Somewhere along the line I developed some pretty negative beliefs about myself. The word ‘beliefs’ is a bit misleading because as far as I was concerned these were facts about me. The strongest of these facts was that I am not good enough. This manifests itself as me thinking I’m not good company, not as clever as people think I am and not as interesting as other people… I’m somehow a fake.
It took years of shaping and moulding to establish these facts about me. It must have been confusing as a child… why could I never choose a present my mother liked… how could my teachers think I was doing so well when I would get such a telling off after every report and parents evening, why couldn’t I read as well as my sister and why is it when I got things wrong I felt like I wasn’t loved anymore? As a child I would never have thought of my mother as impossible to please, a hard parent that switched love on and off… instead a child would persevere… blame themselves for getting it wrong and try harder. The moulding would come through my continuous and systematic failure.
It was my birthday yesterday, but I can only remember one childhood birthday. I was due to have a brace fitted… I guess I must have been pretty excited that day because mum told me we’d go to find a present after the appointment. My brace wasn’t fitted that day… the orthodontist called my mother in and must have laid into her a bit when he found that my teeth weren’t clean enough. I remember him scraping them and showing my mum - she would have been deeply embarrassed. I never understood why I couldn’t have just cleaned them there. After all, in the excitement I just hadn’t done a good enough job first time round. We left the orthodontist, I got a telling off, we went home and I don’t remember leaving my room for the rest of the day. I wish I could remember some of my other birthdays.
None of what happened when I was a child seems all that bad, and that I find kind of scary. It shows just how easy it is to mess things up. As a child I was regularly punished for failing to meet a parent’s standards, short on praise and the odd one out at school. Next thing you know, I develop into an adult that has perfectionist standards, overvalues praise from others and places too much emphasis on other people’s opinion of me.
As I grew up, believing those unhelpful facts about me, I would develop rules for living that would ‘protect’ me. If I was not good enough… I would need to conceal it… to try harder and work harder to be better than everyone else. My perfectionism was a way to guard against failure and criticism. I planned meticulously as another way of averting failure… I didn’t do anything without researching it endlessly. I kept myself under tight control, concealing the real me for fear I would become the odd one out again. I believed the only achievements that were worthwhile were those that were recognised by others. These rules for living would make me a driven person, running from fear of failure rather than towards success. In some ways these rules served me well… from the outside others saw a young man who quickly progressed through the ranks. On the inside though there was the voice of a hard parent driving me and I could never be good enough.
Being driven can make you do some unhealthy things… but I wasn’t in control to stop it… and I drove myself into a breakdown. Being overstretched and not being able to live up to ‘rules’ left the way open for those unhelpful beliefs I had about myself to surface. And from that point on everything I did and everything that happened to me would only confirm in my mind that I wasn’t good enough. I couldn’t fail without attacking myself.
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