Trauma and the Origins of "I'm not good enough"

I've worked with a lot of people from just about every walk of life. Different ethnicities and nationalities, sexual orientations, socioeconomic classes, gender identities, political and religious beliefs, you name it. After working with all of these different people you start to see some general commonalities in people's experiences despite their differences. One of the most universally shared issues that I have noticed is the belief "I'm not good enough;" or some variation of that.

For a long time, I didn't quite know what to do with this awareness of the commonality of this issue. I filed it away as just another unhelpful core belief to work on shifting over the time through the course of therapy. It wasn't until a few more years later in my career studying and learning about how to treat trauma more effectively that I stumbled upon the answer.

Jim Knipe (2018) wrote a fantastic book for EMDR therapists to assist in working with more complex PTSD (not a great read if you aren't an EMDR therapist, but still interesting).

He wrote:

"For many adults, and particularly for children, the "locus of control shift" functions to defend against a full awareness of the fear and actual fact of helplessness during the time of a trauma, while also functioning to preserve a positive, valued image of the world as ultimately controllable."

Basically, if something traumatic happens when you are a kid, you are very likely going to make it about you. Because as a kid, your brain just fundamentally cannot handle that the world is uncontrollable and fucked up shit will just randomly happen at times and you will be powerless to change it. Frankly, this is one of the hardest things to accept as an adult and why so many turn to all kinds of different ways of coping to deal with this reality. Knowing this, isn't it interesting to look at the thoughts or belief of "I'm not good enough" as just our brains' way of dealing with life?

This blew my mind. What I think that we don't realize as people is that this happens to so many of us. So many of us are operating through our lives feeling like shit about ourselves and trying to find all of these ways to fill this void that cannot be filled by anything we do. Sounds pretty doom and gloom, right?

Well, that's the end of this blog article, good luck folks!

Just kidding. I think there is hope for us yet. I believe that many of the forms of therapy, religion, mindfulness practices and philosophy revolve around accepting with and dealing with this reality of life. And in my experience as a trauma therapist, that does not mean you actually have to really do anything. We cannot change the feeling of powerlessness and hopelessness by doing something immediately to make it go away.

We have to find a way to sit with it. By that I mean to observe this feeling and allow it to exist in our mind and our body for at least a few minutes at a time before taking action to feel better. If we can feel it and allow it for a moment, we can allow it to move through us. And it will, eventually. That's what a lot of trauma therapy is; we go back into your past and allow the feelings that weren't allowed or pushed aside to exist and be felt. Then they can move through you. And then the next emotion will come up, and then it is a good time to take some action- to exercise, to pray, to laugh.

So, make some space for "I'm not good enough" when you notice it. Allow it. Thank it. Sit with it. It has helped you in some ways. But maybe it doesn't have to if you can sit with the feelings underneath it. And then, hopefully you can feel good enough after all. You have been the whole time.

References: Knipe, J. (2018). EMDR toolbox: Theory and treatment of complex PTSD and dissociation. Springer Publishing Company.