweat and strain, we end up feeling eerily similar to how we started: inadequate

When a relationship is in free fall, men typically talk of feeling rejected, inadequate, and a failure; women of feeling abandoned and unconnected. Women do appear to have one additional response that emerges when they are distressed. Researchers call it “tend and befriend.” Perhaps because they have more oxytocin, the cuddle hormone, in their blood, women reach out more to others when they feel a lack of connection.

Both hopelessness theory and Beck’s cognitive theory assume that people who become depressed have a cognitive vulnerability—that is, a dysfunctional way of thinking about negative life events that makes it more likely that they’ll become depressed. Simply put, how we interpret our life experiences (e.g., current problems in a relationship) influences our feelings about those experiences (e.g., feeling hopeless and inadequate versus confident and optimistic), which ultimately lead to distress and even full-fledged depression.

Complaining warps, weakens, and sometimes even destroys the very relationships that are vital to our happiness and well-being. When we engage in complaining, our relationships stagnate and devolve. Complaining shifts our focus from the positive attributes that drew us to the other person to what we perceive to be his or her faults. This shift draws us into a trap in which we feel unfulfilled and the other person feels inadequate.

Because the pull toward that feeling of “home” makes what they want as adults hard to disentangle from what they experienced as children. They have an uncanny attraction to people who share the characteristics of a parent who in some way hurt them. In the beginning of a relationship, these characteristics will be barely perceptible, but the unconscious has a finely tuned radar system inaccessible to the conscious mind. It’s not that people want to get hurt again. It’s that they want to master a situation in which they felt helpless as children. Freud called this “repetition compulsion.” Maybe this time, the unconscious imagines, I can go back and heal that wound from long ago by engaging with somebody familiar—but new. The only problem is, by choosing familiar partners, people guarantee the opposite result: they reopen the wounds and feel even more inadequate and unlovable.

If your faith makes you feel inadequate, re-examine your relationship with your faith. Are you full of faith or are you fearful?

Why would people do this to themselves? Because the pull toward that feeling of “home” makes what they want as adults hard to disentangle from what they experienced as children. They have an uncanny attraction to people who share the characteristics of a parent who in some way hurt them. In the beginning of a relationship, these characteristics will be barely perceptible, but the unconscious has a finely tuned radar system inaccessible to the conscious mind. It's not that people want to get hurt again. It's that they want to master a situation in which they felt helpless as children. Freud called this "repetition compulsion." Maybe this time, the unconscious imagines, I can go back and heal that wound from long ago by engaging with somebody familiar — but new. The only problem is, by choosing familiar partners, people guarantee the opposite result: they reopen the wounds and feel even more inadequate and unlovable.

1. Judges self harshly. 2. Fears criticism and judgment, but driven to be critical and judgmental of others. 3. Feels a sense of urgency; impulsive; impatient; compelled to seek immediate rather than delayed gratification. 4. Fears failure but unconsciously sabotages own success. 5. Fears disapproval and rejection, so unknowingly creates characteristics acceptable to others. 6. Fears commitment. 7. Feels inadequate/low self-esteem. Sometimes has to compensate by appearing superior. 8. Fears discovery of real self will cause rejection. 9. Fears intimacy. Unable to form close, loving, intimate relationships. 10. Fears loving and being loved. 11. Fears dependency on anyone or anything, yet are dependent personalities. 12. Fears abandonment but compelled to become involved with compulsive personalities that play out this fear. 13. Frightened of angry people. 14. Afraid to trust due to lack of trust in self. 15. Afraid to reveal inner secrets for fear of rejection or disapproval.  16. Afraid of people and authority figures. 17. Feels different/separated from others due to own feelings, which leads to depression. Isolates self. 18. Assumes responsibility for others’ feelings and behavior. 19. Grieves for the family they never had. 20. Unable to identify or ask for own wants and needs. Unconsciously denies them, for experience has taught that they will not be met. 21. Feels guilty when standing up for self, therefore has to give in to others. 22. Unable to feel or express true feelings as adults, because to feel at all is unbearably painful. In “denial.” 23. Unknowingly driven to build up barriers to protect self from own insecurities.  24. Unable or doesn’t know how to let go, relax, play or have fun. 25. Learns to criticize and blame self and others. 26. Has to make excuses for others’ weaknesses;  has unreasonable expectations of self and others. 27. Tries to find own identity in doing things, but finds it difficult to accept honest praise. 28. Desperately wants control and yet over-reacts to changes they can’t control. 29. Continually seeks outside approval by doing. 30. Takes things literally; it’s either right or wrong, black or white. 31. Takes self very seriously. 32. Distorted sense of responsibility. Concerned more for others than self. (Keeps one from the pain of looking too closely at self and own problems.) 33. Tends to repeat relationship patterns. 34. Has a need to help and seeks people who are victims. Are attracted by that weakness in love and friendship relationships. 35. Doesn’t know self or innate rights. Doesn’t realize it’s all right to make mistakes.  36. Craves validation of self-worth from others, not received as child. 37. Extremely loyal, even when loyalty is unjustified or even harmful. 38. Guesses at what normal or appropriate is. 39. Tends to be a perfectionist. 40. Unable to trust loved ones, authority figures or peers.

Your only real control is to withhold your expertise. And although withholding expertise is the only leverage real experts have, it can be a powerful one, indeed. Let me show you how this relates to the second basic component of positioning: Good positioning makes you noninterchangeable. Imagine a somewhat difficult conversation with one of your existing clients. You’re uncomfortable with the direction they want to pursue, particularly since you know they’ll be holding you partly responsible for the results. You make your case carefully but passionately. You feel strongly that this is a mistake, for all sorts of reasons. The client presses and presses, but you don’t relent. There’s an honest disagreement. It’s not that you don’t know where the other party stands. No, you are both clear about that and just disagree. Eventually, the client says — after three years of working together, no less — that they are noticing an increasingly different perspective on how to impact the future and maybe it’s time for a fresh approach. Essentially they want to sever the relationship and move on. This usually doesn’t come out of the blue. It’s likely to have built up over time until the client gets to this place where they seem to be looking for opportunities to disagree with you. Nevertheless, the expert (you) has reached a turning point with the other controlling party (the client). As this crack in the surface widens, and it looks less reparable than earlier disagreements, the client entertains the possibility of replacing your expertise. They’ve surveyed the landscape of firms like yours and they aren’t that worried about finding an expert who will be a little more cooperative and helpful (as they read the disagreement). So what has seemed increasingly likely does, in fact, occur, and the client severs the relationship with your firm. That point is when the stopwatch starts. Tick, tick, tick. It keeps running until that same client finds a suitable (or even better) substitute for your expertise. But here’s the thing: The client is the one who defines success in that venture. When you hear about who they found to replace your firm, you may scoff and mutter about how inadequate the substitute expert is, but you don’t get to do that. “They hired who? [Snicker.] I saw their work for XYZ and was not impressed. The client will quickly find out that we weren’t so bad after all and that what we’ve been saying makes sense. There will be an initial honeymoon and then it’ll be just like it was with us.” It doesn’t matter.

But then there are those people who overidentify with their emotions. Everything is justified for no other reason than they felt it. “Oh, I broke your windshield, but I was really mad; I couldn’t help it.” Or “I dropped out of school and moved to Alaska just because it felt right.” Decision-making based on emotional intuition, without the aid of reason to keep it in line, pretty much always sucks. You know who bases their entire lives on their emotions? Three-year-old kids. And dogs. You know what else three-year-olds and dogs do? Shit on the carpet. An obsession and overinvestment in emotion fails us for the simple reason that emotions never last. Whatever makes us happy today will no longer make us happy tomorrow, because our biology always needs something more. A fixation on happiness inevitably amounts to a never-ending pursuit of “something else”—a new house, a new relationship, another child, another pay raise. And despite all of our sweat and strain, we end up feeling eerily similar to how we started: inadequate. Psychologists sometimes refer to this concept as the “hedonic treadmill”: the idea that we’re always working hard to change our life situation, but we actually never feel very different. This is why our problems are recursive and unavoidable. The person you marry is the person you fight with. The house you buy is the house you repair. The dream job you take is the job you stress over. Everything comes with an inherent sacrifice—whatever makes us feel good will also inevitably make us feel bad. What we gain is also

When we say a boy needs a father, we mean, a boy needs someone to teach him how to be a patriarch. Teach him to suppress. Teach him to be unfeeling. Teach him to lead without asking. Teach him solitude. Teach him not to cope. Teach him to explode. All in the name of maintaining the myth. Every lesson my father ever taught me came back to the myth. “One day, when you have a son of your own,” he would say, “you will understand.” I have no son of my own, but I understand. I understand that my father carried the pain of being abandoned by his father and vowed to not be like him. I understand that my father became the type of father he wished he had. I understand that for him a father was meant to set an example of hard work, that he should pass along valuable life lessons about handling money, that he should teach you how to drive and tie a double windsor, that he should come down hard when you lie or fail to live up to your potential. I also understand that as a shy insecure kid who wanted someone to talk to about his fears, there was a distance between me and my father. As someone who needed to know that I would be loved even through my mistakes, my father’s raised eyebrows, and voice, and belt, weren’t reassuring. His way of buying affection without speaking through his feelings made it harder to get close. His cold reactions to some of my proudest moments didn’t ease us toward embrace. When I tell the story of my relationship with my father, the response I hear most often is, “You had it better than most. Be grateful he was there.” And once again the myth prevents us from seeing. I did have it better than most. I’ll never deny that. My father’s sacrifices meant that I never went homeless or hungry, unclothed or unwashed. Materially, I had all that I could ask for and more — he made that possible. I would not be writing these words today if he didn’t. I’m grateful. But it doesn’t mean the strain and tension between us didn’t have an effect on me - on my sense of self. I didn’t like myself for a long time and much of that had to do with never feeling like I could do anything worthy enough to receive my father’s love. Perfection, if I could achieve such a thing, felt inadequate. I know now that it isn’t true. That he loved me in the way he knew how and he always would. But that’s not what shaped me.

Why would people do this to themselves? Because the pull toward that feeling of “home” makes what they want as adults hard to disentangle from what they experienced as children. They have an uncanny attraction to people who share the characteristics of a parent who in some way hurt them. In the beginning of a relationship, these characteristics will be barely perceptible, but the unconscious has a finely tuned radar system inaccessible to the conscious mind. It’s not that people want to get hurt again. It’s that they want to master a situation in which they felt helpless as children. Freud called this “repetition compulsion.” Maybe this time, the unconscious imagines, I can go back and heal that wound from long ago by engaging with somebody familiar—but new. The only problem is, by choosing familiar partners, people guarantee the opposite result: they reopen the wounds and feel even more inadequate and unlovable.

The research seemed to reveal that the depressed individual sees himself as a “loser,” as an inadequate person doomed to frustration, deprivation, humiliation, and failure. Further experiments showed a marked difference between the depressed person’s self-evaluation, expectations, the aspirations on the one hand and his actual achievements—often very striking—on the other. My conclusion was that depression must involve a disturbance in thinking: the depressed person thinks in idiosyncratic and negative ways about himself, his environment, and his future. The pessimistic mental set affects his mood, his motivation, and his relationships with others, and leads to the full spectrum of psychological and physical symptoms typical of depression.

It’s no coincidence that people who had angry parents often end up choosing angry partners, that those with alcoholic parents are frequently drawn to partners who drink quite a bit, or that those who had withdrawn or critical parents find themselves married to spouses who are withdrawn or critical. Why would people do this to themselves? Because the pull toward that feeling of “home” makes what they want as adults hard to disentangle from what they experienced as children. They have an uncanny attraction to people who share the characteristics of a parent who in some way hurt them. In the beginning of a relationship, these characteristics will be barely perceptible, but the unconscious has a finely tuned radar system inaccessible to the conscious mind. It’s not that people want to get hurt again. It’s that they want to master a situation in which they felt helpless as children. Freud called this “repetition compulsion.” Maybe this time, the unconscious imagines, I can go back and heal that wound from long ago by engaging with somebody familiar—but new. The only problem is, by choosing familiar partners, people guarantee the opposite result: they reopen the wounds and feel even more inadequate and unlovable.

What most people mean by type is a sense of attraction—a type of physical appearance or a type of personality turns them on. But what underlies a person’s type, in fact, is a sense of familiarity. It’s no coincidence that people who had angry parents often end up choosing angry partners, that those with alcoholic parents are frequently drawn to partners who drink quite a bit, or that those who had withdrawn or critical parents find themselves married to spouses who are withdrawn or critical. Why would people do this to themselves? Because the pull toward that feeling of “home” makes what they want as adults hard to disentangle from what they experienced as children. They have an uncanny attraction to people who share the characteristics of a parent who in some way hurt them. In the beginning of a relationship, these characteristics will be barely perceptible, but the unconscious has a finely tuned radar system inaccessible to the conscious mind. It’s not that people want to get hurt again. It’s that they want to master a situation in which they felt helpless as children. Freud called this “repetition compulsion.” Maybe this time, the unconscious imagines, I can go back and heal that wound from long ago by engaging with somebody familiar—but new. The only problem is, by choosing familiar partners, people guarantee the opposite result: they reopen the wounds and feel even more inadequate and unlovable.

To make sure she really grasped this, I told her that I’d play the role of the negative voice in her mind, and I’d try to make her feel anxious, inadequate, and bitter, and she could play the more objective, positive, self-loving voice. I call this technique the Externalization of Voices.

Hilda looked helpless and inadequate, but she was actually controlling her husband in a powerful way. Her self-blame was her not-so-subtle way of keeping Charles in a straitjacket. She was really saying, “I can’t bear to hear what you’re telling me. Don’t say anything critical or I’ll make you pay!” She was so fragile that I had to discontinue the couples therapy so I could work with her individually. Hilda’s self-blaming tendencies were a huge barrier to intimacy. She simply couldn’t endure the pain of getting close to the man she loved because she didn’t know how to love and accept herself.

When you’re young and in love you think the difficult part of being in a relationship is admitting when you need help, but when you’ve been married for half your life you know that the hardest thing is admitting that you really don’t: you don’t need anyone’s help to feel inadequate and a failure and worthless. Because no one is as good at making us feel all those things as we are ourselves.

Their feelings about themselves are the opposite of the serene image they present – they generally feel insecure, inadequate, dull, unsuccessful, vulnerable and anxious.’ The report also discovered that they found it difficult to develop strong personal relationships. What

our own suffering that we can easily forget our partner is in the same boat. Suppose your partner has deep-seated fears of abandonment: afraid that you will leave her for someone “better.” Or suppose she fears becoming trapped, controlled, or “smothered.” Then when you fight, these fears will well up inside her; she may not even be aware of them because they very quickly get buried under blame or resentment. Or suppose deep inside your partner feels deeply unworthy: that he is inadequate, unlovable, not good enough. This is painful in itself, but when people feel this way inside, they often act in ways that strain the relationship. Your partner may continually seek approval, demand recognition for what he achieves or contributes, ask for reassurance that you love or admire him, or become quite jealous and possessive. If you then react with frustration, scorn, criticism, impatience, or boredom, you will reinforce his deep-seated sense of unworthiness. And this then gives rise to even more pain.

Emotional Deprivation, the parent was always physically there, but the quality of the emotional relationship was consistently inadequate. The parents did not know how to love, nurture, and empathize well enough. The connection with parents was stable, but not close enough. With Abandonment, the connection once existed and it was lost. Or the parent would come and go unpredictably. Unfortunately, for some children, their parents were both emotionally inadequate and unpredictable. In this environment, which is quite common, children will usually develop both the Emotional Deprivation and Abandonment lifetraps.

Exercise Two Exploring Self-Compassion Through Letter Writing PART ONE Everybody has something about themselves that they don’t like; something that causes them to feel shame, to feel insecure or not “good enough.” It is the human condition to be imperfect, and feelings of failure and inadequacy are part of the experience of living. Try thinking about an issue that tends to make you feel inadequate or bad about yourself (physical appearance, work or relationship issues, etc.). How does this aspect of yourself make you feel inside—scared, sad, depressed, insecure, angry? What emotions come up for you when you think about this aspect of yourself? Please try to be as emotionally honest as possible and to avoid repressing any feelings, while at the same time not being melodramatic. Try to just feel your emotions exactly as they are—no more, no less. PART TWO Now think about an imaginary friend who is unconditionally loving, accepting, kind, and compassionate. Imagine that this friend can see all your strengths and all your weaknesses, including the aspect of yourself you have just been thinking about. Reflect upon what this friend feels toward you, and how you are loved and accepted exactly as you are, with all your very human imperfections. This friend recognizes the limits of human nature and is kind and forgiving toward you. In his/her great wisdom this friend understands your life history and the millions of things that have happened in your life to create you as you are in this moment. Your particular inadequacy is connected to so many things you didn’t necessarily choose: your genes, your family history, life circumstances—things that were outside of your control. Write a letter to yourself from the perspective of this imaginary friend—focusing on the perceived inadequacy you tend to judge yourself for. What would this friend say to you about your “flaw” from the perspective of unlimited compassion? How would this friend convey the deep compassion he/she feels for you, especially for the discomfort you feel when you judge yourself so harshly? What would this friend write in order to remind you that you are only human, that all people have both strengths and weaknesses? And if you think this friend would suggest possible changes you should make, how would these suggestions embody feelings of unconditional understanding and compassion? As you write to yourself from the perspective of this imaginary friend, try to infuse your letter with a strong sense of the person’s acceptance, kindness, caring, and desire for your health and happiness. After writing the letter, put it down for a little while. Then come back and read it again, really letting the words sink in. Feel the compassion as it pours into you, soothing and comforting you like a cool breeze on a hot day. Love, connection, and acceptance are your birthright. To claim them you need only look within yourself.

ON WOMEN DOMINATING INFLUENCER MARKETING AND INSTAGRAM CREATING UNREALISTIC EXPECTATIONS . . . I think women are social creatures and form strong relationships and connections much easier than men, so it’s natural that we dominate social media. I definitely think Instagram can create unrealistic expectations. I have had comments and DMs from followers telling me how my content makes them feel depressed or inadequate. So you know what I do now? I post lots of Insta stories and Facebook posts, usually unedited, about what really goes on in my life. This way, they see the prep that goes into that other Instagram post they saw, including the giant mess that is my office, the team that helps me out, and the 3 A.M. late nights.

The narcissistic mother will manipulate other family members to gang up against you by focusing on everything that’s wrong with you. This conveniently takes the focus away from the real perpetrator, which is of course her. It’s interesting to think about the manipulation that’s actually going on. So if you have been labelled as the black sheep and that has been your permanent role in the family, it actually allows all the other family members to start feeling better about themselves. They actually start to believe that they are healthier and more obedient to the narcissistic mother than you, and again this creates a division within the family. Another important point is that if a child is scapegoated from an early age, he or she may fully internalize all of their narcissistic mother’s criticism and shame. This means that the scapegoats develop this harsh inner critic that will continue that inner dialogue that constantly reminds them of how bad and flawed they are. I guess you could call that “inner scapegoating,” and it is extremely toxic to a young impressionable child whose identity is still being formed. So, the scapegoat may struggle with low self-esteem and often continues to feel deeply inadequate and unlovable. Adult scapegoat children also tend to suppress a huge amount of abandonment anxiety because they were emotionally or even physically abandoned by the narcissistic mother over and over again. Adult scapegoat children therefore become super sensitive to observing any potential signs of approval or disapproval. These are all important aspects of the profound impact that a toxic family dynamic may continue to have on adult relationships. Perhaps you may still have issues with authority. Maybe you’re still used to justifying yourself or somehow proving your worth. This is an unconscious pattern that you may still not be aware of and that you are perpetuating because you don’t realize how powerful these dysfunctional family dynamics still are. And once you wake up and understand you can let go of that label, you can break that pattern by choosing to think and behave completely different. You can learn to choose your battles and do not always have to be defensive. You do not always have to feel victimized. You need to become more self-aware and notice if you are still trying to get your parents’ approval or validation. Maturing into adulthood means that you may need to understand that you may never have a healthy relationship with an intentional perpetrator of abuse. You need to process your feelings of frustration, loneliness, rage, and grief.

When you ignore your needs for the sake of your mother’s feelings, you are doing a disservice not only to yourself but to your mother, as well. The anger and resentment that you will inevitably feel cannot help but affect your relationship. And if your efforts to make your mother happy fail, you will feel guilty and inadequate.

He hurts you because he loves you inadequately. When he senses your emotional needs, he feels like a failure as a husband. Instead of doing better he blames his failure on you. You remind him how much of a failure he is, just by having your own emotions.

Recognizing that parental responsibility is insufficient for successful child-rearing, but still not conscious of the role of attachment, many experts assume the problem must be in the parenting know-how. If parenting is not going well, it is because parents are not doing things right. According to this way of thinking, it is not enough to don the role; a parent needs some skill to be effective. The parental role has to be supplemented with all kinds of parenting techniques — or so many experts seem to believe. Many parents, too, reason something like this: if others can get their children to do what they want them to do but I can't, it must be because I lack the requisite skills. Their questions all presume a simple lack of knowledge, to be corrected by “how to” types of advice for every conceivable problem situation: How do I get my child to listen? How can I get my child to do his homework? What do I need to do to get my child to clean his room? What is the secret to getting a child to do her chores? How do I get my child to sit at the table? Our predecessors would probably have been embarrassed to ask such questions or, for that matter, to show their face in a parenting course. It seems much easier for parents today to confess incompetence rather than impotence, especially when our lack of skill can be conveniently blamed on a lack of training or a lack of appropriate models in our own childhood. The result has been a multibillion-dollar industry of parental advice-giving, from experts advocating timeouts or reward points on the fridge to all the how-to books on effective parenting. Child-rearing experts and the publishing industry give parents what they ask for instead of the insight they so desperately need. The sheer volume of the advice offered tends to reinforce the feelings of inadequacy and the sense of being unprepared for the job. The fact that these methodologies fail to work has not slowed the torrent of skill teaching. Once we perceive parenting as a set of skills to be learned, it is difficult for us to see the process any other way. Whenever trouble is encountered the assumption is that there must be another book to be read, another course to be taken, another skill to be mastered. Meanwhile, our supporting cast continues to assume that we have the power to do the job. Teachers act as if we can still get our children to do homework. Neighbors expect us to keep our children in line. Our own parents chide us to take a firmer stand. The experts assume that compliance is just another skill away. The courts hold us responsible for our child's behavior. Nobody seems to get the fact that our hold on our children is slipping. The reasoning behind parenting as a set of skills seemed logical enough, but in hindsight has been a dreadful mistake. It has led to an artificial reliance on experts, robbed parents of their natural confidence, and often leaves them feeling dumb and inadequate. We are quick to assume that our children don't listen because we don't know how to make them listen, that our children are not compliant because we have not yet learned the right tricks, that children are not respectful enough of authority because we, the parents, have not taught them to be respectful. We miss the essential point that what matters is not the skill of the parents but the relationship of the child to the adult who is assuming responsibility.

My dearest friend, Myron Bolitar, though “friend” seems an inadequate word to describe our relationship, worries about this aspect of my personality. He feels there is something “missing” inside of me. He traces it back to what my own mother did to my father. But does the origin matter? This is what I am. I am quite content this way. He claims that I don’t get it. He is wrong. I do understand the need for companionship. My favorite times are when he and I sit around together and simply discuss life or watch television or dissect a sporting event—and then, when we are done, I go to bed with a gorgeous body and, uh, gorge. Does

Had our parents remained emotionally presentas we underwent early experiences of emptiness and loneliness, we would have learned that these feelings did not have to pull us out of relationship and thrust us into isolation. Emotional presence is the capacity to be nonjudgmental and motiveless when listening or simply being with another. If our parents had been able to give us the space and time to feel what we were feeling --without trying to change, fix, or control us--our emotional disturbance would eventually have cleared and we would have reconnected with our essence. Our parents' emotional presence would have given us the external support we needed to endure our discomfort until the emotional disturbance lessened. Unfortunately, most of our parents could not tolerate the emotional discomfort evoked in them by our pain: They were emotionally absent, self-absorbed, or intent on controlling or fixing what we were feeling so they would not be disturbed. As a result, our capacity to stay in relationship while going through difficult emotional experiences was compromised. For example, if we were crying and they did not know how to ease our pain, they may have felt inadequate. We may then have responded to their need to feel capable by denying or controlling what we were experiencing. In this way we learned that to stay in relationship with them we had to disconnect from our internal life. Conversely, to remain in contact with ourselves, we had to cut ourselves off from our parents. In either case, in the absence of emotional presence, we learned that we cannot be fully ourselves in relationship.

An obsession and overinvestment in emotion fails us for the simple reason that emotions never last. Whatever makes us happy today will no longer make us happy tomorrow, because our biology always needs something more. A fixation on happiness inevitably amounts to a never-ending pursuit of “something else”—a new house, a new relationship, another child, another pay raise. And despite all of our sweat and strain, we end up feeling eerily similar to how we started: inadequate. Psychologists sometimes refer to this concept as the “hedonic treadmill”: the idea that we’re always working hard to change our life situation, but we actually never feel very different. This is why our problems are recursive and unavoidable. The person you marry is the person you fight with. The house you buy is the house you repair. The dream job you take is the job you stress over. Everything comes with an inherent sacrifice—whatever makes us feel good will also inevitably make us feel bad. What we gain is also what we lose. What creates our positive experiences will define our negative experiences. This is a difficult pill to swallow. We like the idea that there’s some form of ultimate happiness that can be attained. We like the idea that we can alleviate all of our suffering permanently. We like the idea that we can feel fulfilled and satisfied with our lives forever. But we cannot.

For all of us, there are also likely times when therapy simply doesn't seem to move forward as we imagined it would. At this crossroads, we often question ourselves or blame our patients. Between what our culture requires and what we have experienced in childhood, we might go either direction. We have a particular challenge to feeling competent right now. Our left-centric society has done its best to codify the healing process, leaving us with a set of procedures and expected outcomes that don't welcome the individuality of our people of the fluidity of each person's unpredictable and unique process of recovery. This is doubly difficult, because when we follow the course culture provides, safety is already undermined to a greater or lesser extent. I believe it wounds us when we feel we aren't helping a person because we set out with such good hearts to relieve suffering. A well-practiced practitioner might try to guard our hearts by blaming our people's resistance. When a wounded part of us is afraid we are inadequate, this often generates a critical protective voice to try to urge us toward a better performance. In both instances, our ability to be present for our people gets lost in the need to protect. How can we hold these experiences kindly, recognizing that they are part of the human experience? Right now, we might be able to open the arms of inclusion to these parts of us.

Sometimes jealousy gets such a strong hold on us that we have difficulty having any good relationships with other mothers. We always feel so inadequate or guilty when we are with them that we just scrap the whole friendship thing altogether. That’s when we really need to pull a good friend close to our side and get competition under control. It is insidious and can be profoundly destructive.

An obsession and overinvestment in emotion fails us for the simple reason that emotions never last. Whatever makes us happy today will no longer make us happy tomorrow, because our biology always needs something more. A fixation on happiness inevitably amounts to a never-ending pursuit of “something else”—a new house, a new relationship, another child, another pay raise. And despite all of our sweat and strain, we end up feeling eerily similar to how we started: inadequate.

A fixation on happiness inevitably amounts to a never-ending pursuit of “something else”—a new house, a new relationship, another child, another pay raise. And despite all of our sweat and strain, we end up feeling eerily similar to how we started: inadequate.

An inadequate or traumatic caregiving relationship is deeply damaging, especially during those early years when the brain is forming chemically and structurally. That part of the brain that allows the baby to feel connected with another person can be lost or greatly impaired. Absent adequate nurturing by an emotionally competent caregiver, the baby faces an unpredictable tide of unregulated emotions. … If a baby’s experiences are pathological and steeped in chronic fear early in development, the very capacities that mitigate against violent behavior (including empathy, the capacity for self-regulation of strong emotions and the emotional modulation essential for complex problem-solving) can be lost. As these children grow into adolescence and adulthood, impulsive and aggressive behaviors are so often the outcomes. Moreover, genetic proclivities toward mental illness also are exacerbated. Communities inevitably absorb the consequences. We ignore the root of the problem at our peril.”19