Unworthiness

I've experienced imposter syndrome and feelings of unworthiness most of my life. I have struggled with confidence, and believing in my own capabilities. I understand what it's like to convince myself that everybody else has got it all figured out, and that I'm the only one who's failing.

The funny thing is that I have had these feelings, on and off, my whole life. And yet during all of those years, the outside circumstances have consistently changed. There have been many times that I have been viewed as a failure by society's metrics (failure to launch in my 20s, active alcoholic for a decade), and many times viewed as a success by the world's metrics (educated to a high level, state licensed psychotherapist, long time sober, traveled the world on my own terms). During these widely varied experiences, this consistent sense of unworthiness has often prevailed. It runs so much deeper.

Why would a human being feel unworthy regardless of outside circumstances? We are constantly inundated with messages of self-help, inspirational quotes, there is more information freely available than there has ever been, and yet still this sense of unworthiness perpetuates.

What the FUCK is going on?

Why, no matter how hard I work on it, still this haunting sense of a void, a vacuum at the core of my being that is filled in with a consistent sense of ineptitude, 'less-than', and inferiority. If this describes how you feel on a consistent basis, then you are in the right place, and you are ABSOLUTELY not alone in this.

So where do feelings like this begin? Ahh yes, in truly cliche fashion in the world of therapy, we have to go back to those early childhood experiences. The way an adult talks to themselves in their own head can be directly related back to those early experiences of how they were talked to. Messages that went in deeply during this time period are directly related to the kind of thoughts one has as an adult. If you were consistently shamed, criticized, over-protected, or even, in many cases, attacked and abused, this all has a bearing on the kinds of thoughts that fill your head, particularly in moments of crisis. In particular, when stress hormones fill the body, these thoughts can be activated. Or they can slip under the radar, and exist as constant background noise.

Once many years ago, I was doing a long water-only fast. As a result, I experienced a delightful and deeply peaceful cessation of thought. Due to the absence of any caloric intake, my body literally did not have the energy to generate the usual constant stream of thoughts that it usually did. Instead, thoughts would come up occasionally, one at a time, to be examined, and then to drift back down to wherever they arose from. I am not recommending this experience either way, I am simply relaying what happened to me during this time period to set the stage for what happened next. During this fast, I would meditate often, as it was already so easy to go into a consistently peaceful state of being. One day I was sat on the couch at my house, and I had placed a glass of water on the ground next to me. After 30 mins or so, again experiencing blissful silence in my own head the majority of the time, I ended the meditation, and as I swung my leg back down towards the direction of the ground, I accidentally kicked over the glass of water I had placed there.

Immediately, a thought came rushing to the surface, with force and vehemence, it screamed itself out loud inside my head:

You're such a FUCKING IDIOT!!!!

It stunned me for a moment. It was so incredibly violent and hateful, and so extremely disproportionate to anything I was experiencing, or the extremely mild consequences of knocking over a glass of water, easily cleaned up. After a moment of stunned silence, a reaction much more appropriate to how I was feeling overall arose. I began to laugh uproariously. It built to a crescendo, and I said out loud into the room, 'Who are you talking to that way?! It's a glass of water! That's ridiculous.' But I also realized in the moment how that thought, and so many others like it, are there constantly, it's just that I usually don't notice them because they are lost in the stream of busyness that is usually going on inside my head. The internal quiet brought on by the water fast had made one stand out naked in the middle of the room to be truly seen for what it was. Violent internal aggression. As I reflected more, I remembered times where I had heard externally these kinds of utterances. Whilst the colorful language had been added along the way by my own psyche, that was never a part of my childhood, I nevertheless remember vividly my Father, who had his own mental health issues around cleanliness and quite severe OCPD, yelling at me with the same vehemence, 'STUPID BOY', when I would knock something over or make a mess. One example, that had created one persistent thought pattern that had been recurring in my head throughout my life. Because of this unique experience, that one particular thought never catches me out any more. It no longer has validity, and I continue to laugh at the absurdity when I hear it. But how many others are out there? Or, more accurately, in there?!

The problem at times with therapy is that it can be extremely intellectual. the foundations of this field were laid in environments that focused very much on the academic study of people almost as living cadavers rather than as subjective experiencers with living, in the moment emotions. There can still be a tendency today for therapy skeptics to talk in terms of therapy being little more than a masturbatory philosophical exercise. Whilst I do not agree with this viewpoint, I sympathize with it. An experience of therapy that does not get to the heart of the matter at hand can feel like a frustrating waste of time and money.

In order to get to the depths of these feelings of unworthiness, one must go underneath the surface. One must penetrate beyond the intellectual, and go deeper, into the realm of the emotional and the spiritual. One must access the body directly, without the gatekeeper of the mind. This is why I utilize both a Gestalt and a Trauma-Focused approach when working with clients. The mind can produce endless entertainment that can keep us distracted for months, maybe years. We need to go beyond it to get to some of these primary experiences, some of these deep-seated wounds.

If you are tired of constantly feeling unworthy, of constantly comparing yourself to others in both a negative and occasionally a positive light, but always this insatiable need to compare; if you are tired of doubting yourself; if you are tired of wondering why everybody else seems to have it all figured out, and how long until you are found out for the imposter that you really are; if you are tired of all of this:

I. GET. IT.

I have been there, and together we can walk you out of that place to new ground, where you don't have to feel this way. Book a consult call here to start your way to true freedom.

About The Author

Duncan Collins is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist providing virtual therapy sessions in California and Florida. He is trained in multiple modalities of therapy including Gestalt therapy and Couples therapy. He provides a supportive environment for clients looking to break destructive patterns and experience REAL healing.