By Ben Rosenthal, Psychotherapy Intern
We make all kinds of choices to avoid having feelings we don’t like, and the particular flavor of the feeling you hate most is usually pretty unique to you.
Mine is feeling like a loser. Like I am missing something that everyone else seems to understand, and so no one is going to ever really value me.
For a lot of us, some version of that feeling is near the top of the list. Nobody wants to feel like a failure. In our goals. In our partnerships. And especially not in parenthood.
It’s Often Not About This Moment
For many of us, failing isn’t just a bad feeling. It conjures up all kinds of old stuff.
It might have been that it wasn’t ok to fail when you grew up. Maybe you were praised only when you did a good job (or never praised at all), and certainly no one ever recognized you when you fell short. You were left alone with the disappointment, or even worse, you felt the deep disappointment of your caregivers.
Or it might have been less clear than that. You might have even been encouraged when you failed. Get up, shake it off, and we can keep going. You’re ok! Notice though…that doesn’t include a lot of sitting with the feeling. Caring for the feeling. Validating the feeling.
And somewhere in there you learned that mattering, belonging, being loved, all depended on getting it right. When it was wrong, it was isolating. We are social creatures! As a child, when you feel isolated all kinds of processes go off in your brain. Danger! Danger! Hundreds of thousands of years ago, if you were left behind, you might not get the things you needed to survive. It was literally a matter of life and death.
So we work hard to never feel that way again. Some of us overdo it. Over-prepare, over-function, take care of everyone, never ask for help while we struggle. Some of us shut down, get defensive, avoid the hard conversation, maybe we scroll and numb out, we disappear. Most of us cycle through both, depending on the day, depending on the situation. It can be an exhausting game of whack-a-mole with our own feelings.
These are all understandable ways to cope, but it’s worth asking: has any of it actually worked? Has all that effort made that feeling go away? Or has it quietly grown, influencing what choices you make in your day, how you choose to connect or not, until the feeling you like the least is the one you have the most?
What Is This Really About?
A frame I often use in understanding my feelings, is they are basically predictions. When something goes wrong, our body has all sorts of processes it uses to prepare for the next moment. Our chest tightens, our face flushes. We get the urge to fix it right now, or maybe get out of the room. That reaction isn’t a sign that something is wrong, it's our history trying to protect us.
A lot of the time though, these predictions aren’t contextually correct for the moment. Sometimes they are stories from a long time ago. Your partner isn’t your parent. Sometimes they are even stories from another time in your current relationship. Your partner isn’t even the person they were yesterday! Maybe if you can engage in the moment differently, they could engage in the moment differently. And you can only find out if you slow down and stay in the moment long enough to try and notice the difference.
There is a Buddhist teaching about two arrows. The first arrow is the actual injury: the hurt, the disappointment, the mistake. But the second arrow is the one we habitually hit ourselves with after the first. I’m a failure. I’m a loser. I’m going to ruin this kid. I’m going to ruin this partnership. That first arrow is just the nature of being alive. And we can’t always stop that second arrow, especially at first, but we can get better at noticing it and not building our entire day around it, not building our predictions around it. We can practice being open and present to a new possibility.
What If It Was Ok?
And what if that new possibility is, that life is just a bunch of trial and error?
What if when that feeling of failure shows up, we don't rush to make the feeling go away? What if instead we leaned in, and shared the vulnerable feeling with ourself or our partner?
“I’m afraid that I’m getting this really wrong.”
“When you said that, I felt like I was letting you down.”
I tell this to my clients, and I am telling it to myself too, vulnerability is the way out.
Come back in two weeks and we’ll talk a little more specifically about how this shows up in parenting and partnership.
If this resonates with you, if you notice yourself really averse to feeling like a failure, or any other feeling, and it weighs heavily on you, there are places to get support. Reach out to schedule a free consultation with one of our therapists (including me), or check out our groups and workshops.
