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Are you carrying the emotional burden of a dysfunctional family?
Are you constantly beating yourself up and thinking that somehow you should be more, do more, be better, and you don’t measure up in your own mind?
After more than three decades of working as a therapist with dysfunctional family dynamics, particularly those of narcissistic and abusive families, I have seen first-hand where this internalized “not good enough” message comes from. While it seems easy to comprehend intellectually, I have also found that understanding emotionally and freeing oneself from old negative messages is a journey of recovery which takes some serious work. When we make changes, we usually take a cognitive leap of understanding first and then it takes our emotional being some time to catch up so that the head and gut are congruent and saying the same thing.
But how does the message “I’m not good enough” get internalized? Where does this come from? To start with, I want you to think about small children and how impressionable they are, how they are soaking up life and trying to learn and understand the world around them. And, the most important thing to them is gaining love and affection from their caregivers. They do not yet have a worldly or experienced understanding of human behavior or why people behave in certain ways. Their main goal is to be loved, and this is of course, what every child deserves.
