Feeling not good enough is a common worry.
Many people don’t feel good enough to have the relationship they deserve; they settle for less. People don’t feel good enough to be a success and reach for their dreams. Some folks don’t even feel good enough to be themselves.
Feeling not good enough can affect every area of your life. Where do all these negative feelings come from? Are they real? What can you do?
Feeling not good enough
When you feel not good enough, you feel flawed at a deep level. For some of you, you feel that you are flawed at a soul level. There is something deeply and inherently wrong with you.
You may feel not good enough due to past events, such as an abusive childhood, a horrible divorce, or repeated failures. Others just feel not good enough and cannot point to a specific cause.
Feeling not good enough has a common root cause – unresolved emotional wounds from the past. Whether you remember the cause of your feelings or not, the root is the same.
How emotional wounds affect you
Emotional wounds are real and they cause real pain. When someone you love betrays you or dumps you, your heart hurts. Some of our emotional memories are stored in the brain, but the deeper older memories are stored in the body.
When you have unresolved emotional memories from the past, you continue to feel those emotions even when the cause is long past. For example, if your heart was broken by a boyfriend or girlfriend, you will feel all the old pain whenever you hear their name.
Emotional wounds cause more problems than you realize. Your emotions regulate what you experience as reality. Think about that for a moment. Your emotions decide what you pay attention to, what you remember, and what you learn. Every thought you have is colored by your emotions.
If you have wounds from the past these emotions influence every aspect of your life.
What can you do?
There is no quick fix or pill you can take to start feeling good enough. The only way to feel good enough is to release the past and reclaim your true self.
You are in there beneath all that old pain. No matter how long you have had your emotional wounds you can release them.
There is a catch. You can’t think your out of this mess. You can’t figure out where your wound came from and think it away. If you could heal your wounds with your thoughts, you would have done so long ago.
You need to learn to communicate with your emotions. Emotions communicate using metaphors, symbols, images and stories. It is easier than you think to learn this new way of communicating. You already communicate with your emotions every night when you dream.
One method to heal emotional wounds is the poetry of emotion process. Check out the free material on the Are you new to the site? page.
One more comment
Many of the theories I used in this post were learned from Candace Pert’s writings. She wrote the Molecules of Emotion: The Science Behind Mind-Body Medicine and Everything You Need to Feel Go(o)d. Her writing has influenced me both personally and professionally. I was sad to hear of her death on September 12, 2013. If you do not know her work, I highly recommend you find out more about this remarkable woman.
(image: imram khan @ Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/78645908@N06/7386132222/)
